The Philosophers' Cocoon

Online/hybrid teaching technologies?

Several months ago, I shared some of the new teaching practices I experimented with this fall (my first ever time teaching in a hybrid in-person/online format). As I noted in that post, one thing that seemed to me to work very well has been having students record short Flipgrid video responses to daily readings. Although this seemed to me to work pretty well pedagogically, it was also a lot of work to watch and categorize which videos I wanted to discuss before class, and it got to be a real drain (and stressor) the further we got though the semester. I'll also be curious to see what my students thought of it in my end of the semester evaluations. I also avoided using online test proctoring services (such as proctorio), largely on the basis of privacy concerns--though I'm curious what other people think here (and how, if you don't use proctoring services) how you approach exams instead.

Anyway, in light of the above, I'm beginning to think about how I might do things next semester: whether I'll use the same technology, or do some things very differently, and if so, what might work better. Which brings me to several questions today for you all:

1. Which teaching technologies have you used for online/hybrid teachings this fall?
2. How did you use them in terms of a teaching tool?
3. Did you think it worked well or not so well? Why?
4. In light of your answers to (1)-(3), how do you see yourself doing things differently in the spring?

Philosophy club tips during COVID?

In our October "how can we help you?" thread, a reader writes:

I am the faculty advisor for our undergraduate philosophy club this year. Can people share some ideas about events and activities (online or in-person with social distance) during the time of COVID-19?

This is a great question, and I think it could be cool to crowdsource ideas. Any readers have ideas or things they've tried this semester that have worked well (or not so well)? Please do share below!

Teaching in the time of COVID: what's working?, what's not?

Now that many of us are a month or so into fall semester courses, and have been teaching in new formats due to the pandemic, I thought it might be good to have a thread checking in with readers to see how things are going. What format(s) are you teaching in? What things are you doing that seem to be working well? What things haven't worked well?

In my case, I'm teaching two classes twice a week in-person in the classroom to half of my students each day, while the others Zoom in. By and large, I've tried to keep the class format similar to how I normally run courses, with the first-third of each two-hour session involving discussing student reading responses, the second third giving a lecture, and the final portion of each meeting having students do graded group work. Aside from using Zoom (which I think has actually worked quite well), the one major difference is that instead of having student compose short written reading responses to discuss, I'm having them record short video responses (there are a number of platforms for this, including Flipgrid). My basic rationale for trying this is that I took an online teaching-certification course this summer, and learned that one of the more important things (apparently) for online teaching is to get students engaged with each other. I figured that since my students aren't all going to be in the classroom with each other and will be wearing masks when they are, it would be great to begin each class session with students by playing selected video responses as a springboard for class discussion. I also thought this would probably work well given the general demographic of my students: namely, the fact that they are generally young people who grew up with social media, including short video platforms like TikTok (one quick note: I don't require students to actually film themselves on video. I leave it open to them whether to just record audio instead of video, and I'd say probably 2/3 record video and the other audio-only).

Anyway, I didn't know how this would go, but I have to say: I think it has worked spectacularly well. I have frankly been astonished at how consistently good and insightful their video responses have been. It's clear to me that students have a much easier time speaking insightfully about philosophy than writing about it--as the responses have consistently been far better than the kinds of written responses I've required in previous semesters. I've also found it helpful to play several video responses back to back when multiple students raise similar issues--as this can help them and their classmates see that more than one student had the same kind of reaction to the reading. Now, to be sure, there is a cost here: my students are doing more speaking this semester than normal, and less writing. But, to be frank, I don't think this is a bad thing. Students in my classes have plenty of other assignments where they have to write (including daily group assignments where they collaborate on Googledocs or whatever), and for most of my students who are non-majors, I'm inclined to think that being able to think and speak about philosophical issues competently is probably more important (after all, how many students are ever going to have to write about philosophical issues in their lives after university? It seems far more likely to me that in real life, the ability to think and speak about philosophical issues will be more important--as they are likely to have discussions about morality, politics, religion, etc. with friends, family, and so on).

Other than this, I've tried to keep my courses as close to 'normal' as possible. The only other major difference is that whereas students in previous semesters did group assignments in the classroom, this semester they are doing them via Zoom breakout groups--with some members of groups in the classroom (or leaving the classroom to work outside) and others Zooming in. Aside from giving groups more class-time to complete the assignments, I haven't done anything different here, and it all seems to work pretty well. To be clear, this has been a challenging semester. Teaching this way (half via Zoom, viewing and selecting videos before class) hasn't been easy, and has required more work and juggling than normal. But, on the whole, things seem to be going okay and my students seem pretty engaged and happy.

Anyway, this is what I've been doing.  What have you all been doing? What new things have you been doing that you have found work well? What hasn't worked so well? Why?

COVID/online teaching: are you assigning less?

In our August "how can we help you?" thread, a reader writes:

I am preparing Fall 2020 syllabi for mid-to-upper-level courses.

Synchronous-online instructors, how much reading material are you all assigning?

How much are folks assigning relative to what they would have assigned in a non-COVID-in-person scenario?

Good questions. I'm currently scheduled to teach a hybrid format: in-person in the classroom while livestreaming to other students via Zoom. However, for obvious reasons, I've designed my courses to be able to transition to online-only delivery easily. In brief, I've assigned the same amount of reading for my classes as usual. But what I have done is reduce the number and type of graded assignments students have to complete. The rationale for this is simple: anyone could get sick, both me and my students. Given that my lectures (which will be posted online) help students to understand course readings, it didn't seem to make sense to me to dramatically change the readings I've assigned. Graded assignments, however, can take real time to complete and if someone is out of commission for an extended period of time, then missing graded assignments could be a big burden on everyone involved. I'm not sure this is the right strategy--as, like many people, I'm designing courses like this for the first time--but it seemed to me the best way to go.

What about all of you? Are you assigning the same amount of reading material relative to non-COVID/in-person teaching? Have you reduced the number or type of graded (or even ungraded) assignments you're planning? Etc.

How are you running your courses this fall?

Many of us, indeed probably nearly all of us who teach at a university level, will be teaching courses in new ways this fall. Although most of us had a little experience transitioning to remote/online delivery this past spring, I take it that this fall may be the first time that many of us have designed hybrid or online courses. Consequently, this fall is almost certainly going to be a real learning experience for most of us. Some of what we do may work well, some of it may not work well, and some of it may turn out to be a disaster (as is sometimes the case, in my experience, whenever one attempts radically new things).

Anyway, because most of us will be returning to the classroom soon (and much to my surprise, I've learned that some universities have already started!), I thought it might be helpful to run a thread on how readers are designing their courses. What format are you giving your course in, and how will you be running them? Why? The way I see it, the more details people choose to share, the better: it may give those of us who are still designing courses some helpful additional perspectives to go on. Allow me to start things off.

Synchronous vs. Asynchronous: which is better?

In our newest "how can we help you?" thread, a reader writes:

For nearly the entire summer, I had planned on administering my fall courses (all online) asychronously. This seemed to be the most recommended option, and the asynchronous system I ended up utilizing when COVID hit ended up working out okay.

But now we're facing a new school year, with new students many of whom are going to be freshmen! I've gotten the sense, from students who have sent me emails, that many of them are looking forward to potentially synchronous online classes. This has made me seriously reconsider my plan to do an asynchronous course.

To sum it up: my classes are going to be all first-year students. I worry that an entirely asynchronous course would be unsatisfying and for many of them would deprive them of what they feel is the beginning of their college experience. Does the fact that we are entering a new semester, several months into the pandemic and the new online learning paradigm, make it any more reasonable than before to try synchronous online teaching?

I decided to skip forward to this query because it seems rather time-sensitive. At my university, we've been instructed that at least 50% of our material needs to be synchronous and involve 'face-time' with students (in-person and/or over Zoom). I don't know the full reasoning behind this, but my sense is that it may have to do with students expecting synchronous instruction, and the sense that some robust amount of synchronous instruction is conducive to student-to-student and student-to-faculty engagement. I also want to do synchronous teaching because I think it's probably better for me and my students to expect each other to be present and engaged with the course material only during the meeting hours of the course (rather than the kind of 'round the clock' availability that asynchronous learning seems conducive to).

But really, I don't know. Although we could end up moving all online, I'm scheduled to teach my courses in a hybrid online/in-classroom format--so again, I really have to do a good amount of synchronous teaching. And, like most of us, this is really my 'first time doing this', as it were, so I really don't know what tends to work best. Anyone have any insight that may help this reader decide what to do, especially for a freshman class?

Extra effort for teaching remotely in the fall?

In our July "how can we help you?" thread, a reader writes:

I have a question about preparing for teaching remotely in the fall: how much (extra) effort should I put into it?

I chose to run the classes asynchronously in the spring when we had to move everything online. I decide to run them synchronously in the fall. I feel that asynchronous online classes are not fair to students many of whom are expected to come back on campus (at least for now for my university) and to pay full or almost full tuition.

While I am learning about some really nice tools that help run classes synchronously, I have some worries and am wondering how much time and effort I should put into it. First, it seems to me that what we are facing is a pretty unique situation, and I am not sure whether we will encounter similar situations in the future (hopefully not!). And I am inclined to teach "real" online classes asynchronously to give students flexibilities. So, I am not sure if I will get another chance to teach remotely and synchronously in the future. Second, while I put a lot of time in it, I am not sure students will appreciate it. I read some articles and it seems that many students are disappointed about remote learning. Yes, I can probably design a really nice class and impress students, but is it really worth the time and effort?

I'll be very curious to hear what people think here, but for my own part I'm inclined to think it's best to keep things simple and as close as possible to how I teach in a face-to-face format. Let me explain why.

Clarity

How are you feeling? If you are like me, you've been in lockdown in your house for several weeks now. 

Likely, your experiences are unlike anything you've felt before. Because of the ubiquity of your experiences--weird as they are--they seem too banal to write down. Yet, it's important to do so. Keep a journal. We know a lot about the Great Plague because people like you and me chose to keep diaries, not letting the narrative be dominated by the few. Look back on what you have learned later. Hopefully there is a later. 

Initially, you might have tried to soldier on as you did before, synchronously teaching your classes through Zoom, and getting utterly exhausted in the process. You might have tried to remain a productive scholar, maybe even crank up your productivity, because that's what Newton did, apparently. Maybe you've started baking, knitting, doing your own home repairs, cutting your own hair. 

But now, as the weeks wax on, all that busyness cannot take away this growing feeling of clarity. This clarity is not merely an intellectual feeling. The ubiquitous sound of cars has all but died away. The air is crisp and clear. The birds have never sung more loudly than before. The streets are all but abandoned. 

There are lots of things presenting themselves to you that you have always known, but that you have never truly known. You always knew that departmental meetings are mostly not needed. Now you really know how many meetings we need (it seems more than a few a year, but fewer than weekly. We met weekly in the months leading up to the closure and all those meetings that seemed so important seem like they can often be handled through a vote by email).

On the other hand, there seems no perfect replacement for face to face teaching. Our incentive structures, for tenure, promotion, prestigious jobs do not value us being present for our students in the classroom. Our students need us. Being there for them in person is the best way to serve them. There is something about the physical proximity of student and teacher, the gesture, the eye contact, gauging their faces (did they get it?) that is hard to replace. 

You already knew things were hard for grad students and our contingent faculty, but we now feel it even more. A postdoc I spoke to recently has been receiving emails with heartfelt appeals from his employer with pleas to donate some of his spare earnings to the institution. One should not take it personally--they send this to all their employees, the cushy ones in tenured positions, but also those who will lose their jobs, their health insurance, this summer. What is the mission of our universities? Is it to empower the people through education? Or are they just machines for endowments and tuition fees? How do we turn things around? 

You might feel a sense of shame as you furtively navigate through the aisles of the supermarket, getting your supplies for the week when you see those underpaid workers, showing up day after day. You knew that they are unfairly treated. You've always known their wage does not reflect their true contribution in society. But now, you truly feel it. You know it. Don't try to repress the sense of shame as you go back to the safety of your home. We ought to feel this shame. 

You ready knew that racism is a societal ill that harms people. But now you see it ever more starkly. In Saint Louis, the city I live in the statistics are as follows (at the time of writing): all but three of the nineteen or so people who died of Covid-19 are black. In the UK, BAME (black and minority ethnic) people are disproportionately likely to be diagnosed with, and die of Covid-19. Again, the disparities in health between ethnic minorities and white people in the UK and the US are not news. But now, we witness it in a way we haven't before. In the NHS, the UK national health service, BAME doctors and nurses are bullied more, and face more medical scrutiny. And now, the first ten medical doctors to die of Covid-19 in the UK were BAME. 

You already knew that democratic governments are in crisis. Now, you really feel how they are letting us down. It turns out candidates high in entertainment value, lovable clowns or self-styled businessmen, aren't any help to us right now. The middle class has been largely shielded from the adverse effects of bad government. That's why you might have put up with them for so long. 

You already knew that companies such as Amazon and Facebook have little accountability as they control lots of aspects of our lives. But now, with your options limited, you really feel it. I left Facebook, but like others unhappy with Zuckerberg's policies, I'm back. A lot of social interaction takes place on social media and this is especially the case in a lockdown situation. I've had to use Zoom like most academics, and learned that Zoom was sending data to FB, even of users without profiles. Given how FB governs our social interactions and how Amazon is governing our buying patterns, should we not have more public control in how this all works? 

You already knew that governments have shamefully abdicated their responsibility. But now, with lives lost and no game plan, you really feel it. They bought into the individualism narrative, as Dewey already noted (1927), not acknowledging our interdependence and how our individual actions can harm others. Their laissez-faire attitude has left a power vacuum in its wake.  "Nature abhors a vacuum", Dewey points out, "When the public is as uncertain and obscure as it is to-day, and hence as remote from government, bosses with their political machines fill the void between government and the public." (1927, p. 120) We see it now with Amazon, whose response has been more nimble and swift than the dithering responses of most western democracies. 

Reflecting on the industrial revolution, Dewey remarks: "was a movement, which involved so much submerging of personal action in the overflowing consequences of remote and inaccessible collective actions, reflected in a philosophy of individualism?" (Dewey 1927, 98). The essential workers, our bus drivers, grocery workers, healthcare workers, are now having to choose between foregoing pay and ability to stay alive or to expose themselves to the virus. So much for individualism. 

The ineptitude of our leaders is on full display. I hope no hagiographies of Boris Johnson--and I wish the man well and am glad he recovered--will cover up the massive damage his cabinet did to the country, the thousands of preventable deaths. We can no longer ignore it. Sure, we will be gaslit into believing this didn't happen, as Gambuto says. Our minds will be massaged into ignoring the mass graves, the nurses in corridors mourning dead colleagues. But we should keep this clarity. Write it down. Remember it. 

Teaching philosophy online (Zoom series)

We (Ian Schnee and Paul Franco) are lecturers at the University of Washington, and we have organized a Teaching Philosophy Online series to be held over Zoom. 

Currently, we have two sessions planned. The first will be held this Thursday, March 26th, 12 - 1 EST (panelists and the link for the meeting can be found below). The second will be held the following week (details TBD).

The sessions are meant to be relaxed and informal, and the audience will be able to participate via Zoom's chat function. We hope the sessions provide an opportunity to talk through the challenges we are facing, and to hear ideas about them from our volunteer panelists. We feel we have a great group representing a range of perspectives: mixing those with a lot of experience teaching in online environments with those doing it for the first time; teachers at SLACs, community colleges, and research universities; as well as senior faculty, junior faculty, and graduate students.

Philosophical Research after the Virus (guest post by Eric Steinhart)

This is a guest post by Eric Steinhart, William Paterson University

Most of us are acutely aware of the extreme impact of the virus on our teaching (it’s SARS-CoV-2, but I’ll just call it the virus).  We’ve been suddenly forced to move our entire teaching loads into new formats very rapidly.  This is disruptive.  Actually, it’s more than disruptive – it’s a shock.

Some of us have become aware of the impacts the virus will also have on our schools.  The outlook is not pretty.   For a large number of reasons, detailed in publications like The Chronicle or Inside Higher Ed, many colleges and universities now face uncertain financial futures.  And even if jobs are not lost and departments are not closed, research funding is likely to be cut back severely.  This includes release time for research, as well as money for travel to conferences, and so on.  It also includes money for buying new books and maintaining subscriptions to journals.

If the shock to teaching is the lightning, then the shock to research is the thunder.  Already, in my own limited Facebook feed, I see conferences being cancelled, visiting professorships cancelled, travel to specialized libraries made impossible, collaborative projects suddenly ended by more pressing concerns. 

The immediate impact is on conferences – one after another is being cancelled.  These cancellations represent an enormous amount of potentially wasted labor.  You wrote that paper; it got accepted; you were going to present it – now nothing.  Of course, people are saying you should list it on your vita as accepted.  But that fails to address the problem of lost research, research done but now not disseminated.

Dealing with Learning Management System (LMS) Infrastructure (Guest post by Johnathan Flowers)

This is a guest post by Johnathan Flowers, Visiting Assistant Professor of Philosophy, Worcester State University, Worcester, Massachusetts

It is my view that online teaching should always be informed by infrastructure limitations of our learning management systems (LMS) and our institutions. By infrastructure limitations, I mean both the physical infrastructure, as in the local and cloud servers that host our LMS and the physical connection of our campus to the internet, as well as the digital infrastructure of the LMS itself, or the availability of specific features of the LMS under the strain of multiple users under less than ideal conditions. To this end, this piece will focus on structural considerations where online teaching is concerned.

I will address concerns with physical infrastructure first. Most institutions have a sufficiently robust infrastructure to meet the needs of both students and faculty. In fact, most institutions rarely exceed the capacity provided by their local internet connections. As an example, the closest my institution has come to exceeding its capacity for internet connectivity was during the recent release of major updates to the first-person shooter, Call of Duty: Warzone, and the MMORPG Division 2. With students and faculty away from campus, and not using the institution’s connection, there is little risk to exceeding the institution’s available capacity.

Not every institution has a robust internet connection: many rural or underfunded institutions may not have sufficient capacity to maintain stable connectivity to their web-hosted portals. Library websites, institutional websites, and other crucial forms of information made available to students and faculty through institutional web portals may become unavailable during times of increased load. While this does not directly impact student use of online learning and LMS, it does impact student ability to access those LMS and online resources should they not have the resources themselves bookmarked.

These issues can be resolved relatively quickly under normal conditions: IT can establish alternate portals to ensure availability or can take actions to limit the strain on web portals by through other technological remedies. However, these are not normal conditions. The speed at which our IT support personnel can respond to overloaded or crashed websites is dependent upon the availability of those personnel, and their ability to address a problem remotely as many may not be on campus during the pandemic. Further, in a remote work situation, with IT Help Desk lines forwarded to personal or home phones, IT support may be quickly overloaded with requests to address crashed websites or portals and may be unable to respond with their typical speed.

As someone who has worked with and for campus information technology services as a faculty and an employee, here are some recommendations to minimize the strain on IT personnel.

• Reach out to your senior most IT personnel to determine the best means to submit help requests in the event of a remote work situation. Standard mechanisms may be inadequate or insufficient to handle a large volume of requests.
• Reach out to your senior most IT personnel to determine the appropriate information to submit in the event of outage. Not all information will be valuable to address the issue and providing the most helpful information to your IT personnel can speed their response to your issue.
• Be patient with your IT personnel as they may be experiencing increased call volume. That was a joke, but one that is grounded in reality: your IT help center and help desks may be overloaded in the event of a major outage.
• Your IT personnel may not be able to address every issue that arises with online teaching or with your LMS. Some issues must be outsourced to the LMS providers, particularly if the LMS operates on a software-as-a-service model.
• If you have concerns about your specific LMS installation, consult the LMS help pages. As an example, for Blackboard, consult blackboard.com for specific advice.

The other aspect of infrastructure concerns that educators should bear in mind are the infrastructure limitations of the LMS itself. To understand this point, we have to take a walk through the architecture of a LMS, Blackboard in this example. That said, it needs to be stressed that each of LMS has different attributes and features which means that the infrastructures have different kinds of limitations and should be considered differently.

A brief tour of an online business ethics course (Guest post by Jake Wright)

A brief tour of an online business ethics course

Successful online teaching requires a different set of skills than successful in-person teaching.  Some of these skills are related to how a course is organized and how students interact with a course.  Having your course shifted online means that you lose all of the regular, impromptu, and informal opportunities to update your students on course logistics before class, after class, and whenever you handle housekeeping announcements like upcoming assignments.  Functionally, this means you have to plan for your students to be able to access all of the course’s materials independent of your guidance, especially if your course is delivered asynchronously. 

Having a well-organized course site can go a long way towards ensuring that students can navigate the course easily and independently.  What follows is a brief tour of my business ethics course, which I’ve taught online for the past six years.  Obviously, you might not be in a position to implement everything found in an online course that has benefitted from six years of iterative development, but having an example may be useful as you consider how to shift your course to online delivery.  The good news is that many of the features of a well-organized online course mirror or closely align with a well-organized in person course.

My course is run through Canvas, so major course components are divided into modules.  Similar divisions exist in other LMSes like Moodle or Blackboard, but the terminology might be different.  The main point is that all of the major LMS platforms are capable of supporting courses broadly organized in this way.

Facilitating Learning Online in face of Pandemic (Guest post by Adam Bowen)

Practical Strategies for Facilitating Learning Online in the face of Pandemic

By Adam J. Bowen, PhD

Assistant Teaching Professor

Dept. of Philosophy & Religious Studies

Ball State University

In the face of the imminent covid-19 pandemic, academics are being tasked with carrying out an unprecedented mass migration to online learning environments. For many colleagues at my institution and others across the globe, this is a daunting and stressful task, due to general unfamiliarity with online education and the tools available. I have been teaching philosophy online full-time for 5 years, and prior to that I utilized online tools to supplement my traditional courses, so I have been training myself on online teaching methods and becoming proficient at developing online learning experiences for over a decade. Given my virtual battle scars and time served in the online trenches, I acknowledge a collegial obligation to assist fellow educators in their efforts to transition their courses online, in an attempt to sustain our universities and colleges in this time of crisis. My advice is not intended as a guide to master online teaching, since that requires years of experimentation and revision to one’s methods, as with anything worth mastering. I will, however, offer some practical strategies for how to effectively transition into an online learning environment, implement course activities that help realize target learning objectives, and temper your expectations about how to undertake this without scrapping your course-plans for the current semester.

To begin, I recommend some reflection on the methods you currently use in the traditional classroom, why you make those pedagogical choices, and how those choices are intended to facilitate student learning. What in-class activities do you initiate that helps develop critical thinking skills? What is the purpose of your lecture? Do you use structured group activities to encourage peer-to-peer cooperative learning? These types of questions will help identify exactly what you want your students to learn and how your pedagogical choices are intended to accomplish these objectives. Everyone has already thought about this to some degree when designing our courses, but re-evaluating your course activities and content delivery methods will help you decide what you need the online tools to help you achieve, in a manner that is comparable to your traditional course. Will you be able to find an easy analogue for every aspect of your current course? No, that is unlikely, and it would be unwise to set that as your goal under the current emergency circumstances. Rather, I recommend identifying the essential features of your course, i.e. the content and learning activities that make your course valuable to your students. There are a diverse set of tools in the online toolbox, and many of them do not require mastery to successfully implement.

Switching Quickly to Online Teaching with Canvas (Guest post by Nicholaos Jones)

Some Suggestions for Switching Quickly to Online Teaching with Canvas

Nicholaos Jones, Professor of Philosophy, The University of Alabama in Huntsville, Huntsville, Alabama

I began teaching online four years ago. I have converted three courses into fully online formats. I offered my first online course during a summer semester, for the sake of experimenting with strategy. The next was a proof-of-concept for doing an upper-level undergraduate course online (Asian Philosophy) in a way that students found rigorous and engaging. I converted the third for the sake of gaining flexibility in balancing child-care with an emergent chronic health condition in my family.

My university will transition to online-only instruction beginning next week. As the chair for a joint department of Philosophy and Political Science, with faculty of all sorts and varying degrees of experience teaching online, I created a nut-and-bolts list of suggestions for switching quickly to online teaching, along with some samples of content I provide (when I have ample time to design the content).

My university uses Canvas, and so the suggestions are targeted for that platform. I do not know whether the suggestions are helpful for faculty who use other platforms. So please receive these suggestions with appropriate qualification. (Canvas offers free accounts to teachers and students. But if your institution uses an alternative platform, switching now is likely to cause logistical issues.) 

Like Professor McDonald, I prefer asynchronous teaching online. Disruptions to student schedules, and disparities in student resources and obligations, might interfere with their ability to attend an online session at a set time. Asynchronous teaching avoids this issue. Here's a suggestion for implementing an asynchronous approach.

First principles for emergency online teaching (Guest post by Jake Wright)

Some first principles for emergency online teaching

Many of us are struggling to transition our courses from well-planned in-person offerings to online delivery in various states of panic.  Perhaps we are worried because we have high expectations for our courses.  Perhaps we have never taught online before and aren’t sure where to begin.  And perhaps we are simply overcome by the news of the day and the speed at which it seems to be moving.

I am confident that many of the pieces being written for this series will ably handle specifics of how to rapidly prepare one’s course for online delivery in the midst of a crisis.  I also believe that one of the best things we can do to be successful is to take a moment, take a breath, and consider some first principles that might guide us through this rapid transition.  I would like to share my first principles here.  They all boil down to a pretty simple ethos: we find ourselves in challenging times that are deeply unsettling, but we can get through it by maintaining our communities and trusting ourselves, our students, and each other.

Trust your students

Even in normal circumstances, there is no better place to start than by trusting your students.  We all deserve grace and compassion in the best of times, and we especially need it in times of rapidly developing crisis.  These are not times where we want to obsess over how a rogue student might game the system to their advantage.  Rather, we should keep in mind that our students want to do right by themselves and us as surely as we want to do right by them.  Trusting your students will not only allow you to build and maintain an academic community (see below), but also frees you up to concentrate on what really matters—creating an online environment where students can successfully learn and demonstrate that learning.

Online teaching poster: 'do this, not that'

I came across this helpful poster on social media yesterday. It sums up a lot of advice I have heard recently that seems right to me, and which I myself plan to adopt:

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.

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.

New series: COVID-19 teaching transition -- Fritz McDonald on the basics of teaching online

My university, like many others across the world is moving to teach online in the light of the Covid-19 pandemic. Given that many of us have little prior experience with this (I personally have none), the Cocoon thinks it is useful to host a series on this. Anyone with experience in online teaching is welcome to submit material for this series. 

Our first post is by Fritz McDonald, Associate Professor of Philosophy, Oakland University, Rochester, Michigan

I have been teaching online for about a decade. In fact, my whole course load this year is online. It’s a matter of convenience for me and my students—I have a long commute to my university, and so do many of my students. I am still not sure, as I’ll note below, that online classes really are a good substitute for the work we typically do in face to face classes. All of us should do what we can, no matter how we teach, but within reason.

The first thing I would stress to those of you new to online instruction is that instructor presence is a big deal in online teaching. Email your students to keep them updated on exactly what they need to do, how they need to do it, and when. Don’t just assume they will read what’s on the learning management system page. Keep on top of students who are not doing the work, or not doing well.

This is a lot of work, obviously, and so is converting a face to face class into an online class. Online teaching is not easy. Making a face to face class into an online class is not a simple matter. It took me years, not days, to figure out better ways to teach online. I spent a good two years researching best practices in teaching logic online, and I’m still not sure I have it figured out.

If your university has a center for online teaching, take advantages of all its resources. Don’t be afraid to look dumb or silly—you’re learning a whole new way of teaching, and it’s best to be humble about what you know.