Amy Pistone

Classics Professor at Gonzaga University

Resources for Teaching Remotely

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amypistone@gmail.com

I’m taking a lot of these sentiments from conversations that have been happening online (predominantly Twitter), so these are not at all original ideas. My goal here is to consolidate all the things I’m seeing in one place. This is aimed at college instructors who have not been teaching predominantly online courses before and who are worried about how to transition.

Number 1: Talk to your students!

Explain what’s happening and how you’re adapting and that you’re also in uncharted territory here. Establish lines of communication. I’m noticing that my students have concerns and anxieties that aren’t entirely about our class, but just about what’s happening in their world, and they aren’t getting the information they need from other sources.

When you communicate with them, check what kinds of internet access they have at home or if campus is closed. Do they have personal computers? Reliable wi-fi? Will they be using their phones? Don’t assume that the answer is yes.

Here’s what I sent my students, and here’s a list of questions Daniel Libatique sent his:

Set Reasonable Expectations

First, expectations for yourself. If you have a few days to transition to an online format, it’s not going to be on par with classes that were designed for distance learning and fully online delivery. That’s ok. This is no one’s ideal scenario — do what you can, focus on what’s most important (the students, your own well-being). I’m bracing myself to have to scrap some things I wanted to do this term, because I don’t always like change and I think if I start preparing myself for needing to be flexible, it will help me be less petulant and upset when I have to cut things that I wanted to do.

I found this to be a really useful read on this topic: Please do a bad job of putting your courses online by Rebecca Barrett-Fox

For students, think about how to build in flexibility. Can you make your deadlines more like guidelines? There’s about to be a lot of physical and mental stress on a lot of people, including our students. Work with them on deadlines that accommodate unexpected stressors (protip: flexible deadlines are a best practice anyway, for accessibility!).

It’s still about TEACHING

Here are some slides I put together for a talk on critical digital pedagogy a few years ago. My main point was that digital pedagogy is still about pedagogy. The technological tools are there to promote and facilitate your teaching. Don’t get too bogged down in the digital side of things.

If you have time, read An Urgency of Teachers (by Morris and Stommel), an excellent book on digital pedagogy.

Lecture delivery

Here are some options. I’m leaning toward asynchronous instruction when possible (recording things and letting students access them on their own schedule) but I also don’t lecture a lot in general, so replicating interactive classes is going to be a challenge. In terms of recordings though, there are a couple options for video and audio recordings (make sure you’re providing transcripts when at all possible — Otter is a great option to help with transcripts!)

YouTube/Recorded videos

I’m not very experienced with this area, but even someone with no real expertise here can put together some entirely passable educational content. Here are a few of my very amateurish offerings — they don’t have to be GREAT to help your students and get the job done! I’ve used screencasting software as well as just a webcam to make these, and upload them to YouTube.

Vocab videos to accompany our Greek textbook

Walking students through a passage of Greek we didn’t get to in class

Accent tutorial

Here’s some far higher quality video instruction:

Amy Cohen’s Hansen and Quinn videos

Alliterative videos

Justin Slocum Bailey’s videos on teaching

Hannah Čulík-Baird’s remote teaching sample

Podcasting

Quick Note on Creating a Podcast Lecture by Bill Caraher

Invasion of the Podcasters: Podcasting 101 by Alison Innes

Podcaster/teachers to follow on Twitter for tips and tricks: Aven McMaster, Mark Sundaram, Scott Lepisto, Curtis Dozier, Barry Lam and Hi-Phi Nation, Ryan Stitt and the History of Ancient Greece, Alison Innes and Darrin Sunstrum

Tools and Platforms

Starting a place to consolidate everything I’m reading about and seeing people talk about online. I’ll try to update and annotate this as best I can

Emma Vanderpool’s Technology: Distance Learning Tools

Education Companies Offering Free Subscriptions due to School Closings

Teaching in Higher Ed (podcast) – her blog has a lot of great information about educational technology. I would highly recommend taking a look!

Flipgrid – if you want to play around with using Flipgrid, here’s a demo grid I set up. And here’s a podcast about using FlipGrid in higher education.

Hypothes.is – here are some slides I put together for a presentation a while ago, with demos of what Hypothes.is can be used for. Their support people are also very good and can help out if you run into trouble!

Edpuzzle – you can make videos into interactive quizzes! Here’s one I made about ancient Greek, if you want a demo

Wakelet — (per Alison Innes) “It’s super easy to use and combine blocks of texts with links and videos (easier than building a webpage, imho).” From their website, “Unlock the power of curation: Wakelet is the easiest way to capture, organize and share multi-media resources with students, teachers, and learning communities.”

More reading (haven’t read these yet, can’t vouch for them, but I’ve seen folks sharing them)

Coursera’s Foundations of Virtual Instruction

Preparing to Teach Online from CMU

NYU’s Digital Teaching Toolkit Case Studies

Excellent Twitter Threads

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