Hi Y’all, 

I did some writing on my key takeaways from these months of working with a small team at the Center for Teaching and Learning to develop school-wide materials for teaching in the time of COVID and run round-the-clock online workshops from March to now. I additionally taught a Summer II English 2150 (Writing II) section for its five-week span.

I am offering this anecdotal experience if it is helpful to anyone—or if you haven’t had the time or chance to jump into various programming that we or others offered over the summer. But it really is just about what works for you. We are in an explorative mode, and there are few clear answers.

Best,
Seth

1. Attendance means something new in Fall 2020.​

It’s now policy that we need to give options to students who cannot attend our live sessions. We can do this by offering asynchronous options for engagement, expanding our idea of what attendance means in our courses, and talking with students about what modes of communication work for them. Low-stakes live communication through platforms like Slack can be infinitely useful here (I had entire—and effective if even pleasing!—text-based conferences with students on Slack—but I also found later that many more of my students already knew the similar platform Discord, a open-source platform that appeals more to youth, and I plan to migrate over).

I asked my students who couldn’t attend live meetings on Zoom to complete a “Missed Meeting Form” that asked them to (1) summarize what they missed in their words; (2) say how they would have participated; and (3) say how they are doing, how their work in the class is going, and if they have any questions for me.

2. It took time to teach students to be in my class​.

I dedicated a whole first unit to introducing the platforms of my class: Blogs @ Baruch, Slack, Zoom, Google Docs, and Email. Students had to do an activity on each platform (that included making their bio and adding a profile picture) to demonstrate they understood how to use each in the ways we were going to in the course. I had to be methodically clear with my instructions, and that paid off later. You can view how I did this in my first unit course module.

3. Students craved community, but each engaged in their own way.

Some students will be sharing space with family, and may be totally disinclined to communicate with us over voice—but eager to talk by email or text chat. Some students may be looking for a space to talk about anything other than class—I used a “random” channel on my class Slack to let them exchange notes on how life is going and to share media. Some of the students most reluctant to come to sessions or participate on Zoom were among the most vocal on Slack and blog posts (or discussion board posts, if you are using Blackboard instead of Blogs@Baruch).

4. We cannot require students to show their faces or share audio on Zoom.

This is policy.​ In fact, it is policy that we must tell students they are not required to do so. This also means that we need to become more creative with how students participate. In Zoom, they can use the chat function if they feel like it is the only way they feel comfortable participating. We can say at the start of class that we are trying our best to humanize our online class space and encourage folks to help that by showing faces (BUT THAT THIS IS NOT A REQUIREMENT per CUNY policy).

5. I started my prep by culling down the number of platforms I was using. 

Using fewer platforms often and robustly felt and worked better for me than using many platforms a little. This semester won’t be a competition for who can use the most platforms. I’m a very tech-savvy person, but I tried my damndest to make Blogs @ Baruch and Slack do all the work. I did a deep use of Blogs @ Baruch—and while some things are bells and whistles I don’t expect others to replicate, other tools I used (like blog comments) were me learning and testing to make the platform work for me and meet my goals.

6. Prioritizing “low-bandwidth” teaching options helped students and me stay present in the course.​​

I even took a damn class on making high-quality YouTube videos for teaching at the start of the summer, but by class-time I’d opted out of anything video-fancy and am grateful. I recorded myself once, doing a screen-share demo of some tech tools I wanted students to use. Ultimately we are all capable of making a good class with as many or few platforms as we need. It helped to focus on making the experience, however techie, easy to jump into for students. I knew one student was trying to fight a boss off to grab time to jump on a Zoom session—and I might end up seeing them on their phone, tuning in from out in a parking lot somewhere. They were making it work. I wasn’t annoyed, I was grateful. They were trying. This is hard. We just need to make whatever we use work for our pedagogies.

7. Synchronous sessions may be desirable because they aim to replicate in-class experiences, but they are not in-class experiences and have drawbacks. 

A combination of synchronous and asynchronous engagement, paired with clear instructions and guidance, works best to accommodate all students in your course.

8. The most impactful decisions​ of my course development were: 

• Developing a weekly/unit rhythm, so that students could have a general sense of the pace, structure, and recurring deadlines of the class.
• Developing spaces for classroom community to develop. I did this with (1) low-stakes Zoom check-ins instead of intense live sessions; (2) the class Slack; (3) robust use of the comments function for posts and pages on Blogs@Baruch; and (4) weekly check-ins of my own that were about my life as a human being and teacher.
• Writing stuff down that I otherwise might have said in a traditional classroom. I found that I even started to develop a new kind of voice in my writing to them, which I used on the course site.

9. I found it extremely helpful to restrict students to specific sites to gather media.

For the English 2150 multimodal assignment, I asked students to restrict themselves to using a Creative Commons image search site called Pexels.com; an audio site called Freemusicarchive.org; and the GIF site Giphy.com. When I asked my students to make a video, I restricted them to a free-to-use platform called Animoto, which they can access from a cell phone or computer browser. Animoto offers few options, but the constraints were helpful for them to talk to each other about their processes and troubleshoot together.

10. Instead of writing traditional lesson plans for my Zoom sessions, I created what I ended up calling “Check-In” sessions. 

This felt like the right tone of the course. Here’s one of the week’s check-in slides. Each one followed a similar pattern. The regularity of it created a positive ritual space. One choice proved useful beyond my expectation: having students popcorn-style call on the next student in the class to check-in. This kept the conversation from always coming back to me. Students used the “pass” moment to talk to each other and add some humanity and often humor into the session.

11. I tried to set realistic goals for myself about what feedback I could give and when. 

I tried to trust the process I had infused into my assignments: using the comments to prepare for the blog, the blog to prepare for a draft, a draft to prepare for a final draft, and so on (as well as other process elements within). I trusted this process because I trust that the writing process helps us learn and understand concepts. I tried to lean into my feedback at key times, without over-promising what I can read. My students left more than 1,500 comments over the course of the class. They know I didn’t read them all. They were talking to each other, and preparing. We touched base about their writing as it scaled up to the essay or project. I told them on the Slack when I was planning to review their work and when I was giving feedback. I gave comments along the way, like, “These cover letters are looking great!” or “Really enjoying the variety in the topics y’all picked.”

12. It was important to have a clear and streamlined process for the delivery of assignments and the return of feedback.

With the full class operating on web platforms, it became very important to make sure that having a single, prescribed way for depositing assignments was essential to keeping the class moving without too much individual troubleshooting or my fishing for work. I don’t think it really matters how you set this up for yourself. Anything used consistently can work, pretty much, from the tech-lite to the tech-heavy: email, Blackboard submission, shared Google Drive or Dropbox folder, annotating a Blogs @ Baruch post with Hypothes.Is—whatever. Just a system.

I have my students make a Google Drive folder with their name and share it with me at the start of class. I ask them to place all their work in there. I give them feedback using the “Suggestions” and “Comments” on Google Docs, then make a copy (with my comments) so that I have a record of those (I call my copy DUPLICATE in the title). Then the student can directly respond to my comments. But that’s just what works for me.