Please do a bad job of putting your courses online (Guest Post by Rebecca Barrett-Fox)

This post first appeared on Rebecca's blog on 12th March 2020. We're very grateful to her for allowing us to repost it.

I’m absolutely serious.

For my colleagues who are now being instructed to put some or all of the remainder of their semester online, now is a time to do a poor job of it. You are NOT building an online class. You are NOT teaching students who can be expected to be ready to learn online. And, most importantly, your class is NOT the highest priority of their OR your life right now. Release yourself from high expectations right now, because that’s the best way to help your students learn.

If you are getting sucked into the pedagogy of online learning or just now discovering that there are some pretty awesome tools out there to support student online, stop. Stop now. Ask yourself: Do I really care about this? (Probably not, or else you would have explored it earlier.) Or am I trying to prove that I’m a team player? (You are, and don’t let your university exploit that.) Or I am trying to soothe myself in the face of a pandemic by doing something that makes life feel normal? (If you are, stop and instead put your energy to better use, like by protesting in favor of eviction freezes or packing up sacks of groceries for kids who won’t get meals because public schools are closing.)

Remember the following as you move online:

1. Your students know less about technology than you think. Many of them know less than you. Yes, even if they are digital natives and younger than you.
2. They will be accessing the internet on their phones. They have limited data. They need to reserve it for things more important than online lectures.
3. Students who did not sign up for an online course have no obligation to have a computer, high speed wifi, a printer/scanner, or a camera. Do not even survey them to ask if they have it. Even if they do, they are not required to tell you this. And if they do now, that doesn’t mean that they will when something breaks and they can’t afford to fix it because they just lost their job at the ski resort or off-campus bookstore.
4. Students will be sharing their technology with other household members. They may have LESS time to do their schoolwork, not more.
5. Many will be working MORE, not fewer, hours. Nurses, prison guards, firefighters, and police officers have to go to work no matter what. As healthcare demand increases but healthcare workers get sick, there will be more and  more stress on those who remain.
6. Some of your students will get sick. Others will be caring for people who are ill.
7. Many will be parenting.
8. Social isolation contributes to mental health problems.
9. Social isolation contributes to domestic violence.
10. Students will be losing their jobs, especially those in tourism and hospitality.

All of these factors mean that your students are facing more important battles today than your class–if they are even able to access it.

As you put your class online:

1. Put your energy into the classes that are required for your major or minor or that are required by other majors or minors. Electives and GE classes are an important part of a good education, but we have already decided that what students learn in any one of those courses is not vital. (The exceptions to this are GE courses that are required for a major.) For some of us, this is every class we teach, but for others, we have the ability to choose to focus our attention.
2. Do not require synchronous work. Students should not need to show up at a specific time for anything. REFUSE to do any synchronous work.
3. Do not record lectures unless you need to. (This is fundamentally different from designing an online course, where recorded information is, I think, really important.) They will be a low priority for students, and they take up a lot of resources on your end and on theirs. You have already built a rapport with them, and they don’t need to hear your voice to remember that.
4. Do record lectures if you need to. When information cannot be learned otherwise, include a lecture. Your university already some kind of tech to record lectures. DO NOT simply record in PowerPoint as the audio quality is low. While many people recommend lectures of only 5 minutes, I find that my students really do listen to longer lectures. Still, remember that your students will be frequently interrupted in their listening, so a good rule is 1 concept per lecture. So, rather than a lecture on ALL of, say, gender inequality in your Intro to Soc course, deliver 5 minutes on pay inequity (or 15 minutes or 20 minutes, if that’s what you need) and then a separate lecture on #MeToo and yet another on domestic violence. Closed caption them using the video recording software your university provides. Note that YouTube also generates closed captions [edited to add: they are not ADA compliant, though]. If you don’t have to include images, skip the video recording and do a podcast instead.
5. Don’t fuss too much about the videos. You don’t need to edit out the “umms” or the postal carrier ringing the doorbell. Editing is a waste of your time right now.
6. Make all work due on the same day and time for the rest of the semester. I recommend Sunday night at 11:59 pm. Students who are now stay-at-home parents will need help from others to get everything done, and that help is more likely to arrive on a weekend. While, in general, I dislike 11:59 due dates because work done that late is typically of lower quality, some people will need to work after the kids go to bed, so setting the deadline at 9 or 10 pm just doesn’t give them enough time.
7. If you use a textbook, your publisher probably has tests that you can download directly into your learning management system (LMS). Now is the time to use them. Despite publishers’ best efforts, these tests quickly float around online, so take a few minutes to add some anti-cheating protections. First, organize questions into test banks and have them fed to students at random. For example, if you want to ask two questions about pay inequity, select 5 of them from the test bank, and have your LMS feed two of them to students at random. This makes it MUCH harder for students to work together, because they will never get the same exact test as a peer. Second, change the wording on the questions so they can’t easily paste them into Google. In example questions, changing the name of the person in the example is one fast way to make the questions harder to locate online.
8. Allow every exam or quiz to be taken at least twice, and tell students that this means that if there is a tech problem on the first attempt, the second attempt is their chance to correct it. This will save you from the work of resetting tests or quizzes when the internet fails or some other tech problem happens. And since it can be very hard to discern when such failures are really failures or students trying to win a second attempt at a quiz or test, you avoid having to deal with cheaters.
9. Do NOT require students to use online proctoring or force them to have themselves recorded during exams or quizzes. This is a fundamental violation of their privacy, and they did NOT sign up for that when they enrolled in your course. Plus, they are in the privacy of their homes, sometimes with children who will interrupt them. It may be impossible for them to take a test without interruption. Circumvent the need for proctoring by making every exam open-notes, open-book, and open-internet. The best way to avoid them taking tests together or sharing answers is to use a large test bank.
10. You have already had some kind of in-class work, I’m guessing, so you do not need to further authenticate their identities on exams. If you are suspicious that a student is cheating–for example, someone was previously performing very poorly on in-class assessments and is now scoring very well, which might make you think that they’ve hired someone else to take the class for them–address that situation individually.
11. Remind them of due dates. It might feel like handholding, but be honest: Don’t you appreciate the text reminder from your dentist that you have an appointment tomorrow? Your LMS has an announcement system that allows you to write an announcement now and post it later. As you put your materials online, write an announcement reminding them of the due date to be released 24 hours before it is due. The morning of, send a note to everyone who has not yet turned it in. (In Canvas and Blackboard, you do this by going into your gradebook and right clicking on the header of the assignment. You’ll see an option to email all students who have not yet completed the work. It takes less than 1 minute if you are already logged in.)
12. Alert them to any material that is not appropriate for children to watch, including minute markers for scenes of violence or nudity. Again, you need to assume that they are doing their work with children in the background.
13. Make everything self-grading if you can (yes, multiple choice and T/F on quizzes and tests) or low-stakes (completed/not completed).
14. Don’t do too much. Right now, your students don’t need it. They need time to do the other things they need to do.
15. Listen for them asking for help. They may be anxious. They may be tired. Many students are returning to their parents’ home where they may not be welcome. Others will be at home with partners who are violent. School has been a safe place for them, and now it’s not available to them. Your class may matter to them a lot when they are able to focus on it, but it may not matter much now, in contrast to all the other things they have to deal with. Don’t let that hurt your feelings, and don’t hold it against them in future semesters or when they come back to ask for a letter of recommendation.

****

This advice is very different from that which I would share if you were designing an online course. I hope it’s helpful, and for those of you moving your courses online, I hope it helps you understand the labor that is required in building an online course a bit better.

Comments

[anon]

Re: whoever shared this

After the post you say: "This advice is very different from that which I would share if you were designing an online course"

But the point seems to be: we're not designing online courses here.

We're being asked to transition an in person course to an online course.

Importantly she notes:

" You are NOT building an online class. You are NOT teaching students who can be expected to be ready to learn online."

So your disagreement seems to fundamentally miss the point

[huh?]

anon,

I think he's just highlighting that this advice is for transitioning to online courses, not for courses that are built from the ground up online. I mean, why would he even share the post if he didn't already know that it's not advice for general online course design?

[grymes]

anon:

That's still Barrett-Fox speaking. She's not disagreeing with herself; she's noting that the advice she's giving is different than the advice she would give in a different situation.

[anon]

OP: oops I thought that was a separate commentary.

My B

Feel free to remove my post.

[Amanda]

Hmm, well, I think it depends on your situation:

1. Doing a bad job could very much influence your teaching evals, and those matter for some people.

2. For many, even if they haven't developed this particular course online, they might be in a position to teach it online in the future. In that case, (depending on one's situation) it might make a lot of sense to spend time on it as you can use it again in the future.

3. For me, personally, I just can't feel good about myself teaching half-assed. It creates a lot of anxiety for me to go into a class that way. So I think the mental health stress for me of following such advice would outweigh the pros.

4. As for synchronous work, I think it might depend on the type of course. The way my class is set-up, with persons assigned specific dates for in class activities that require the participation of the class, I would have to change many major assignments to do asynchronous work. First, this would mean that kids in the same class have different assignments. Second, kids who already prepped for these assignments would have wasted their time. Third, the amount of work I would need to do to revamp the course content would defeat the purpose of the original point of the post, i.e. to not put much time and effort into things.

[Marcus Arvan]

Hey Amanda: I'm not sure the author of this piece is actually advocating doing a bad job (I think the title is a bit misleading). Rather, I think their piece is more charitably read as implying that if you try to do a "really good job" at online teaching (viz. best practices for online courses)--deviating far from what one is currently doing (e.g. experimenting with new technology you and your students may have little experience)--then it's likely to be self-defeating: you won't do a good job. You'll do a *bad* job.

Conversely, I think the author is implying that if you don't radically change what you are doing (i.e. doing a "bad job" of online teaching), you're actually more likely to do a good job for your students.

For what it is worth, this is my own planned approach. I am NOT going to use Zoom or any other fancy tech that I have no experience with. I am almost certain that if I tried, it would be a disaster for both me and my students. Sure, maybe in the long-run I should learn how to do that stuff (if, for instance, the COVID crisis stretches into the next academic year), but for now my plan is to keep things minimally different than I currently do them: I'm going to post Powerpoint lectures online (as I currently do), but with a voice-over recording of how I would lecture in class. I plan to upload it to YouTube as well so my words are transcribed. Other than that, I'm just setting up some discussion boards and requiring students to contribute a little bit each week--just as my current participation component requires. Other than that, I plan to do very little different. Students will submit assignments online, and take their exams timed online. That's it--that and online office hours (which I have set very clear and proscribed expectations regarding: I am *not* going to answer detailed student emails around the clock, any more than I would sit in my office holding office hours 24/7 if we were still meeting in person).

I cannot predict how it will go--but at least I know how to do all of that stuff pretty well. Getting into the weeds on learning Zoom with large groups, etc., are simply not things that I think are worth the trouble for me or my students right now. I sincerely think that kind of stuff would be likely to be a disaster.

[Amanda]

Hi Marcus,

Well, I thought I was trying to be charitable as the author starts the post with, "I'm absolutely serious." That seems an odd turn of phrase to use if you meant something different than what your title suggests. In fact, I think that phrase is used in particular, when you say something controversial and so people might think you are not serious, and yet, you want to assure them that you *are* serious.

It sounded to me like she was saying that at this point in the semester, and with the busy lives we and our students lead, no one cares if you put much time into teaching. So don't put much time into teaching. That's how I read it.

Regardless, the post seems very aggressive from my perspective. It is one thing to suggest that often first time online teachers think zoom will help when it actually won't. And so therefore, you should consider if using zoom is really best for your circumstance. I'm sure in many cases it is not. But it is a bit much to say "DO NOT" do anything. We all have individual circumstances, and they do not all require the same measures. This is bland and obvious, but the post comes off as very opposed to circumstantial differences. Or it does to me, anyway.

What you are doing sounds great for you Marcus. As I said, it depends on circumstance. I have both experience with zoom and online teaching. I think zoom works best for me. So I'm doing it.

[Marcus Arvan]

Hey Amanda: okay, that’s fair. I stand corrected. I guess I was being overly charitable.

[Amanda]

Ha, well better to err that way than the other way :)