A Guide to Online Teaching in the Social Sciences

Introduction

Originally started in March of 2020 by Will Styler at the University of California, San Diego, this is intended to be a helpful guide for faculty moving to online teaching. It was then substantially revised and updated in preparation for a talk at the University of Michigan in July 2020. There are many such guides out there, including the official guide at UCSD’s “Keep Teaching” Hub, but this one is focused on the kinds of classroom interaction often used in the social sciences. Please email suggestions and ideas and comments to wstyler@ucsd.edu.

Last updated: August 25th, 2022

Conceptual Course Planning

As you consider how to best move online, the first and biggest question is ‘what form will my class take’, because you can’t just perform a ground class online and expect excellent results (any more than a lab class can be performed via large-group lecture). In the online context, this is because…

• The course structure can look entirely different in an online setting
  • Lecture no longer needs to happen during scheduled sessions, and classrooms ‘flip’ easily
• Evaluation needs to look different
  • “Closed book, non-collaborative” is no longer a thing you can ensure
• Meetings need to look different
  • Lecture doesn’t work as well online
  • Students don’t reliably have access to quiet places for lecture with reliable internet
• Active learning is more important than ever
  • Deactivated cameras and mics could easily just be asleep
• In class culture needs to be different
  • Classroom norms from ground classes need to shift some

So, although you’re not expected to change everything all at once, it’s a good idea to consider whether alternative, online-first class structures might fit your needs better. Give yourself flexibility, and don’t be afraid to make big, bold changes to better fit a new modality.

Synchronous vs. Asynchronous Coursework

Synchronous (‘synch’) classroom interaction involves having students inhabiting a (virtual) space at the same time and interacting in real time (e.g. a virtual question-answer session, or virtual discussion section). These interactions are scheduled, involve direct supervision of the instructional team, and generally have a fixed duration.

Asynchronous (‘asynch’) interactions do not require any cotemporality, and students are able to interact with the material entirely on their own timeframe. Usually asynchronous work just has a due-date, but when the work happens is up to the students. These can range from ‘watch a video on your own’, to conventional homework, to asynchronous discussion board postings. You’ll note, by the way, that this is akin to the idea of a ‘flipped classroom’, where lectures are asynchronous and class times are active and focused on analysis and discussion. So, although it may feel crazy and new, it’s not new at all.

These form a continuum, with most successful classes combining elements of both (e.g. asynchronous lecture watching, but synchronous data analysis sessions and homework assignments). Each approach has advantages and disadvantages:

Synchronous Advantages

• Less work for the instructor for new preps
  • You’re not pre-recording materials and then leading sessions to discuss it
• Creates a sense of ‘community’ for the students
  • Synchronous interactions build a ‘class’, and let students get to know each other
• Students can learn from other students
  • Questions asked in synchronous sessions might answer questions other students didn’t know they had
• It provides a ‘beat’ for the class
  • “I know I had to be there once a week, and that forced me to do the work”
• It motivates participation
  • Students who struggle with motivation might not complete asynchronous work in a timely manner
  • Similarly, some students would never attend office hours, but could easily ask questions in synchronous lectures
• Student feedback in my Spring 2020 courses supported synchronous coursework
  • Students, believe it or not, appreciated that they were expected to be in the once-a-week synchronous meeting (even though there was a method for completing the work asynchronously). They said it motivated and gave them a reason to feel like they were a part of a class, rather than working on their own. Commonly, it “a bit more like a real class”, and “motivated me to ask questions I wouldn’t bother emailing”, and they expressed disdain for completely independent asynchronous classes.

Asynchronous Advantages

• Synchronous attendance is more difficult for students with work schedules, differing timezones, family at home, or irregular internet
  • Async work can be completed when the student is best able to focus
• It’s robust to illness, as deadlines can be adjusted
  • An asynchronous class can be ‘caught up on’ more readily
• Asynchronous work can be reused by the instructor
  • There are likely materials and videos which can be re-used for a future quarter
• Asynchronous work doesn’t require videoconferencing technology to be working
• Asynchronous videos and readings can be digested at the students’ own pace
  • Students can pause, rewind, and jump back through
• Moving lectures to asynchronous work allows remaining synchronous sessions to focus on active learning
  • If students mostly sit quietly while watching lectures, why not let them do that on their own?
• Completely asynchronous classes (previously known as ‘correspondence courses’) are able to run continuously and without a ‘focal instructor’.
  • This allows work to be spread among a larger instructional team, allowing more students to enroll
  • It also allows students to start and complete the course at any point
  • This often has negative consequences for teaching quality, but it is an advantage

In practice, you’ll likely end up combining both models, and most online-first class formats rely on asynchronous delivery of information (with pre-recorded videos, readings, and case studies), and synchronous sessions for active learning and discussion.

A sample mixed-synchronous course design

Imagine a MWF 12-1 class. Normally you might spend those three hours lecturing, and then have students do homework in the rest of the time. Then perhaps a proctored midterm and final. Something like 50% Homework, 20% Midterm, 30% Final exam as a grading split. This not only requires a lot of lecturing, but also relies on Zoom to be operable 3 days a week, and fails if this isn’t tue. A different approach might be to make more of the work asynchronous, like so…

• Each week, students watch assigned pre-recorded lectures or podcasts during the normal Monday and Wednesday time and read the relevant chapters in the text. Office hours are held during the previously scheduled class times, to allow students a chance to ask questions in real time, at a time when you know they’re available.
• Before the Zoom session, students complete a small, self-grading quiz on Gradescope or Canvas, to ensure they’ve done the required asynchronous work.
• On Friday, your class meets via Zoom, students ask questions, and you can engage in active learning activities surrounding the course material, either as a group, or in smaller breakout sessions, with you and your IA(s) jumping from room to room.
• Student assignments are submitted on Sunday nights, by Canvas or Gradescope.
• A final exam that’s based more on synthesis or analysis (which is harder to ‘cheat’ on) is administered, or a paper is assigned, to taste.
• Grades are split, for example, among Homeworks, Quizzes, Class Participation on Fridays, and some other element (e.g. graded discussions, or a take-home final)

By doing this, students are able to get the material, have their comprehension tested, engage with analysis or other relevant skills, complete assignments, and have their knowledge tested, but with only one synchronous period. And so long as the total time spent for students is not hugely greater or lesser, the administration at UCSD is fine with it. For sample syllabi (which are far from perfect and will change as I improve them), see my LIGN 101 syllabus and my LIGN 113 syllabus.

Here’s another sample syllabus from the UCSD teaching and learning commons

On ‘Hybrid’ approaches, where some students are online

There are two main approaches to ‘hybrid’ online teaching.

‘Hybrid’ teaching (synchronous classes, held both online and in person at once)

This is super challenging. This where classes are held synchronously, but some students attend in person and others attend via Zoom.  I do not recommend this.

• There are considerable technical challenges involved with feeding your slides, room video and microphone into both the room and into Zoom at once, and will be a pain each time.  It’s to the level of pain where it’s something I personally would probably not choose, despite being relatively tech-saavy.
• Students on the (still unreliable) campus wifi may not be able to log in for classes at the desired moment, for reasons which aren’t their fault
• There’s also a major interactive challenge, as only half the class will have clicker access, and it’s more difficult to spot a ‘zoom raised’ hand.  This can be helped by assigning an IA to watch the Zoom and repeat questions raised there.
• It’s very tricky to balance exams such that they’re fair for closed book, non-collaborating in-person exam takers and open book, collaborative online exam takers (because remember, there’s no way to ensure an online test is closed book and non-collaborative)
• The joke is that Hybrid Online Teaching is the best way to ensure that neither online nor in-person students get the optimal experience.
• For small seminars, this can work OK with a meeting owl, but it’s still the case that the majority will have a better experience, whether mostly remote or mostly in person.

Mixed-Asynchronous Teaching (synchronous for in-person people, asynchronous for remote people)

This is where some students choose to attend in-person synchronously and participate synchronously, and others watch the class sessions and participate asynchronously, and homeworks and tests are submitted online.  This is, in my mind, ‘the sweet spot’, and the closest hybrid teaching gets to working well.

• Existing tools like Podcasting make this pretty straightforward, and allow folks who are at home a very similar experience, with relatively little fuss or extra work.
• You’ll likely want to create a workflow or a ‘repeating assignment’ for remote students to get any ‘participation’ or clicker credit.
• You’ll want to assign an IA (if you can) specifically to work with these folks, handle the asynchronous participation, and such.
• You’ll want to give everybody the same online-only homework and online-only exams, so everybody’s evaluated the same way.
• Consider hosting discussion sections online regardless, or designating one section which works for remote students as ‘online’.

Implementing your online course

Evaluation

The biggest problem facing online classrooms is not teaching, but evaluation. This is because closed-note non-collaborative assignments are not possible online. Let me repeat that:

Closed-note non-collaborative assignments are not possible online

The fact is that there is no way to ensure that students are not making use of their book, notes, your lectures, or their friends and classmates for a student working at home on their own private machine. You can request that students not use notes or collaborate, but it is simply ‘on the honor system’, and this will end up putting honest students at a disadvantage relative to their less ethically endowed counterparts. As a result, the classical ‘exam’ cannot exist online, and evaluation will need to be fundamentally different for courses which have relied on exams historically.

Why Online Proctoring Tools are a bad idea

Most faculty immediately hope that technology can save them, and refer to ‘online proctor’ tools as a possible approach.

Do not use online proctoring tools. Even when working perfectly, these install keyloggers and other invasive software on a student’s computer, and then force them to keep a webcam on them at all times during the exam, with a live ‘proctor’ or flawed ‘AI’ promising to watch your students very carefully (among the thousands of other students also being viewed by the service).

Most of these tools have high-ranking search results on Google discussing how to bypass them undetectably. In several cases, there are not methods for ‘fixing’ the vulnerabilities. In terms of effectiveness, these tools are someplace between putting a sticky note on your computer that says “Don’t worry, students won’t cheat” and asking students nicely not to cheat. Some students may be unable to bypass them, but this introduces another level of inequality in the classroom, rewarding students with multiple devices (which is perhaps the easiest way to bypass the tools) or sufficient technical knowledge to invent new attacks.

Additionally, these systems don’t work with students using Chromebook systems or tablets. Students who choose these lower cost devices over general-purpose computers are generally lower-income, so using these tools is unfairly impacting low income students. And many of them ‘penalize’ students for noise or other people in the room, which is inevitable for students with roommates or folks living in multigenerational households. There have also been cases of AI-based tools mistakenly flagging and failing to even detect people of color, which is a very ugly thing, and yet another social justice issue with these tools.

Finally, there are major privacy issues with requiring students to provide information about running programs and browser tabs, then to enable a webcam and hot microphone for three hours in a home setting, and uploading this data to a non-university company. If any other software did the things that these ‘services’ did, it would be considered highly intrusive spyware, and handing over this level of control or surveillance to an untrusted third party is poor cybersecurity practice for anybody, student or faculty. As such, you should be prepared to offer an alternative means of assessment for students who practice good cybersecurity and refuse to install these tools.

For a nice overview of some of the issues involved, please take a look at this page from the EFF on online proctoring tools.

So, in practice, these tools provide security theater at best, and using them simply gives students who are willing to bypass them an advantage. And given the considerable social justice issues of requiring more expensive computers and an uninterrupted test-taking areas, there’s a reason schools are banning these tools, and why you should ban them in your classroom.

Massive Edit, Fall 2022: A Federal Judge has now ruled that ‘Room Scan’ based online proctoring is a violation of students’ fourth amendment rights in the US. Here’s an article in the Chronicle of Higher Ed. So, using these tools is now not just dumb, not just a privacy violation, not just anti-equity in classrooms, and not just security theater, but it’s now possibly illegal as well, and students have a very good justification for refusing to use this software on solid legal ground.

Testing recall and problem solving without proctored exams

Although it’s often better to design assignments around more cheat-proof questions and approaches, which involves writing and synthesis rather than recall or demonstration, there are some techniques which can make classical ‘exam’ style assessment more tenable:

• Some online-first schools make students go to a proctoring center at a local university to take an old-fashioned exam
  • This is actually effective, and recreates the exam setting we’re used to.
  • This is often inconvenient and depends on students having vehicle access.
  • It’s completely broken in COVID-like circumstances
• Consider doing something like timed and unproctored online submission using Gradescope, with oral exam ‘spot check’ followups
  • Tell students “a number of you, randomly chosen, will be asked to demonstrate their knowledge again one-on-one. This is a part of your exam grade.”
• Another approach is to have students record themselves on video and screensharing while completing the assignment, and then spot-check students post-hoc.
  • “Show me the room, your table, your papers, and your pencil, then set down the laptop and complete the assignment within the field of view of the camera.”
  • Students upload the video with Canvas
  • This way, only you and the TAs have those videos, and they can be securely deleted following the grading.
  • This may or may not be legal at your institution, depending on student privacy regulations
  • (Many thanks to Melissa Famulari for this suggestion!)
• Finally, you can have an oral exam, which tests recall and ability, independently of a larger, asynchronous assignment testing synthesis and deeper knowledge.
  • You can use my oral exam policies to see one approach to this.

Conventional ‘Homework’, ‘Paper’ and ‘Project’ submission online

One approach which both teachers and students have seemed to appreciate is shifting from a few high-stakes exams and assignments (which are ripe targets for dishonesty) to a number of lower-stakes assignments or to a cheat-resistant final project. Luckily, homework and essay submission isn’t so different online.

• For ‘fill in the blank’, multiple choice, or short answer quizzes and assignments, Gradescope is by far the best option
  • You can have them write on and then scan your own worksheets
  • Or you can enable Online Submission and have them type their work directly into the form
  • Canvas quizzes are also a possibility, but are considerably slower to grade.
• For final project or essay submission, Canvas has a nice suite of grading tools, and allows things like spoken feedback
  • You can create a new assignment in Canvas, then choose ‘Submission Type’ as ONLINE.
  • Canvas will then give you a grading and commenting interface
  • Students submit a PDF. It works fine
  • You can designate a ‘Due date’
• One oddly consistent piece of feedback I got in Spring 2020 was that students appreciated when assignments were due at a time other than Friday night, which was apparently chosen by most instructors. Sunday due dates were very appreciated for students working during the week.

Online-first assignment types

One nice approach is graded discussions, where students asynchronously complete discussions with their classmates in a forum/bulletin board style approach.

• Canvas offers the ability to designate posts in the discussion board as graded
• There’s a check-box when you create a discussion that lets you make it graded, give it a ‘due date’, and designate the number of points it’s worth
• You can check a box to hide other responses from the student until they make a post
• This makes it workable for ‘Here’s a problem set, work it out and talk with your classmates’
• Here’s my rubric for grading discussion posts
  • Borrow, steal, or just link to it. Information should be free, I don’t mind.
• Remember that you don’t even need the bulk of the project to be text based. Students can also upload a video to YouTube, and allow their classmates to watch and interact via Canvas.
  • If your main focus is video, consider video-first tools like FlipGrid.

Other online-first assignment types include (in a non-exhaustive list):

• Recorded, asynchronous video/voice discussions among students
  • These could be conversations about course material, roleplay of an experiment or conversation type, or even a short debate, among other things
  • Students then upload the videos to Canvas, which are spot-checked by instructors
• “Create and upload a video” projects where students create educational content and upload it for discussion
  • This can be done via graded discussions, or via dedicated video sharing platforms like FlipGrid
• Short ‘Teachback’ videos or presentations, where students are tasked with re-teaching what was just done in class
  • This can be a great approach for graded discussions, too!
• “Build a website” projects where the final project is a functioning website about a topic
  • Be prepared to offer hosting for students doing this
• Teaching through Wikipedia editing
  • See this guide from the University of Michigan on using Wikipedia editing as a part of teaching and learning

Lecture-style teaching

Of course, part of our main goal in teaching is sharing information with students in a meaningful way, and historically, this has been done through lectures.

Live Lecturing

Although it’s less smooth than in person, particularly given the lack of student feedback and impediments to smooth questioning flow involved with poor connections and bad mics, it’s absolutely possible.

• Properly configured, Zoom allows for…
  • Screen sharing of slides
  • Playback of slide audio and video
  • Live markup of slides (e.g. drawing and typing on the screen)
  • Students to unmute and ask questions, also indicating that they have questions via chat and specialized ‘reactions’
  • Students to chat live with you mid-lecture
  • Polling (see below)
  • Small group discussions (see below)
• Student questions can be managed in chat and highlighted by one of your IAs if they’re particularly good
• Share Guidelines for students attending online classes with your students ahead of time, to help minimize distractions and problems.
• Remember to repeat student chat questions and statements aloud, as people watching the recording later will not be able to see them.
• If you’re recording the session, please be sure to announce this at the start of each session
  • It’s better if this is done during the recorded portion of the session
  • Also add a note to this effect to your syllabi
• Use the chat! Students are much more likely to participate via chat than by unmuting, so take advantage of it.

Creating asynchronous lecture videos

If you’d rather create videos instead of lecturing live during scheduled class time:

• Lectures can be recorded in a variety of ways
  • Zoom can be used to record lectures (while alone in a Zoom room)
  • Quicktime or iMovie can be used to capture webcam information
  • OBS is a cross-platform tool for setting up and recording multiple video streams
    • OBS gives incredibly professional results, and can be customized for your specific needs.
    • Here’s an amazing tutorial for using OBS to generate lecture videos
• Recorded lectures or videos can be uploaded for students to watch asynchronously in Canvas, Google Drive, or even YouTube
  • YouTube has the advantage of providing (comically inaccurate) automatic captioning, and an easy app-based interface for playback that students are already familiar with
  • Please see the ‘YouTube Uploading’ Quickstart guide below
• Consider using low-stakes quizzes to evaluate learning from the lectures, both to motivate watching the lectures, and to let students quickly test their knowledge.

For what it’s worth, in Spring 2020, student feedback was strongly in favor of prerecorded lectures:

• This “let me get the lectures done when I felt ready and motivated” and “let me get ahead when I was able to”
• Students were not fans of synchronous online lecturing in other classes around the university, although several praised optional synchronous ‘lecture watching parties’ where the instructor or TAs are available for questions
• Students reported appreciating being able to see the instructor as well as the slides, where possible

Sharing Readings and Media

This one’s pretty easy.

• Canvas has a ‘Files’ section where you can upload everything, and organize into folders. Also consider creating a Canvas ‘discussion’ post for students to comment as they read.
• Non-Copyrighted content (e.g. lectures) can be uploaded to YouTube
• Librarians offer online course reserves

Synchronous Student Interactions

Whether it’s during a live lecture, a small seminar, during a group work session, or in office hours, interacting with students in cyberspace requires somewhat different methods, and active learning techniques can (still) help narrow the achievement gap online.

Small-Group Discussion

You can also encourage students to ‘break out’ into small groups using Zoom to work on a problem, with somebody sharing their screen

• Zoom’s Guide to using ‘Breakout’ rooms
• You can choose breakout group sizes and automatically (randomly) assign students to groups, and shuffle them around as needed. Students can jump back into the main session at any point.
• You and the instructional team can bounce from room to room interacting with students
  • Students can page the instructor using ‘Ask for Help’
• You can also summon everybody back to the main room with a 60 second countdown.
• Moving into breakout rooms does require time
  • Students need ~3-4 minutes to ‘settle in’ to the task, so don’t expect a quick breakaway and return
• Breakout rooms were well received by students
  • Students feedback pointed out that using breakout rooms made the class feel more like a community, and because it helped them identify potential study partners.

Polling and Whole-Class interaction

In addition to judicious use of the chat for questions and comments from students, other forms of ‘whole class’ interactions

Active polling tools like iClickers have shown great promise in synchronous lectures for active learning, and this mode of interaction is no less capable in an online context.

• My favorite approach is to ask students to ‘spam the chat’ with their answer, in whatever format you prefer
  • “OK, what’s the Gricean Maxim being violated here, just spam the chat”
  • This allows quick interaction, resonates with the livestreaming culture, and is less constrained than polls
  • This also provides a log of who was present and interacting, which IAs can later search
  • In many ways, for me, this wound up supplanting clickers and allowing more detailed responses, and was faster than Zoom polls or “Yes”/“No” zoom responses.
• Zoom does allow you to run ‘polls’, which accomplish the goal of getting student interaction in real time
  • This feature works well, and by having a predefined poll with “A B C D E”, you can replicate the interactive learning functions of clickers nearly effortlessly.
  • These Polls are anonymous! There appears to be no way to identify who said what. This means no ‘credit for correct answer’ or participation points are workable here.
  • In practice, it’s often easier and faster to to use the chat than to make a poll.
• You can also have them use Padlet to allow students to upload pictures (e.g. of syntax trees or diagrams) to a course-wide board.
• iClicker offers online tools (‘REEF’), but their only advantage is integration with existing grading systems for ‘graded clicking’
  • … and using it will require an additional payment from students who may have already purchased a clicker.
  • This probably isn’t a great choice

Taking Attendance

• If you’re using Zoom, you can access an attendance report
  • Go to Canvas -> Zoom LTI Pro -> Previous Meetings
  • Click “Report” for a list of the participants
  • Here’s a Guide from UAB
• You can also just cross-check Zoom chatlogs, to make sure students are interacting, although this can become time consuming particularly if students have different names on roster vs. Zoom

Hosting Office Hours

Office hours are, likely, the easiest experience to replicate online.

• You can create a ‘Personal Zoom Room’ with a link like https://ucsd.zoom.us/my/yourname, which can be freely joined and left by students.
  • In that room, you have all the normal zoom powers, and if you just leave Zoom open, students can ‘drop in’
  • You’re able to exist in that room with your camera and mic off, and just turn those on when a student joins to ‘start the meeting’
  • You can also turn on a waiting room and put other students there for private matters.
  • Also, you can use the waiting room to give a student ‘some time to work alone’, by placing them back into the waiting room while you work with a more recent arrival
• One common piece of feedback was that the low stakes and easy availability of online office hours was a win, and made students feel more comfortable coming in for a quick question. Several students mentioned their hope that Zoffice hours would still be a thing even in future offline quarters.
• Students also mentioned appreciating the ease of a waiting room to have just one student at a time in office hours, with collaborating students just saying “Oh, could you let Maria in too.”

Microteaching

Microteaching is a method of helping instructors improve their teaching where a participant presents a short, 2-3 minute presentation, then this is recorded, then the participant is asked for their first impression, then the recording is played back for all to watch, and then comments are elicited from the group. This is more straightforward than expected on Zoom. Here are the steps:

1. Get everybody in a room together
2. Ask the teaching participant to share their screen
3. The host or another designated participant starts recording to your local computer, not to the Zoom cloud
4. They do their presentation
5. The recorder leaves the meeting (but without ending the meeting for everybody else)
   • Zoom will not start processing local recordings until you leave the meeting
   • … but you are able to re-join the meeting while it processes
6. The recorder immediately re-joins the meeting
7. Once the recording is processed, the recorder shares that video window using Zoom (‘Computer sound enabled’), and plays it back
8. After the video, move to discussion, and repeat the process.

Supporting students online

As in all teaching, supporting students is crucial, and online teaching brings up some challenges for students from a variety of backgrounds.

Creating a supportive culture for online learning

Online classes have their own dynamics, mechanics, and flow. Part of your role as the instructional team is to create an environment where students are best able to succeed. Here are a few tips:

• Create a list of expectations for online students (see mine here), dictating how to attend class sessions and establishing cultural norms
  • You’re welcome to adapt mine to your needs
• Make student webcam use during classes ‘opt-out’ rather than ‘opt-in’, as it helps students to build community, and forces them to pay attention.
  • In my classes, I just made it clear that camera use was expected, but that students who had circumstances making it difficult or impossible could message me for a waiver.
  • I was surprised at how consistently students praised the fact that camera use and the ability to unmute and talk were expected parts of the class, and although some students ‘opted out’ (by messaging me) for individual classes, usually because of roommates or distractions in the background, it was surprisingly rare.
• Establish clear expectations and mechanisms for interaction during sessions
  • “I didn’t know whether I was allowed to unmute” was an unexpected stumbling block
• Make deadlines clear and centralized and regular, as you won’t be able to ‘remind’ students at the end of class

Supporting overwhelmed or under-motivated students

Whether it’s because they’re not interested in your particular class, not interested in college generally, or perhaps because they’re distracted by important issues in their real lives, students without a strong internal force pushing them to complete the work can struggle in asynchronous online courses more than most.

Here, I’ll offer a few suggestions of ways to reach these students, although I’d certainly appreciate suggestions of more!

• Offer asynchronous work and post future materials ahead of time
  • This allows students who are regularly overwhelmed by other life obligations to ‘catch up’ and ‘get ahead’ as need and opportunity arise
• Make sure the course offers a consistent ‘cadence’ of due dates
  • “Something is due every Sunday” is easier for students than checking the syllabus for each week’s plan
• Give low-stakes ‘checkpoint’ assignments
  • Weekly quizzes or small assignments which ‘force’ students to complete the work by a given time and day helps to prevent students from falling into “Oh, I’ll do the readings and lectures next week”
  • Similarly, outline and draft deadlines help to prevent papers from ‘sneaking up on students’
  • In Spring 2020, students, shockingly, praised the use of weekly low-stakes quizzes to make sure that they were watching the lectures and doing the reading. “It kept me motivated and made sure that I wasn’t falling behind, because that was really easy to do”
• Require some synchronous participation to keep students engaged in the class
  • Consider requiring synchronous attendance, but offer a no-points-lost ‘make up’ method, where students (e.g.) solve the group problems on their own or write a few paragraphs about what was discussed.

Supporting students with disabilities

Online education provides some wins and some losses for students with disabilities. First, you might check out the UCSD Office for Students with Disabilities’ Guide to COVID-19 and Disabilities. But for the most part, it’s straightforward.

• Zoom is reasonably accessible to students who are blind
  • As are Gradescope and Canvas
  • Do remind students that it’s bad practice to just highlight something on screen and say ‘this one’, particularly when you have students who are blind
• ASL Interpreters are familiar with and able to use Zoom
  • We’re being reminded to remember that the normal lag is made worse when there there’s an intermediate translation, so pauses are a generosity.
• Real time captioning is also an option for students who are deaf, and the use of an actual human transcriptionist is possible through OSD and Zoom.
• Post-hoc captioning of videos is also possible through OSD.

Supporting students on the difficult side of ‘the digital divide’

Although we tend to think of modern students as tech-saavy and well-equipped for a digital classroom, many students, particularly coming from underprivileged backgrounds, may have lower end devices, internet connections, or lack the tech-saavy to adapt to fancy tools. Here are a few ways to help these students specifically.

• At UCSD, the campus will provide ‘loaner laptops’ for students without to use
  • Students can email vsca@ucsd.edu
• Survey your students as to their tech abilities and devices
  • Get a sense of what platforms are in use
• Asynchronous classes are easier for students without regular computer access
  • A student who has to borrow or share a computer may not be able to guarantee a timeslot
  • This is particularly true in multigenerational households where other kids may be ‘in class’ on the computer during lectures
• Avoid requiring that students install specific software or extensions
  • Remember that licensing agreements covering on-campus software access don’t reliably extend to at-home use, so avoid proprietary software with burdensome licensing
  • Allow submissions in widely-supported formats, without assuming access to expensive software
  • If it can’t run on a Chromebook or an iPad and you’ve not providing an alternate means to complete the assignment, you should hesitate to require its use in a world where students can’t ‘just do the work in a lab’.
  • Again, online proctoring tools are generally specifically burdensome to these students
• Remember that students may face technological constraints you don’t
  • Not all students can simultaneously watch the lecture and take notes or look at their online textbook while interacting with their classmates in breakout
  • Small screens, or only having the ability to use a tablet, reduce a student’s ‘working space’
  • Similarly, older machines may not be able to display a field of faces while simultaneously opening a Word document
  • Your students likely don’t share your fancy multi-monitor setup or modern device
  • This is why it’s a good idea to suggest that one student shares their screen in breakout sessions with the relevant document(s) on display
• Don’t penalize electronic issues beyond students’ control
  • Have a method for accommodating students experiencing internet outages, or who have ‘run out of data’ on their mobile plan
  • Be sympathetic to students who experience broken devices, or who are having to complete the work using a non-conventional computing device (e.g. a smartphone)

Using Specific Tools

No matter your approach to structuring the class, you’ll need to use online tools to conduct the course. In this section, we’ll discuss some common tools, and offer tips, tricks, and resources to get the most out of them.

Using Canvas

Canvas is a great ‘central hub’ for your course, containing grades, discussions, and potentially even quizzes and assignment submission.

Canvas Pro-tips

• Canvas is better than TritonEd in every meaningful way
• Canvas has an excellent app for teachers for iOS and Android
  • No, you’re not crazy, it doesn’t let you see grades, but it lets you grade discussions, respond to messages, etc, all while you’re on the bus.
• Graded Discussions are a great asynchronous way to have students interact with the material
• Check the grades, as Canvas does silly things like taking ‘This assignment wasn’t submitted’ (“-”) to mean ‘this assignment doesn’t count for this student’
• Allow your courses to ‘open up’ and be visible sooner than the start date
  • This is particularly important as students try to figure out how to ‘attend’ class.

Other people’s Canvas guides

• UCSD’s Zoom and Canvas Walkthroughs
• Canvas Video Guides
• UCSD: How to Prepare for the Canvas Move

Using Zoom

Zoom is my personal choice for synchronous work.

Zoom Pro-Tips

• Check the Instructor’s Checklist for Zoom guide being maintained by myself for installation, setup, and a handy checklist of things to do before each class
• You can broadcast audio from your computer to students as well
  • c.f. https://support.zoom.us/hc/en-us/articles/201362643-Sharing-Computer-Sound-During-Screen-Sharing
  • To adjust the volume for participants of the computer audio alone, use the conventional volume adjustment on your Mac
    • Your voice will remain the same volume, so don’t worry about that
• You can use Keystrokes to control Zoom more quickly
  • Check out Craig Ball’s Cheat Sheet
• Most of the time, Zoom windows are hidden when you’re screensharing. This is great usually, but awful for teaching Zoom. If you go to Zoom -> Preferences -> Share Screen -> “Show Zoom windows during screen share”, you can show the Zoom interface as well as the rest of the items on your desktop.
• Zoom is actually shockingly good. I’ve now tried it with students, and my wife has used it for years in her online classes. Assuming it doesn’t shatter under the burden of hundreds of thousands of university courses, this is quite excellent as a service, and will replicate many of the interaction types you’re used to
• Feel free to give your students my guidelines for students attending online classes.
• Zoom has experienced some major security issues in the past, but it’s still the least-worst option, in my opinion. Here’s statement from the UCOP on Zoom security

‘Co-Hosts’ and Zoom Breakout Rooms

If you have your IAs as co-hosts and you assign them into breakout rooms, they can… - Move between the N breakout rooms - Move back to the main room - Return back to the assigned breakout (e.g. they were assigned to 2, so they go into 2)

Self-assignment of breakout rooms now, finally, works well, and is great for both student-led groups, and for creating breakout rooms for e.g. a study session, where people come and go from the main room.

Other people’s Zoom guides

• UCSD’s Zoom and Canvas Walkthroughs
• Blink Guide to Zoom
• Using Zoom Breakout Rooms
• Check Zoom’s status

Discouraging ‘Zoom Bombing’, Trolling, and other bad behavior on Zoom

We are humans, and live in a world of humans, and as such, we can’t have nice things. One of the ways that this manifests is in ‘zoom bombing’, that is, people breaking into synchronous sessions and spreading ugliness of one of many forms.

• Only allowing signed in users
  • Remember, this is one more barrier for entry for students joining in on a mobile device, but this is an easy approach.
• Turning on a waiting room once class has begun
  • This gives you or your IAs the ability to ‘vet’ late joiners.
  • Be careful of people with generic names (e.g. ‘iPhone’ or ‘UCSD Student’)
• Prevent Participants from Screensharing
  • This is generally a good idea, but you may want to disable this option for breakout rooms.
  • Also remember to prevent annotations from audience members, although again, this can hurt the possibility for students to interact by highlighting a part of a diagram, e.g., that’s bothering them
• Mute Participants on Entry
  • This is again good practice
• Use Canvas’ Zoom Pro LTI integration to create scheduled class sessions under a different-from-your-public-ID Zoom meeting ID
  • This is a good idea anyways, provided all your students have Canvas access
  • This will keep your sessions off of public addresses, and reduce the chances of a random troll
• React quickly when and if it comes up
  • You can use a waiting room or just kick unknown guests.
  • It’s not hard for you or a TA to kick somebody from a room, and prevent them from rejoining
• Use a meeting password
  • Just put clearly on canvas or the syllabus that ‘fidelio’ is the password, and only real students should be able to join.
  • But again, this will be another barrier for entry towards attendance.

Although these things are hard to completely prevent, it’s worth being aware of it, and being ready to act decisively if it ever comes up.

Using Gradescope

I recommend using Gradescope for grading both online submission assignments as well as assignments that would conventionally be done on paper. The only strength of Canvas is in grading long-form papers (as the annotation tools are better).

Gradescope Pro-Tips

• Sign up with your UCSD Address
• Create the Gradescope class by…
  • Open Canvas, go to Settings -> Navigation
  • Then drag ‘Gradescope’ above the ‘Hide from Students’ line, then click save.
  • Then click the Gradescope link in Canvas in the Sidebar
  • ‘Create a New Course’ on Gradescope, and fill in details
• If you want online submissions (e.g. students work directly in a form), you need to email help@gradescope.com to ask them to enable Online Submissions Beta
• Gradescope Online assignments use Markdown to do bold, italics, links, tables, and more. It’s great.
• Reinforce to students that, if you’re doing PDF submission, they must use exactly your form.
  • Some people try to paste the text into Word or something. This will break EVERYTHING.
• Grading is faster if students are instructed not to use punctuation when they answer.
• The fill-in-the-blank option is buggy on some machines, so just give it as a ‘Short answer’ and grade quickly, manually.
• As of March 19th, 2020, Gradescope can now let you both insert and let students upload pictures or files within online submissions.

Other people’s Gradescope guides

• Gradescope ‘Getting Started’ Guide
• Student Guide to Scanning Documents with Gradescope
• Gradescope’s ‘Remote Assessments’ FAQ

Using YouTube to upload lectures

Particularly if Kaltura (a.k.a. the Canvas Media Gallery) keeps crashing, you might consider uploading videos to YouTube for students, who can then watch the video without a canvas login and on their cell phones or tablets or computers. Here’s the process:

Getting Started on YouTube

• Log in to your UCSD Gmail Account
• Go to YouTube.com
• Click the ‘Upload Video’ button in the top right (it looks like a camera with a plus sign)
  • Then click ‘Upload Video’
• You’ll see a window with ‘Your Creator Journey Begins’
  • ‘Get Started’
• ‘Use Your Name’ (unless you want to be AwesomeProf1337 on YouTube)
• You can click ‘Set up Later’ to skip the profile picture, ‘Tell Viewers about your channel’, etc.
• Now you can click the ‘Upload Video’ button again, and upload a video
• As the video uploads, you can change its name, description, etc.
• You’ll need to ‘verify’ to upload videos longer than 15 minutes
  • YouTube will demand a cell phone number that they can call or text to confirm that you’re just one person, rather than a movie-uploading robot

YouTube Pro-Tips

• You’ll probably want to upload as ‘Unlisted’
  • If you choose ‘Private’, you’ll need to manually add gmail addresses for each student
  • If you choose ‘Public’, your video will be searchable and findable by anybody
  • ‘Scheduled’ videos go public at a certain time, but they’ll be public
  • With ‘Unlisted’, only people with the link can see the video
• You’ll want to create a Playlist (here) to contain all videos for a course, so you don’t have to link each video individually.
• You can upload or delete videos from the ‘Creator Studio’
• Videos containing copyrighted music or videos may be monetized by studios or blocked
  • Even short clips of TV shows or movies are liable to cause trouble.
  • Content cartels like to pretend that ‘fair use’ isn’t a thing, so don’t count on it.
  • It shouldn’t matter most of the time, but some TV and video clips will cause your videos not to be viewable in some countries
• Students may see ads before your videos
  • This is the nature of YouTube. You do not control this, you might express to students that you don’t select the ads shown, and that they don’t represent your views nor those of UCSD.
• You can upload multiple videos at once using the ‘Classic’ uploader
  • At the top of the upload window, there’s an ‘Upload with Classic’ button (for now)
  • This will bring you back to the old interface, which will allow you to upload up to 15 videos at once
• There is a gap between when videos are uploaded and when they’re watchable
  • This is them processing the video into an uploadable format
  • This is usually 2-3x the running length, depending on the video format.
• There is no way to limit YouTube videos to playback by your students.
  • Unlisted videos are viewable by anybody with a link to the video or playlist.
  • This means that any recorded videos are PUBLIC
  • I would advise against uploading videos where there’s any sensitive information, anything you wouldn’t like used against you by trolls, or anything FERPA protected.

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