Associate Teaching Professor of Linguistics at UC San Diego
Director of UCSD's Computational Social Science Program
Resources for University Teaching
I do my best to make my work available as widely as I can, and if I do work, I’d love for somebody else to not have to repeat it. So, here are some of the resources I’ve created for fellow folks in teaching roles.
A Reference for Course Design
This is an open resource created for a graduate class on course design I taught in Fall 2022. Although there won’t be too much news for experienced course designers, I’ve tried to highlight many options for grading, generating learning outcomes, scheduling and structuring courses, question design, and more. I also have a separate resource on presentation design.
https://savethevowels.org/coursedesign/
Supporting Students through Extraordinary Circumstances and Trauma
This document has a number of specific and concrete actions you can take when one of your students (at any level) is going through extraordinary, traumatic, and/or legal difficulties. This is based partly on my own experiences navigating unusual trauma as a student, partly on best practices for trauma-informed pedagogy, and partly in consultation with my wife, Jessica Styler, a trauma-focused Clinician.
https://savethevowels.org/traumasupport
Gradescope Answer Sheets
We’re seeing increased popularity of tools like Gradescope, which allow you to scan student homeworks or exams which exist in a particular format with delineated question areas, and then grade questions individually and anonymously. I looked to see if anybody had created a set of standardized answer sheets which could be used for exams, and finding none, generated a set. The below link has a variety of answer sheet formats, with the format answersheet_[number of single-word blocks]_[number of sentence blocks]_[number of paragraph blocks], as well as a sample exam with answer sheet showing how they work.
https://savethevowels.org/files/answer_sheets
Student Facing Sites
I’ve also created a number of student-facing sites which you’re welcome to copy, steal directly, or link folks to, which might be valuable.
- Guide for Students Requesting Letters of Recommendation
- A page about grade changes, exceptions, and grade lawyering
- Student Resources at UCSD
- Guide for Students in Online Classes
- Guide for Undergraduate and Graduate Instructional Assistants and TAs
- A Guide for Students taking exams and oral exams
- A Rubric for Graded Discussion Posts
Online Teaching in the Social Sciences
This resource was developed in Spring 2020 to help people who were quickly forced into online teaching by the COVID pandemic. Although much of it is, thankfully, less relevant, it still has some (hopefully) useful thoughts on online teaching, online testing, and course design.