FIVE TENETS FOR ONLINE TEACHING (In honor of my colleagues all scrambling to physically distance their spring syllabus

FIVE TENETS FOR ONLINE TEACHING

Ok, I've been teaching a big GE online course for a few years now, and amidst all this turmoil, I put down just a few major tenets of online teaching. I'm not getting into the nitty-gritty, because there's already such a flood of amazing information out there. I just thought I'd try to boil down the major points that I have learned from doing this for 4-5 years. For me, many of the endless, uncountable miniature decisions we have to make about online teaching (and teaching in general) can be best answered by returning to these few considerations. I hope it can be somewhat helpful, and not just add to the cacophony. Good luck my dear colleagues, you are gonna do just fine.

1. Don’t try to replicate the in-person course—

use the features and facts of online teaching to do what it is best at, not a poor imitation of brick-and-mortar class.

2. Make basic infrastructure as consistent and routine as possible

(ie assignments are due every week at the same time). This is probably the #1 thing that student evaluations bring up as a helpful thing. Consistency and clarity on what is wanted when allows you to be a bit more creative in the content that is required (something I think that pushes students in new directions, encouraging them to think more expansively, although they often express anxiety about new assignment formats too.)

3. Use this opportunity to hone your pedagogy—

I realized that many of my assessments were more for my convenience or a superficial pedagogical goal than the deep ones (like quizzing to make sure people read, but not necessarily to make sure they understand or forge new ideas). The raft of cheating opportunities presented by the online format have forced me to continue to be clearer and clearer about what I *really* want students to be able to do and get creative with the means of eliciting that from them— I think it’s okay to require less, done better, than more, done cursorily.

4. Don’t overburden yourself or your teaching assistants—

This one is the counterbalance to #3. It’s also really important to keep one’s class in perspective. This isn’t the hill you or your TAs should be required to die on. How can you maximize TA or your own time on the right assessments and student interactions, and reduce low-payoff work (like: TAs just can’t respond to every post on the discussion board. And what could realistically be the cumulative payoff of that outlay of time? But you could require students to respond to each other— with some guidelines, they can use that reply time to help each other improve writing and thinking.)

5. Be transparent about why you’re doing what you do and don’t beat yourself up—

These might really be two separate, but what I’m basically after is that I personally find it immensely unburdening to try to put as much info out there about why I’m doing what I’m doing: the thing I hate more than anything about teaching is being cast as the ‘villain’ or the goalie who’s trying to stop students from getting what they want (an easy A). So I explain why I assign what I assign and do what I do, narrating myself consistently as the coach who's trying to guide people to get stronger, better, etc, and not the enemy. And then I have to balance that with acceptance and detachment from the [many] students who just aren’t going to come along on the ride. That’s not my problem in the end, and I have to let them go. Not everyone will be in a position, personally or situationally, to take up and run with what’s there. But that’s education. You can’t do everything for the student and if they aren’t going to come to the table, that’s not your fault and it’s not about you. So many will! And you can keep perfecting the banquet that awaits them, be it digital or in person. Different meals, both with nutritional value.