Pedagogy and Practice
Pivoting from Emergency Remote Teaching to Intentional Online Teaching
by Catherine Ford
If you could choose one word to describe the last six weeks, what would it be? Chaotic, whirlwind, abrupt, disruptive, or challenging? If so, you are not alone; these have been a few of the words I’ve heard faculty share in conversation over the past several weeks. You were asked to quickly adjust most all plans and adapt to emergency remote teaching, and it’s been tough. As the semester’s end is now clearly in sight with 2-3 weeks remaining, we begin to shift our focus to summer and fall terms.
With this shift in focus comes a need to pivot away from emergency remote teaching to intentional online teaching. You may have heard others use these terms or read about them in Teaching, a Chronicle newsletter. These terms are not synonymous.
Emergency remote teaching is the situation many of you found yourself in when you were required to stop face to face and hybrid courses and transition to a fully remote setting. In many instances, there wasn’t time to consider course design elements, evaluate assessment strategies, and humanize the remote experience. Whereas intentional online teaching is when a course is just that – intentionally designed to be taught online.
As we look to the summer and fall, now is the time to review the emergency changes you made to your class and consider course design and best practices for teaching online. Will you reflect on what went well and opportunities for development? The Backwards Design Model and the Universal Design for Learning can provide guidance on how to begin thinking about and structuring your online courses. Let the course objectives and pedagogy inform your technology selections. Ask what tool will best help meet this learning objective. Make changes.
And don’t forget – you are not alone! Your campuses have resources (people and technology) who are ready to support you. The Network for Educational Development (NED) will also provide support and resources through a summer filled with opportunities: 3 week short courses, webinars, templates, and a Conversations with Colleagues program. A calendar of courses will be available May 8 and a final, more robust calendar will be available May 25.
At your fall faculty development day on your campus in August, you may be asked again for that one descriptive word. My hope is that as you pivot toward intentional online teaching this summer and fall that your one descriptive word changes to revitalized, change, mindset, challenge, or resilient.
NED Event Highlight
Connect and Collaborate with Minnesota State Faculty
If you are looking for more opportunities to meet faculty from across Minnesota State, then consider either the Open Education Resources (OER) Learning Circles or the MN REFLECT (Research Experiences For Learning, Engaging, Connecting, and Teaching) program. These cohort programs bring faculty together around common interests and goals.
Have you wanted to use zero cost textbooks or Open Educational Resources and not sure where to start, or want to take your OER use to the next level? This summer, the OER Learning Circle is a 5 week commitment to a course redesign or creation of ancillary materials to support the use of an OER text. Faculty participants meet virtually once a week and work closely with the learning circle facilitator.
MN REFELCT is founded on the tenets of the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL) and provides structure, time, and resources to support faculty in the development and implementation of a pedagogical-focused study. This is a two-year commitment. Participants meet seven times (virtually and/or face to face) each year and also receive financial support to attend a teaching conference each year.
Academic Technology Tips
Using Interactive Video Quizzes to Encourage Accountability
With the transition to emergency remote teaching, some educators have asked how they can be sure their students are actually paying attention and comprehending the content.
Zoom’s gallery view can be used to help monitor immediate visual feedback, but for asynchronous material or large classes, digital analytics in Zoom, Kaltura MediaSpace, and D2L BrightSpace can help provide insight into the students’ interactions with the material.
Some key metrics include the following:
- Who accessed the content?
- How many times did they view the content?
- When did they view the content?
- How much time did the individual spend on the content?
These are great measures to review, but there is another way to get detailed insight from your students with interactive video quizzes. These activities promote active viewing and can provide more personalized feedback from remote individuals’ participation. They can be designed as comprehension checks embedded throughout the content and can be used as a low-stakes, engaging way to help learners connect concepts, retain information presented, and perform self-assessments.
Here is a quick video overview of how you can use the interactive video quiz tool that is a part of Kaltura’s MediaSpace.
The interactive video quiz scores can be transferred to the grade center in D2L Brightspace, but because of the variability in the quiz settings and the reliance on the students’ playback device settings, some information collected from Kaltura MediaSpace may not be transferred immediately to D2L Brightspace or match the final submissions tracked in Kaltura MediaSpace for each individual student. Because of this, it is not a recommended method for high-stakes assessments and may require some manual intervention to ensure complete parity between the two systems.
Initiatives Update
Apply for “Innovating through COVID-19 Funding” by May 18
The Innovating through COVID-19 Funding program encourages the sharing and use of innovative practices in online teaching and student services. Funding is dedicated to the creation of quality multimedia demonstrations of practices developed or perfected during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Faculty and staff innovators are invited to submit an application by May 18 at 4:00 pm describing the innovative practice they have developed and the technology they intend to use to demonstrate its use.
Share Your Voice
Summer Development Opportunities Meeting
This summer, the Network for Education Development (NED) will be providing opportunities tailored to support our faculty colleagues as they pivot from emergency remote teaching to intentional online teaching practices.
Join us for a meeting (link to join) on Tuesday, May 5 at 11:00 AM to discuss Summer Development Opportunities.
At the meeting we’ll do the following:
- Celebrate the great work so many campuses have done to support faculty during this pandemic,
- Summarize the data collected from the needs assessment survey
- Share our plan on how we plan to make opportunities available through NED this summer, and
- Provide a space for you to identify additional questions, needs, or topics
Upcoming Events
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