Advice for First-Time Online Teachers
I assume that this blog post will mostly circulate among those who know me, but just in case you happen to be coming to it without any prior knowledge:
I’m Silas Hansen, I’m an essayist and an assistant professor of creative writing at Ball State University, and while I’m no expert on online teaching, I teach my 300-level nonfiction writing class online each summer and thought I might be able to share some advice for those who are moving their classes online halfway through the term.
1. The way you structure assignments and delivery of course content is likely going to change. That could be a good thing.
For example, my in-person creative writing classes include full class workshops of student work. This is really hard to replicate online. Anyone who has been on a conference call or Skype meeting with more than one other person can attest that it’s almost impossible to hear each other, to have a productive conversation, or to make sure everyone is on the same page.
This also requires students to all be available at the same time, which isn’t always going to be possible. Although it might seem as though students could be available during their typical class meeting times if things need to move online this semester, that may not be the case. Your students may end up taking care of younger siblings—or their own kids!—if K-12 schools close, taking care of elderly or sick family members if home care workers fall ill, working more hours to fill in for sick co-workers or to help cover lost wages for family members working in service or travel industries. They may be relying on cell phones with limited data plans to access course materials. They may not have a stable place to live if residence halls close or if their roommates leave a lease early. In short: don’t assume that they will be able to continue with synchronous class meetings if your campus closes.
I instead switched this to entirely asynchronous discussion board posts. I had students work in smaller groups, which allowed them to respond to each other more rapidly (i.e., they only had to read/respond to three other students’ work, rather than 19), which in turn allowed them to have more back-and-forth in a shorter period of time. My schedule looked something like this: the writer would post their work by noon on Day 1; by noon on Day 3, the readers would have read and responded to it; by noon on Day 5, the readers would read and respond to each other’s posts while the writer also responded and asked their own questions; by noon on Day 7, the readers would post final comments and responses to the writer’s questions.
Since I wasn’t going to be there to redirect feedback to something more constructive in real-time, I provided much more prescriptive questions for the students to answer about each other’s work. Instead of saying, “Provide three craft-based suggestions,” which is how I might handle this in an in-person class where I could then ask follow up questions to move the comment toward being “craft-based,” I asked students very specific questions about the narrator of the essay, about the structure, about which important moments in the essay were rendered in either scene or summary, etc. This ensured that the feedback the student writers heard was equivalent in quality, if not quantity, to what they would hear in an in-person class.
Doing workshop this way in my online classes has also changed the way I handle it in my in-person classes. I do more instruction with students now to help them improve the quality of their feedback; we do more small group discussion to prepare for full-class workshops; I also facilitate more back-and-forth dialogue between the writer and their readers both before and after workshop.
2. Use the technology available to you to make the class as accessible as possible.
If it’s not vital that your students all be signed on to your Learning Management System at the same time, consider ways that you can make the class work asynchronously. Doing so doesn’t only benefit the students whose schedules are more complicated: having video lectures allows students to go back and review material more closely; it allows them to rewind and listen again if they miss something, to point to a specific moment in your lecture when they were confused so that you can help them. If you provide a transcript of your lecture, or captions, this can also help students who are deaf or hard of hearing, or those might not process information as well when they hear it as when they read it.
A few options to consider:
For lectures: Consider creating short lecture videos (I’ve found that 5-10 minutes is perfect; 15 minutes at max, but that’s really pushing it) to explain course concepts. These don’t need to be professionally done—using Photobooth or another similar free program and your computer’s built-in mic/camera is plenty. I like to combine Photobooth (so I can talk directly to the students and they can see me) with screencaps of my PowerPoint/Keynote presentations. I use QuickTime Player both to record screen sharing and do these basic video edits—you can record, trim videos, and combine multiple files into one, then export as several different file formats and there are numerous easy-to-follow YouTube tutorials.
If you want to keep the synchronous nature of your course lectures while still allowing students with complicated schedules to watch the lectures later, you might consider using tools like Zoom, Webex, or Big Blue Button (this last one is the built in “Conferences” feature on Canvas), all of which allow you to record lectures, share your computer screen or a file (e.g., PowerPoint, a Word doc, etc.), for students to ask questions, etc.; you can record this for students to return to later. Most schools have a preference for one of these tools over another and many of them are already built in to your LMS, so you—and your students—should have free access. Try to avoid anything that requires your students to buy software or pay licensing fees, as they are likely already facing financial stress by moving out of residence halls, losing on-campus employment, and/or having their hours cut if they’re in affected industries.
For discussion: Rather than having students all participate in the same conversation, which becomes unwieldly and leads to a lot of repetition, I place students into smaller groups. I typically separate the groups into separate threads on the same discussion board so they can see what the other groups are posting, but they are engaging with a smaller number of people. I also ask fewer and more directed questions than in an in-person class, giving each group specific tasks to complete and then prescribing certain ways for them to respond to their classmates’ ideas. In an in-person class, I can allow time for the students to get there on their own, since I’m able to model the kind of comments we’re looking for and since I can ask follow up questions to get them to the heart of the matter. In an asynchronous, online class, it’s not as easy to get students there as quickly, so they might need more direction. Another great “discussion”-based activity is to use the “Pages” feature in Canvas, which is similar to a Wiki. One activity I do in my creative nonfiction class is to give each group (3-5 students) a section of an essay we’ve read, and then ask them to use the Pages feature to annotate it: they label scene vs. summary vs. exposition, they point out concrete vs. abstract language, they label direct vs. indirect characterization, etc.
For feedback: If you’re worried about losing the personal nature of the class, think about giving video and/or audio feedback, either instead of or in addition to written feedback. Canvas has a built in feature in SpeedGrader that allows you to leave this feedback right through your browser without having to download or upload anything special. I haven’t done this yet in my own classes, but my colleagues who have say that it actually takes them less time to grade this way than if they provide feedback in writing.
3. Be sure to think about accessibility for students with disabilities.
Not everyone is able to process information the same way, so having at least a transcript—or, better yet, real-time captions!—for your audio is important. At the very least, make sure that anything important you say out loud is also in writing somewhere. I’m a big fan of writing a quick script before I record, which lets me (1) estimate length, as I know 250 words is about 2 minutes and (2) ensure I’m saying the right thing and (3) include a transcript for anyone who might need it.
YouTube has built-in captioning software, but their automatic captions are often incorrect, depending on your personal accent and dialect, so you will likely need to edit them slightly. I speak Inland Northern American English (I’ve got those nasally As) and I’d estimate YouTube gets my captions right upwards of 85% of the time; this is likely going to be different if you speak a dialect and/or have an accent that isn’t considered “standard American English.”
Talk to your school’s Disability Services ASAP, especially (but not only) if you have students with documented disabilities in your class, to see how they may be able to help you. Don’t assume that you don’t have students with disabilities, even if no one has reached out to you yet this semester. Many students are able to succeed without these services in an in-person class, but an online class might pose challenges. Make sure they know to contact Disability Services if they need help and be willing to work with students who might have to wait for a bit to get the necessary documentation in order.
3. Consider how you hold students accountable for having read the material and/or watched the lecture videos.
When I first began teaching in-person classes, I didn’t worry about this quite as much. Either students were fully participating in the conversation in class or they weren’t and I’d give a “pop quiz” on the reading to scare them into doing it.
In an online class, though, it might not be as obvious when students aren’t doing the reading and when they might need to do some intervention. It’s not because students are lazy, but instead because they’re busy and need to prioritize. If you aren’t holding them accountable in some way, the reading falls to the bottom of their to-do lists.
I’m by no means advocating for busy work, daily quizzes, or anything like that. This accountability should be relatively easy to complete if they’ve done the reading—think an extra 5-10 minutes—and should be relatively low stakes.
In my own classes—in the in-person ones now, too, since I’ve been blown away by its effect on discussion—I have students complete daily reading responses. These are short, graded as credit/no credit, and they must submit them by the deadline to earn points. I don’t have to do much “grading” of them beyond glancing at them to make sure students are completing them and are understanding the reading. It takes me maybe 10-15 minutes total for each set I collect.
I created the responses not to quiz them on trivial information from the reading (which they could easily just skim the reading to find—I know this because it’s what I did as an undergraduate!), but instead to teach them what to pay attention to in the reading.
In my creative writing classes, this means I want them to:
(1) very briefly summarize the material to ensure they understood it (<100 words)
(2) for craft essays or lecture videos: list three most important takeaways; for example essays/stories/poems: list three craft techniques they noticed the writer using, along with a brief note about where it’s happening in the text (e.g., “they’re writing about x event in scene, rather than summary, on the top of page 3”)
(3) take note of a passage from the text that they find interesting, have questions about, or admire for some reason; I don’t ask them to explain in writing, but I often have them talk about this in the discussion board posts or in class discussion
(4) ask a question about this reading OR make a connection between this reading and something else we’ve read/talked about this semester
This is all valuable for them to do—to identify the main point of what they’ve read, to think about the writer’s use of craft, to consider how the writer is putting together their sentences, to make connections—but it’s also harder for them to get away with “faking” it as they could if I were to use reading quizzes, particularly in an online class.
4. Try to keep things as “normal” as possible, while acknowledging to students that things are weird and you’re all figuring it out together.
Your students are freaked out. They’re panicking. A lot of them are away from half—or all—of their support system, either because they’ve moved out of the residence halls and back home, or because their friends have, or because they aren’t able to return to their families right now. They need some stability. That’s not to say that we can’t acknowledge that things are weird or that we need to act as if it’s “business as usual.”
I say this as someone who was 12 when Columbine happened, who watched the second tower fall on 9/11—live—from the back row of his 9th grade social studies class during the first full week of his freshman year of high school, who has been glued to the news during every mass shooting on a college campus since he entered college himself. The best thing my teachers and professors did for me was to acknowledge that things were weird and that we were all doing our best, but then getting back to the work as quickly as possible. Being glued to the news, focusing on the terror of it all, doesn’t help anyone.
All of this to say: talk to your students about the changes you’re making in the class, and why. Let them know that you are learning about this as you go, that you’re probably going to make mistakes, and that those mistakes aren’t going to be held against them. Be clear with them about how your expectations have changed, and why those expectations have changed. But don’t throw out your course plan to turn a creative writing class into one about pandemics and dystopias, for example. Give your students the chance to think about something else—the thing they signed up for and have been learning all semester.
5. Talk to students about why you’ve structured things as you have.
I often do weird assignments in my classes, but I’ve found that students are typically willing to go with it if they can see that I’ve thought about it and have a reason for it. You obviously don’t need to do that with every assignment, but if you’re getting pushback, or if it’s drastically different from the type of work you’ve been doing so far in the semester, acknowledge it and give a bit of context. What do you hope they get out of this assignment? Why is it structured in this particular way? What should the students know before completing it? Then, ask follow up questions: what worked for them? What didn’t? Be willing to change things if it doesn’t work.
6. Give students a place where they can still connect—with each other and with you.
One of the things I miss most about teaching in-person vs. online is the five or so minutes immediately before and immediately after class, when students are coming in and chatting with each other while I set up my laptop. I get to overhear their conversations: who has a new job, who’s going where for spring break, who’s signing up for what classes the next semester, etc.
This often leads to impromptu group advising, where I can give them advice about how to choose their classes—read the course descriptions and see who’s covering what, instead of just signing up for the one with a time you like better!—or remind them to apply for graduation. But it’s also just a chance for me to get to know them better, and for them to know me as a person. This is likely different in, say, a math class vs. in my creative nonfiction class where we’re all reading about each other’s personal lives, but it creates a level of trust and community that is really important at times like these, when we’re all struggling.
This could be a chat room that you set up (Canvas has one built in that you just need to turn on; some other LMS have similar ones), a separate discussion board for off-topic conversations, etc. Check in on it once in a while and see how your students are doing. Respond more personally to their writing—I typically don’t comment on the content of what they’re writing as much as the way they’re writing about it, but in online classes, I might add a recommendation for a podcast or TV show they might like if they’re interested in that topic, or point out the place where their writing made me laugh out loud in my office, or say, “I’m really sorry this happened—let me know if I can help you connect to resources that could help” if they share a traumatic experience.
In short: remember that your students may be feeling very isolated without attending class; give them the space to deepen those connections with their classmates.
Here’s a copy of my syllabus for my online class, which I last updated for Summer 2019
And finally, here are some other resources that might be helpful to you:
· Indiana University’s Teaching Online Series (I believe this is open access—let me know if you have trouble accessing it)
· Course Design Checklist, created by Washington State Community and Technical Colleges
· Assay: A Journal of Nonfiction Studies is putting together pedagogy resources for folks moving online; while their focus is creative nonfiction, they also have resources for composition, literature, and other genres of creative writing
· Google doc with resources, compiled by Dr. Sarah Whitcomb Laiola of Coastal Carolina University
· Facebook group, Sudden Distance: Teaching Writing Online
· The online teaching panel I moderated at this year’s Association of Writers & Writing Programs Conference (if you go to “outline and supplemental materials,” you’ll find two documents that may be useful)