Tips for Moving Your Classes Online

We realize that, due to the rapid spread of the corona virus pandemic, many teachers are working this weekend to move their courses online.  If you are one of those teachers, here is a compendium of information from those of us who have worked a long time in the world of online teaching.

‍

Live Streaming

Thefirst tendency of educators moving their classes online is to use something live, such as Webex or Zoom.But there are challenges with this approach.  For example, Webex defaults to live microphones. If you have a live class of say, 70 students, you can spend half the class debugging who has a microphone on—and as soon as that’s fixed, someone else can leave their microphone on. Where Webex and similar apps can come in handy is in hosting office hours. 

There are ways to embed Webex meetings in your LMS so that the meeting is instantly accessible by all your students. Generally this is done by something like adding an activity or resource to your LMS. There are other possibilities, however, for teaching to large groups, including Twitch.(Here’s an article about how a math professor has found Twitch, ordinarily considered a gaming platform, to be useful in his teaching).

‍

The Value of Screen Recording

But it can be much easier—and students love it—if you simply record each of your lectures. Then, not only is the lecture more similar to what you normally give as a lecture, but students can also access the lecture at their convenience.When students have questions, they can easily email them—more complex questions can be answered by phone calls. 

You might think that a narrated video is just extra work, and it’s easier to just upload documents and make students read them. While uploading documents may be simple for you, it makes things much more difficult for students. Students often need to know why one step, for example, leads to the next in a derivation, or to see you draw arrows and discuss the relationship between grammatical structures as they hear you saying words in French. Just giving students a handout and forcing them to read the materials means that students don’t have access to your real value as an instructor—which often lies in being able to provide both pictorial and audible narrative simultaneously (the great power of multi-media instruction).

We ourselves generally capture our screen with screen capture software such as Camtasia(Panoptois another popular option). Camtasia has five-minute introductory tutorials—watch the first one or two,and you can be on your way to screen capture within minutes. Don’t learn all the additional more advanced add-ons. Your first goal as a new online instructor should simply be to record five minutes of one of your lectures. If you can do that, you’ve taken the first major step to getting your course shifted online. 

‍

Writing Tablets, Touch Screens, and Microphones

We like to use a writing tablet (for example, this one)attached with a USB to our computer in order to write on PowerPoints or a page.An alternative recommendation if you have a touchscreen on your PC is to use a special glove with yourpen, so that your hand, which can also sometimes touch the screen, doesn’t mess up your writing. PowerPoint has its own annotationability. Microsoft’s OneNote (for PC or Mac) allows a very simple way to write on pdfs—here is a good tutorial on OneNote.

‍

‍