Warning: academic thread

Dealing with the pandemic in Fall 2020

In the hope that this might be useful to some of you, I wanted to share some ideas for online teaching as someone who has taught online every semester for the past 5 years.

Firstly, I much prefer asynchronous. There is some merit in synchronous options, though, and you should prepare for some students wanting to speak with you in real time. I suggest having an online office hour however many times a week you are comfortable, though.

One of the major obstacle that I run into is internet access - I can't assume that all the students in my classes have good, consistent access to the internet (that might not be the case for you, of course). If I only offer synchronous classes, they miss out.

Further to that, if I were to record a 50-75 minute class lecture, they might have to use up a ton of data to watch it, tune out after 10 minutes, or just not watch it. To counter that, I try to only have a 5-7 minute video for each section of the class

Usually I'll review some of the key questions that I have for that section. I use these for in-person classes as well and write them up on the board at the start of the class session and we work through them. You can replicate this fairly well online

One problem, though, is you will likely get a lot of "good point, Other Student, I agree with you" which will represent the students in your f2f class who don't really talk that much. Online you can engage them by having small tasks on the forum

One thing that's worked quite well is to have the students go and find their own reading for a particular class (indeed you could do that quite a bit) and ask them to review it in a forum post. I also offer a range of "assigned" readings in course content folders

If you can use an open access textbook, great, but it's important to be prepared for students who can't afford to buy the book you are assigning if its not available for free. I like to use the library resources for many reasons

One being it encourages them to use sources they got from the library in their papers and not just what they found on google. You can either use a permalink to the library or download/upload any articles you are assigning. Again, issues of access might push you one way

I've found it useful, particularly during the pandemic, to have more lower-stakes assignments. We are pushing writing across the curriculum as an institution and I prefer papers anyway. Exams can be harder to manage if you can't guarantee the whole class is online at once

You can either ask them to submit all of them or let them choose how many they submit. It's best to encourage the former, of course, as time management is tricky at the moment for all of us.

Related thread: decontamination if you have to teach f2f!

My wife works at a major hospital in town. She's a therapist and doesn't work with covid patients. Nevertheless, we have a fairly strict decontamination protocol for when she gets home

This part of the thread really has those of you in mind who have loved ones who might be particularly at risk from the virus.

Firstly, she changes in the car. Not in the hospital, as she would still have to walk through the hospital to get to her car. This includes changing shoes. She has a pair of shoes that go from the house to the car and a pair that go from the car to work and back.

She takes those shoes off and goes straight to shower when she gets home. All her work things are sprayed or wiped (obviously can't leave everything in the car overnight) and left somewhere fairly secure. Her scrubs are tied in plastic bags and washed every 2 days

Obviously disinfecting spray is very hard to come by right now, for whatever reasons.

But if you have an appropriate amount of laundry each day, you could put your work clothes straight in the machine when you get back. Other medical-field friends will change in the garage when they get home.

Finally, get all your students to register to vote. Everything is totally unacceptable and it's not your fault or their fault.

Good luck! https://www.usa.gov/register-to-vote