Communicate With Students
You'll want to let students know about changes in schedules, assignments, procedures, and broader course expectations. Early and frequent communication can ease student anxiety, and save you dealing with individual questions.
Keep these principles in mind:
- Communicate early and often: Let students know about changes or disruptions as early as possible, even if all the details aren't in place yet, and let them know when they can expect more specific information. Don't swamp them with email, but consider matching the frequency of your messages with that of changes in class activities and/or other broader updates related to the current situation.
- Set expectations: Let students know how you plan to communicate with them, and how often. Tell students both how often you expect them to check their email, and how quickly they can expect your response. Let them know, too, if you are using Moodle and/or Canvas, since they may need to update their notification preferences (details in the next section).
- Manage your communications load: You will likely receive some individual requests for information that could be useful to all your students, so consider keeping track of frequently asked questions and sending those replies out to everyone. This way, students know they might get a group reply in a day versus a personal reply within an hour. Also, consider creating an information page in Moodle and/or Canvas, and then encourage students to check there first for answers before emailing you.
Distribute Course Materials and Readings
You will likely need to provide additional course materials to support your changing plans, from updated schedules to readings that allow you to shift more instruction online.
Considerations when posting new course materials:
- Make sure students know when new material is posted: If you post new materials in Moodle or Canvas, be sure to let students know what you posted and where. You might even ask that they change their Moodle or Canvas notification preferences to alert them when new materials are posted.
- Keep things phone friendly: Many students may only have a phone available, so make sure you are using mobile-friendly formats, Microsoft Word being the most common. Consider saving other files (for example, PowerPoint presentations) as Word documents, which are easier to read on phones and tablets, and keep the file size small.
Deliver Lectures
Whenever possible, record your lectures ahead of time. Prepared videos are effective because they:
- Are available at any time to students
- Give you the ability to ensure the quality of your own lecture on your own schedule
- Allow you to break up lectures into smaller chunks for more effective viewing
- Ensure unstable networks don't impact student success
- Enable automated closed captioning
Use live Zoom sessions when instructional strategies require real-time audio/video collaboration. Examples include:
- Facilitating discussion among students, including using breakout sessions
- Sharing Zoom whiteboards
- Using live polls
- Facilitating Q/A sessions after viewing recorded lectures or other materials
Some students won't have access to fast internet connections, and others may have their schedules disrupted. The best practice is to record any live classroom session and be flexible about how students can attend and participate.
Foster Communication and Collaboration Among Students
Fostering communication among students is important because it allows you to reproduce any collaboration you build into your course, and maintains a sense of community that can help keep students motivated to participate and learn. It helps if you already had some sort of student-to-student online activity since students will be used to both the process and the tool.
Consider these suggestions when planning activities:
- Use asynchronous tools when possible: Use asynchronous tools like Moodle Discussion Forums to allow students to participate on their own schedules. In addition, bandwidth requirements for discussion boards are far lower than for live video tools.
- Link to clear goals and outcomes: Make sure there are clear purposes and outcomes for any student-to-student interaction. How does this activity help them meet course outcomes or prepare for other assignments?
- Build in simple accountability: Find ways to make sure students are accountable for the work they do in any online discussions or collaborations. Assigning points for online discussion posts can be tedious, so some instructors ask for reflective statements where students detail their contributions and reflect on what they learned from the conversation.
- Balance newness and need: As with any changed activities, you will need to balance the needs and benefits of online collaboration with the additional effort such collaboration will require on everyone else's part. Learning new technologies and procedures might be counterproductive, particularly in the short term, unless there is clear benefit.
Collect Assignments
Collecting assignments is fairly straightforward, since many instructors already collect work electronically. The main challenge in the current situation is whether students have access to computers, as anyone needing a campus computer lab will be unable to access necessary technologies. Here are a few things to keep in mind:
- Require only common software: Students will not have access to specialty software located in on-campus computer labs. Be ready with a backup plan for such students.
- State expectations, but be ready to allow extensions: Some students will undoubtedly have difficulties meeting deadlines. Make expectations clear, but be ready to provide more flexibility than you normally would in your class.
- Require specific filenames: It may sound trivial, but anyone who collects papers electronically knows the pain of getting 20 files named Essay1.docx. Give your students a simple file naming convention, for example, FirstnameLastname-Essay1.docx.
Assess Student Learning
It is fairly easy to give small quizzes to hold students accountable or do spot-checks on their learning, and this might be ideal to keep students on track.
General tips for assessing student learning:
- Embrace short quizzes: Short quizzes can be a great way to keep students engaged with course concepts, particularly if they are interspersed with small chunks of video lecture. Consider using very-low-stakes quizzes to give students practice at applying concepts—just enough points to hold them accountable, but not so many that the activity becomes all about points.
- Move beyond simple facts: It is good to reinforce concepts through practice on a quiz, but generally it is best to move beyond factual answers that students can quickly look up. Instead, write questions that prompt students to apply concepts to new scenarios, or ask them to identify the best of multiple correct answers.
- Check for publishers' test banks: If you are already using a publisher's textbook in your course, check to see whether the publisher has question banks that can be loaded into Moodle and/or Canvas. Even if you don't use these questions for your exams, they can be useful for simple quizzes. Some textbooks also have their own online quizzing tools that can help keep students engaged with the material.
- Update expectations for projects: Be ready to change assignment expectations based on the limitations imposed by the current situation. Possible options include allowing individual rather than group projects or adjusting the types of resources needed for research papers.
- Consider alternate exams: Delivering a secure exam online can be difficult without a good deal of preparation and support, so consider giving open-book exams or other types of exams. They can be harder to grade, but you have fewer worries about test security.
Final Exams
- Communicate: Regardless of the choices you make about final exams or assessments, please over-communicate with your students.
- Cancel: While this may not be an option for your particular situation, many professors across various disciplines are canceling the final exam.
- Change: While your face-to-face classes may be well-suited for paper exams, there is evidence to suggest that alternative assessment techniques may be beneficial in an online situation.
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Have a written assignment with short-answer questions submitted via Moodle or email.
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Use several small quizzes to replace a larger exam.
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Have student’s complete presentations through PPT (with voiceover), podcast, or video.
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Assign an electronic portfolio with discussion of key topics (using Digication or Adobe Spark).
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Assign digital poster on key topics.
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Consider using Turnitin or a plagiarism checker for written assignments and PPTs.
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Use take-home exam with possibilities for short-answer and more developed analytical questions (asynchronous: that is, you can set it for a different time to your regular class time – more like a homework assignment-24-hour window). These can be submitted online through Moodle or via email.
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- Continue: If you do not want to make changes to your exam mode, you can still create this assessment task through Moodle while maintaining academic integrity and offering students the best opportunity for positive outcomes.
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Institute an Honor Code for remote testing. Ask students to submit a signed Academic Conduct statement based on MC’s Code of Conduct. This can be developed ahead of time or students can be asked to read the MC Student Code of Conduct site to develop their own statement outlining the expectations.
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For multiple-choice exams, have a large question bank so that specific questions can be randomized.
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Randomize order of questions within tests/exams and have only one question per page; this cuts down on students’ ability to share answers. For more information on these strategies, please see faculty Moodle page.
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Use Turnitin or plagiarism checker for longer exam questions.
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If the final is the first online exam your class will take, consider offering practice exams/quizzes so students can test their technology/access as well as get used to timed-tests in the online environment.
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You can offer multiple-choice (automatically graded through Moodle), short-answer, or essay questions, depending on your preferred mode.
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For those interested in capturing more advanced input responses (formulas, calculations, etc.), consider using draw and write with ink features in Office 365 applications (Word, Excel, PowerPoint) for capturing student work (equations, formulas, show-your-work scenarios) for assessment.
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If you feel as if proctored, synchronous exams are essential for your course, you might consider proctoring those via an online video conferencing platform like Zoom. In order to do this, you would set up a timed Moodle Quiz, gather students in a Zoom session, and proctor that exam live.
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Do not curve exams – Students who cheat may still get their As, but in the absence of a curve, their “success” will not reduce the chances for other students to get As as well.
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Make all exams open-book so that students who consult notes and books do not gain an unfair advantage over students who adhere to closed-book rules.
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