Skip to content

Category: Uncategorized

Published on

This week’s  combination of rising COVID positivity rates on campus and off, combined with travel delays in the US and abroad, has meant that most faculty have had to accommodate students who have not been able to attend classes. How best to do this? While there are no clear-cut answers, because of the variability of teaching scenarios, here are some strategies to consider.

Please note: Different challenges exist for different courses, class populations, and classrooms, so there is not one solution that will work for everyone. Furthermore, many of the potential solutions to accommodate students or faculty having to miss class are not possible or practical in many courses and classrooms.

  • Recording in class: Shared recordings of class components: Instructors are using web cameras to capture their in-person lectures, class discussions, whiteboards/chalk boards, and other classroom activities. These recordings are then shared with all students via Canvas, where students who could not attend class can review them. To learn more about recording your class, see this article. To optimize a good audio capture, we recommend using your laptop’s or the classroom computer’s built-in microphone. If this doesn’t produce a crisp audio recording, contact Classroom Technologies, to see whether a better audio solution can be worked out for your specific classroom. To do so, fill out this service request form.
  • Asynchronous content delivery: Learn more about sharing content via Canvas and other tools here on this site. Discussion boards and peer review activities on Canvas can engage absent students in class content and with their classmates. This is not a replacement but perhaps a reasonable substitute for engaging students in varying circumstances.
  • Synchronous connection:
    • Simultaneous Zoom session accompanying in-person class session: This approach requires the use of one or more web cameras in the classroom to capture audio and video for remote students to follow along in real time. Some are using existing classroom technology, while others are equipping classrooms with their own/departmental cameras, or buying or renting an OWL camera from the computer store. Instructors using this approach recommend establishing a recurring Zoom room for class meetings where absent students can consistently find the live class. Challenges include remote students being able to participate actively or be seen/heard by in-person students during class discussions and activities.
    • Synchronous Zoom session for all: Some classes have moved to remote delivery for all synchronous class time. Please see information from the Dean of Faculty regarding policies and practice for this decision.
  • Last but not least: consider adding some high-quality engagement opportunities that occur in Canvas and elsewhere, for students that cannot be physically present in the classroom. Find ways for students to contribute asynchronously — google docs, discussions, hypothesis annotations, voicethreads, etc. Many of these options are detailed and described here on the teachremote.dartmouth.edu site. Another good idea is to pair up remote students with in-class students in a buddy system, to help ensure that remote students don’t get left behind, and to keep building this term’s class community beyond the classroom walls. 
    • Office hours or meetings with absent students: Instructors are meeting students over Zoom to discuss what they missed in class. Setting a regular time and inviting students to meet with you in groups can save time rather than meeting with each student individually.
    • Group work among remote students: Classes that involve in-class group work can form ad hoc groups of remote students to work together over Zoom during a single class period while their in-person peers work in groups in the classroom.
    • Group work with 1-2 remote members: Students working in groups during class time might connect with a remote member using their own group Zoom room during one or multiple class periods.

Published on

Classes start September 14th.

Between July 6th and then, there are 10 weeks. Here are some suggestions for how to take a little time each week to get your course ready to launch. Feel free to modify the timeline based on your availability and needs.

Week 1

  1. Do some reading. See the summer reading suggestions from DCAL/LDT.
  2. Take a look at the Remote Readiness Checklist on teachremote.dartmouth.edu.
  3. Talk with your department chair about the Spring student experience survey results.

Week 2

  1. Review your learning objectives and syllabus. Discuss with your Academic Continuity team to determine how you might approach the redesign most effectively and ensure that you have additional resources if you need them. Is there anything from your previous offering of the course that needs to be changed for the new environment?
  2. Develop a list of the technology you’d like to use, and determine where you need additional training.
  3. Create a schedule for yourself based on your own availability and needs that includes major milestones and minor to-do items as you see them.

Week 3

  1. Consider how students will engage with you and with each other. Draft ideas for office hours, study groups, and other engagement strategies for the remote environment. Students have indicated that meaningful connection to you and to each other is critical for their learning.
  2. Craft outlines for each week/module of your course including the purpose of the week/module, learning objectives, lectures, readings, other media, and a general idea of assignments.

Week 4

  1. Sketch an outline of each lecture you would like to record or deliver via Zoom.
  2. Identify resources you may need for development of these lectures, such as media, images, scripts, editing technology, etc.
  3. Refine your plan for student assignments, ensuring that you are providing multiple modes for students to demonstrate their knowledge, and that there is a chance for students to receive formative feedback as they progress through the course.

Week 5

  1. How are you doing with the schedule you developed for these 10 weeks? Check in with yourself and/or your Academic Continuity team.
  2. Design your Canvas site to match your course outline. Be sure to include all of your plans for engagement. 
  3. Review the Remote Readiness Checklist on teachremote.dartmouth.edu. 

Week 6

  1. Review each assignment to ensure that directions are clear for students and fit well into the plan you’ve developed for your course.
  2. Review your readings for accessibility.
  3. Finalize your syllabus. 
  4. Begin recording any lectures you’d like students to view asynchronously.

Week 7

  1. Will you be working with TA’s, UTA’s, LF’s or other teaching helpers? Time to bring them into the plan and get some feedback on your plan.
  2. Finish preparing your Canvas site, get feedback from a colleague if possible. Check that anything you copied from previous terms, like teaching methods and course policies, are revised with remote teaching in mind. 
  3. Continue recording if needed.

Week 8

  1. Finalize your Canvas site, ensuring that it’s clear to students how they should interact with your content, with you, and with each other.
  2. Continue recording if needed.
  3. Craft drafts of rubrics for assessing student work.
  4. Publish your Canvas site.

Week 9/10

  1. Send a survey to get to know your enrolled students.
  2. Review all the above steps for anything you’ve missed.
  3. Take a step back and appreciate all the work you've put in. Breathe. It's going to be great.

Published on

Maybe you're not heading to the beach or building your usual reading list, but instead trying to focus your reading on preparing for the upcoming term. Here are two reading list suggestions from DCAL and Learning Design and Technology (ITC) teams, depending on where you're starting.

Option 1: You taught in Spring term and survived, or are teaching now in Summer and getting through! You’re on the schedule to teach again in Fall, maybe a new preparation or perhaps re-offering a course you have some experience offering remotely. 

  1. Turns out you can build community in a Zoom classroom by Rachel Toor
  2. We are not in the same boat by Emery D. Haley
  3. Three strategies for better online discussions by Michael B. Sherry
  4. How to recover the joy of teaching after an online pivot by Flower Darby

Option 2: You are new to remote teaching. Feel free to read any of the articles from the other section too!

  1. Dartmouth Teaching Remotely Getting Started Guide by DCAL and ITC
  2. 5 ways to connect with online students by Flower Darby
  3. Effective educational videos by Cynthia J. Brame 
  4. Pandemic Teaching Prescriptions by Regan A. R. Gurung

And no matter what, review the Remote Readiness Checklist!

Published on

Committee on Instruction Co-Chairs Lynn Patyk (Russian) and Robyn Milan (Physics), in consultation with DCAL, offer some thoughts on assessment within the credit/no credit parameters this term.
If you would like to share your thoughts and experiences with your colleagues, please contact dcal@dartmouth.edu - we would love to hear from you and share the teaching practices being adopted.

The Credit/No Credit (CT/NC) environment offers advantages and opportunities as well as challenges. It is natural for faculty and students who are accustomed to letter grades to have concerns about CT/NC, especially as it affects faculty’s ability to give more calibrated feedback on the one hand, and student responsiveness to that feedback as it manifests in their motivation, performance, and ultimately, their learning outcomes. There is evidence, however, that the decreased focus on grades that the CT/NC offers may allow your students to focus on learning instead of achieving, and that grades don’t act as the “motivator” that faculty often assume (e.g., https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4041495/).

Especially in conditions of remote learning, we want our students to stay engaged, participate, and learn, so our course structure and assignments should be geared toward these goals.

First Steps:

You as the instructor must decide what constitutes CT in your course, and this begins with being clear about your learning goals for your students and devising assessments that demonstrate whether your students have achieved them.  In this time of profound disruption and uncertainty, it is both realistic and compassionate to acknowledge that our goals and our students’ achievement may not be as lofty as usual. 

When you explain your standards for achieving credit in your course, you may consider informing your students that distinguished work may receive acknowledgement through a citation on the transcript. You should also let your students know under what circumstances they would receive NC. These may be:

  • Failure to submit assignments in a timely way;
  • Failure to meet the criteria of the assignment;
  • Failure to participate adequately in discussions or other course activities

*Note: Participation standards and expectations should not penalize students’ varying circumstances, including time zones, remote learning environments, abilities, and degree of access to equipment and/or internet.

If you choose to continue using your usual grading system and intend to “convert” this to CT/NC based on a predetermined cut-off, be transparent with your students in your syllabus and throughout the course about both your grading approach and the cut-off points. Be aware, though, that students who are attached to grades may be disgruntled to have their “A” recorded as merely “CT.” 

Devising Assessments:

Your course syllabus and/or Canvas home page should contain a clear statement of what assessments/assignments you will be using, and your expectations for the assignments. Assignments with different learning goals will likely have different thresholds for CT/NC, and concomitantly, varying degrees of instructor feedback. 

You may want to forego or limit the usual high-stakes assignments of tests, term papers, and exams and instead foreground assignments that emphasize student engagement and learning. For example:

  • A discussion post or voice thread that responds in a thoughtful, informed way to a reading or lecture is a low-stakes way to maintain student engagement and learning.
  • An analytical essay or research paper may be broken down into successive steps, as many faculty already do, each of which has its own rubric and criteria for Credit. 
  • Remote discussions offer different modes of participation, from speaking synchronously to messaging or recording asynchronously. Decide what your threshold for CT for a discussion will be (one comment and one message post per session?) and state that explicitly on your syllabus.  Students may not be able to or feel immediately comfortable discussing live on Zoom, so pairing live discussions with asynchronous or retrospective reflections in Canvas might also merit CT.  

*Note: We recommend recording all live sessions for your own reference as well as for students who can’t attend. Please note the Dean of Faculty’s recommended language to include in your syllabus and share with your students.  

  • To facilitate student  learning through granular written feedback, you might use the Speedgrader function in Canvas to give pointed comments on an assignment and require the student’s response to each comment in order to receive full Credit for the assignment. Speedgrader includes this “response function” for students, who may not otherwise bother to read instructor comments.  To elicit a response, comments are best phrased as explicit questions for students to answer, for example, “What would be a better word?” instead of “awkward” or “How can you restructure your paragraph so that your argument isn’t buried?” instead of “Thesis?” 
  • Faculty could also require students to collect and respond to peer feedback at certain times during the quarter, and also to provide self-evaluations of their participation, engagement, and quality of their work. 
  • Tests/quizzes can be adjusted to CT/NC and serve as summative assessments by determining and making explicit to students the threshold of correct/incorrect answers for receiving credit. To use tests/quizzes to facilitate student learning and improvement over time, consider offering students the opportunity to retake them until they achieve the desired result for CT. The Canvas quiz function is especially handy for creating and administering short, low-stakes quizzes.

A Final Note

Although CT/NC may seem like a blunt pedagogical instrument compared to the accustomed grading scale, it offers the opportunity to experiment with creating different kinds of assessments and feedback for students about their learning. Experiment with what works best to achieve your goals and remind yourself and them to be flexible and open to new ways of teaching and learning.

Published on

The foreign language departments recently hosted a webinar on the topic of Teaching Languages Remotely: Contingency Planning hosting Esperanza Román Mendoza from George Mason University. Click here to view the webinar (courtesy of Roberto Rey Agudo at Dartmouth).