The Philosophers' Cocoon

Teaching philosophy online (2nd Zoom session)

The second Teaching Philosophy Online series (via Zoom) will held this Wednesday, April 1, 1-2 EST. Here's the meeting link.

The sessions are 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.

Session 2 panelists:

Audrey Anton (Western Kentucky University)

Mara Harrell (Carnegie Mellon University)

Jonathan Milgrim (University of Washington)

Janice Moskalik (Seattle University)

Kate Padgett Walsh (Iowa State University)

Justin Tiehen (University of Puget Sound)

Jake Wright (University of Minnesota, Rochester)

We have created a form where folks can register if they're interested in receiving reminders and a link to a recording of the session if they can't make it live. (Registration is not required.) The form also provides a place to express interest in various topics that we may try to cover in the webinar.

We hope to see y'all there!

Ian and Paul

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.

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.