Prepare Your Fully Online Course ~ Week 3
Over the next four weeks, the Center for Teaching and Learning will help you to take some “bite-sized” steps toward transitioning your course online. In addition to our online resources, there are several opportunities to get more support, including one-on-one conversations with CTL consultants, synchronous workshops, and asynchronous opportunities to engage with your colleagues at Baruch. Click here to see Week 1 of the guide (Learning Goals & Modalities), and click here to see Week 2 (Course Platform & Access).
Please note that this is a suggested timeline, and an example for your reference.
Week 3
(Re)view strategies for student engagement through weekly deliverables.
As you continue adding content to your platform of choice, consider building in a regular rhythm for the course by scheduling consistent weekly deadlines. Assigning low-stakes “deliverables” can be an opportunity for students to interact with each other’s contributions and can provide you with insight about what students understand (without adding a tremendous amount of grading). This sample schedule gives a good idea of how to create a predictable weekly pace (this link will open a PDF document in a new tab).
(Re)design a major third “unit.”
Develop a third major “unit” and a third major project, assignment, or exam. Consider how you are gauging students’ learning. How do your assignments, exams, or projects help you to determine if students have met the learning goals? If necessary, revisit Week 1 and Week 2 of this guide for refreshers on defining learning goals and scaffolding a unit.
(Re)visit course policies on attendance and participation through an online lens.
Make sure your course policies accurately reflect the experience you want students to have in your online course. For example, have you thought about what “participation” means in the online classroom? How will you assess it? How will you determine that students have “attended” your class if it is asynchronous? If a student has a connectivity issue during a synchronous session, will they be allowed to make up the class? Will you record your class? (and if so, you should notify students in advance) Here are some options on what participation can look like in an online class.
Let’s Cook Together! CTL Support For Week 3 Prep:
Anytime: Check out our CTL Events page for any ongoing programming that you may find helpful as you continue to build your online course.
Monday-Friday, 9am – 5pm: Click here to schedule a one-on-one synchronous online appointment with a CTL consultant. If this is your first time to make an appointment, learn how to join the one-on-one session (this link will open a PDF document) after you have scheduled it.
More to chew on, if you want it:
Check out this theoretical text (online and interactive) on the scholarship of participation: The Rhetoric of Participation: Interrogating Commonplaces In and Beyond the Classroom, co-edited by Lisa Blankenship, Baruch Associate Professor of English.
Want to run asynchronous discussion forums/boards on Blogs@Baruch or Blackboard? Before you commit, you may want to consider this essay about the pitfalls of relying on discussion boards without thoughtfully structuring them by English professor Edward Gallagher (this link will open a PDF document in a new tab) (skip down to page 8 for a helpful framework for scaffolding discussions).
This helpful rubric, authored by Joseph Ugoretz, the Chief Academic Officer of Macaulay Honors College, explains what counts as meaningful participation, on discussion forums/boards.
This neat non-narrated video offers some thoughts and options for good discussion prompts.
Remember that the single most important consideration that we can make in designing an online course is to have compassion for our students and ourselves. Check out Cathy Davidson’s 2020 article to learn more about why it’s so important to offer a flexible instructional model, which includes some more concrete ideas for how to create one.
Good job on week 3! Check out prep recommendations for week 4, or go back and review recommendations from weeks 1 and 2.
Image credits: ‘Cooking’ icons toolkit from goodstuffnononsense.com