Author: Holly Ketterer, PhD
In this time of uncertainty and transition, you may be required to adapt your brick-and-mortar classroom course to the online environment. Below, I share my experiences and some helpful strategies for first time online course developers to engender student engagement and preserve your sanity. I also highlight how NCFDD, my home organization, successfully applies some of these strategies in their programs and operations for demonstrative purposes.
Become Acquainted With Your Learning Management System (LMS) Features: For traditional classroom courses, you might use your LMS (e.g., Blackboard Learn™, Moodle) exclusively to report and calculate student grades, if at all. When teaching online, intimately knowing the vast functionality of your LMS is a necessity. Otherwise, your efficiency and well-earned peace of mind may certainly become threatened. For example, many of my colleagues required that students upload completed assignments in Microsoft Word only so they could download them to track changes digitally or take manual notes. They would then upload their comments and critiques to the grade center, after scanning their notes if necessary. (I’m exhausted even writing this.) With a little digging, they might have learned that our LMS offered “inline grading” capabilities whereby instructors can annotate and grade student assignment files directly within their browser, saving time, energy, and keeping everything integrated into one seamless system.
Provide Time-Bound Structure: In all of my online courses, I organized course content and expectations by week in a sort of “chunking” strategy. Each week had a devoted menu button in my institution’s LMS with dates included (e.g., Week 1: 1/5-1/11) to enhance clarity. Subsumed under the week menu option, I provided a weekly task summary – an outline of the topics, readings, learning activities, assessments, and deadlines of which students should be aware. For students, this practice makes course requirements feel manageable and clear. It is also true that it organizes instructors expectations for how best to be a resource to their students and prepares them for their workload ahead.
NCFDD’s 12-week intensive Faculty Success Program (FSP) for tenure-track and tenured faculty is similarly structured. Participants can expect to see clearly outlined and highly visible goals for each week and day of the program in their WriteNow dashboard and even get the satisfaction of actually checking them off of their virtual to-do list. Example weekly requirements in FSP include viewing training modules, completing specific assignments, and meeting weekly for a mentoring call with their faculty coach and carefully curated peer group. Daily, participants are urged to write for at least 30 minutes and check in on our WriteNow platform to hold themselves accountable for goals and give/receive peer support. Participants are also encouraged to give themselves some form of “treat” each day to celebrate the successes, no matter how big or small, personal or professional.
Make Your Course Media Rich and Take Advantage of Others’ Work: To keep students engaged and the course content interesting, create media-rich courses by integrating varied learning mediums throughout (e.g., podcasts, song, short form video, documentary films, social media). Furthermore, capitalize on the enthusiasm students experience when consuming these media types, versus reading a lecture, by encouraging active, stimulating discussion around them. For example, each week, I asked that students view a video, talk, or documentary, listen to a podcast episode or lyrically relevant song, or even review an enlightening Twitter debate related to the weekly topic and respond to a series of prompts to generate discussion on class forums. This might materialize as the following: require that students watch a TED Talk, write two substantive discussion questions inspired by the talk, and provide two thoughtful responses to discussion questions posited by peers. For students, they encounter interesting, dynamic, and topical content in stimulating formats and ideally develop a sense of community in discussing their viewpoints and learnings. For the professor, time is saved by using already prepared dynamic and insightful media without sacrificing meaningful peer conversations.
This idea of outsourcing trainings or lessons strategically is not novel to the NCFDD or its members. In fact, many of our Institutional Members foster community around NCFDD trainings by inviting faculty to gather on campus to screen a relevant Guest Expert Webinar or Core Curriculum Webinar and engage in a full and vibrant discussion afterward. Some campus leaders at member institutions even curate collections for an entire semester by choosing topics from our vast library of past trainings or plan screenings for all new and upcoming webinars. This practice saves institutions from developing additional trainings, talks, or roundtables above and beyond those already hosted in offices concerned with faculty development.
Use Available Campus Resources: Many institutions, particularly those at which online teaching is pervasive, have offices that are entirely dedicated to providing instructional technology support to faculty. At my former institution, this office was called the Center for Instructional Design. The competent and accessible educational designers provided consulting support on best practices for designing and delivering online curriculum, generated peer-reviewed transcriptions for my audio lectures, offered swift technology support when the LMS lagged or produced errors, provided regular trainings on instructional technology developments, and facilitated peer-reviews of my course design to ensure it was effective and high-quality.
Record Your Lectures to Supplement Your Presentation or Course Notes: This task seemed daunting and technologically intimidating to me. Though, it was incredibly easy in execution. I used the free audio recording and editing program called Audacity to record my lectures at my laptop computer, and the sound quality was shockingly impressive. I recorded my comments on a slide-by-slide basis, thus had separate audio files for each slide. Our on-site Instructional Design team helped to sync my audio files to each slide. You may be in a hurry, particularly in response to an unexpected crisis that requires rapid online course development, thus have little time to consult taxed others with technology help. You can just as easily record your entire lecture in one uploadable audio file and ask your students to move to the next slide at the end of your comments on each.
Hold Regularly Scheduled Virtual Office Hours: When learning online, students may feel disconnected from their instructor or professor. Circumvent this feeling by being predictably available for student inquiries via some form of live video chat during regularly scheduled “office hours.” I personally created a Gmail account exclusively for students to contact me via Google Hangouts, though you might also consider using any institution-supported software (e.g., Zoom). This way, your students have the opportunity to build a fuller picture of who you are, why they should trust your expertise, and at the very least, have proof that you’re an actual human being! If you’ve moved your course from the classroom format to the online format in response to an unforeseen health or safety concern, your students might also be craving the classroom connection they once experienced.
With that said, there is value in managing your time very carefully. The NCFDD Core Curriculum Webinar Mastering Academic Time Management highlights that academics tend to prioritize their time based on the inherent accountability of their obligations, and often do so at the expense of their wellness and other responsibilities with greater implications for one’s career progression, particularly writing and research. In other words, instructors have to show up to class, hold office hours, advise students, and be present and contributory at university and department level committee meetings. They themselves must learn the skills to plan strategically for how and when to conduct research, write, and carve out time for health and wellness.
To avoid falling into this trap, be available during office hours only via chat and set expectations for how your students can communicate with you outside of these hours. If it is via email, provide a strict window of time within which they should expect a response. For me, it was within 24 hours. You might also offer up video chat opportunities by appointment – but use your discretion on whether the chat format is required for the types of inquiries you receive.
Ditch the Idea that Online Courses Work for Themselves: Pouring all of the course expectations, teaching materials, assignments, and assessments into your course to let it passively function is in poor taste. Remain actively engaged with your students as they navigate the coursework. For example, while grading, you might spot common error patterns or misunderstandings. This is a prime opportunity to create a 2-minute video in which you acknowledge the error and respond with a clarifying explanation. Other ways to stay meaningfully present and sustain student-instructor interactivity include earnestly engaging on discussion forums, grading in a timely manner, providing tips on upcoming assignments, hosting impromptu discussions around topical current events, or sending warm, personalized emails to learners to check in, motivate, and encourage.
This enthusiastic accessibility is precisely what NCFDD’s FSP participants can expect from their small group coaches. In addition to live weekly coaching calls with one’s coach and small group, participants receive substantive and encouraging feedback on progress check-ins and homework assignments with regularity. And, in the coaching spirit, NCFDD coaches extend thoughtful and tailored strategies to manage proposed concerns with follow up to determine how implementation went. What’s more, FSP participants can dig deeper into an issue with an NCFDD Master Coach in a 1-on-1 individualized session, whether their concern be resistance to writing, concerns about navigating academic life, or how best to focus on wellness when responsibilities abound.
Final Thoughts: Transitioning your course online may be intimidating and foreign, and this sense may be coupled with concern that your students will feel alienated from you, their peers, and the coursework. If you use the above tips and approach the task with calmness, patience, and preparation, you’ll successfully rethink and restructure the class you’ve taught semester after semester…after semester. You know this stuff, you’re an expert, just package it up differently!