Tips For Moving Your Course Online (Guest-post by Mary Beth Willard)

This is a guest-post by Mary Beth Willard (Weber State University). Many thanks to her for putting it together!:

Why Listen To Me:

Free advice is worth what you pay for it, but I have been teaching online with success for about seven years now, and I know many philosophers haven’t, and now have to do so with very little notice. 

You are not going to create an awesome, interactive, beautiful online course in less than a week. Online courses that are done well require enormous amounts of prep. You don’t have that, and you shouldn’t be expected to do that. A lot of the guidelines that are out there assume you’re designing a new course. This isn’t what we’re doing, so I wrote up some tips on Facebook. They were shared and liked and hearted so Marcus asked me to write them up for you all here.

I am assuming that you have access to a learning management system like Canvas or Blackboard, and that you will never put this class online again, and that while you’re willing to fiddle with your syllabus a little, you want to minimize doing so to whatever extent possible. I’m also writing under the assumption that this is for an undergraduate course. 

Big Picture Preliminaries

Backwards course design: That's the buzzword and the term to Google, but the idea is that you start with what you want them to learn and work back to how you will get them to do that.

Why haven't you had to do this before despite your many successful years of teaching? Because the university lecture/discussion model has been refined over hundreds of years to be a pretty much spot-on way of indirectly focusing on outcomes without anyone having to analyze it. We need to focus on outcomes because we’re doing something new.

The reason you want to think backwards is to avoid thinking that you're just going to have your 30-person class meet on Zoom while you film yourself doing what you would have done in class. That's focusing on the classroom, not on what you want them to learn.

Think of it like this: you want them to learn Mill, let's say. Ordinarily, you'd assign a reading, and then do your thing in class, and they'd learn Mill.

What you need to recreate online: them learning Mill. What you do not need to recreate online: them having the experience of your discussion section. It does NOT need to map onto an ordinary class.

Asynchronous whenever possible: This means that your "lecture" is accessible by students in a format that allows them some flexibility with respect to when they watch it.

I highly, highly recommend this, even though it's likely as a quickly-converted class you're probably inclined to think you'll just Zoom during class time especially because administrators seem to be pushing it. You are going to have students in different time zones. You are going to have students whose access to tech and Internet at home is lousy. You may find yourself without access to childcare as schools and daycares close. You might yourself be ill!

If Zoom or other conferencing software makes sense for you, assume that it is going to fail in the most inconvenient way possible, and record every conference or ‘cast, and post it to your Canvas/Blackboard. It’s not just your tech, but theirs, that will cause trouble.

Lots of low-stakes assignments: The biggest challenge in an online course in my experience is keeping everyone engaged when there's no requirement to attend class. Make these easily gradeable - credit/no credit, no late work accepted - and aim to have a lot of them designed to get them to do the reading, watch the videos, etc.

Access:  Keep in mind that many students are going to struggle with access to reliable Internet, especially if the university library is also closed. Many are going to be using their phones as their sole or primary way to get to your course. You’re also going to need to ensure you have captions or transcripts for your videos, should you choose to do them. (YouTube will auto-caption whatever you upload, but you will need to edit it for grammar, punctuation, and the odd time when you say “Epictetus” and the autobot loses its mind.) Simplicity is your friend.

Communicate, communicate, communicate: Log in every day to respond to students, discussions, etc. You can set a time when you do this and let them know that you’re not on-demand/just-in-time professor, but plan on logging in and doing something so they can see you’re there once a day. They don’t know what’s going on, either. An online course feels like shouting into the void, so do what you can to mitigate that.

Also reassure them: they’re worried. I told mine today that figuring out how to move the class online was my problem, not theirs, we were on it, and to expect me to make a mess of our Canvas calendar and to sit tight for a couple of days while I scooted things around. 

Use what you know and have prepared. What tech do you know how to use? What do you think you can learn quickly?  I have my own copy of Camtasia, a Blue Snowball microphone, and facility with Kaltura, Powerpoint, and Audacity. If that’s not you, then maybe don’t go for videos! You’ve got enough on your plate as it is. Do you have Powerpoint slides already?  Might be easiest to record yourself talking over them. Do you have just your own notes because you chalk-and-talk? Might be easiest to write up your notes. Do you blog? Make a private blog and let them take turns writing posts.

Exception: your learning management system (Canvas/Blackboard)  If you haven’t been using it, you need to get up to speed on that. Sorry. Your IT people probably can help.

Practical Tips

You need to be a far ahead as possible. Try to be one week ahead if you can, so you have some slack built in for the inevitable challenge. Not feasible for everyone, but for those of you who have a spring break or a couple of prep days, try to get a week ahead.

Organize the class by week. Make everything due at 11:59 pm on Saturday or Sunday. They will all do it at the last minute. That’s to be expected, but encourage them to treat the class meeting time as their study time. (Some places are encouraging everyone to keep to the class schedule. I think that’s misguided, but listen to your boss if your boss is going to care deeply about this.)

You need a way to deliver content. This could be a video that you’ve recorded. This could be a Powerpoint presentation.  This could be a Word document that you’ve typed up. Go with whatever option is best for you at this point in time.  Not the you that would develop a beautiful video course with elegant artwork and transitions had you a summer and time in the university’s filming lab.

(If you choose to do videos: 5-10 minutes per video, max. About 30 minutes of video time per class meeting.  Put them in a playlist. And figure about 4x the length of the video in editing for captions/transcripts, at least until you’re used to doing it.)

You need a way to keep them engaged. Reading responses are good. Discussions are also good. Quizzes can be useful but require more work than you might want to deal with if you don’t regularly use them. 

Your exams need to go open book. You have no way of proctoring an exam. Solution: don’t try.

Keep it simple. You can have a perfectly fine class by a) posting the reading b) linking to a Wi-Phi video on the topic, if applicable c) writing up a lecture in Word d) requiring reading responses and e) requiring substantive contributions to weekly discussions. 

Be kind to them, and to yourself. I am sort of surprised, with my heart of stone, to be finding myself mourning the loss of class time after we announced our closure today. I was more surprised that it was also true of the students. Be patient with yourself, and with them, as you work out the next couple of weeks.

And wash your hands.

Comments

[DS]

My advice: Don't make a bunch of vidoes. Just use what is out there:
Crash course philosophy on Youtube is quite good and no video is longer than 10 minutes.

So is wiPhi, but they don't have as great of coverage of topics.

[Caleb]

If you have videos or resources to share with other instructors, you can add links to this google doc: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1_T7Cnv9c6VHc3YWUvUaVfkApUjojlU5XyCe61A_bB4g/edit?usp=sharing
You can also post if you're going to be making a video on a specific topic to share within the next few weeks

[Stephen Grimm]

This is *extremely* helpful advice, Mary Beth--thank you!