I’ve written a couple posts about keeping it simple and thinking about equity as we move our higher ed classes online due to COVID-19 closures. But I wanted to take a few minutes to share a few of my favorite resources I’ve found that I think are great for helping consider the logistics, ethics, and pedagogy of moving courses online. I’ll list a few of my key takeaways from each “Your Suddenly Online Class Could Actually Be a Relief” by Alexandra L. Milsom use as few tools as possible and go easy on yourself maintain community as best you can
Keep it simple, y’all – moving your class online
As we all face down the likelihood of moving courses online this semester for the covid-19 outbreak, it’s easy to get caught up in the overwhelm of hundreds of pedagogical options and the glitter of new tech tools. Our passion for teaching drives us to constantly innovate, to make our classes better and more engaging. After all, Pedagogy Playground is born of this impulse. But truly innovative, engaging online classes take weeks or even months to develop, and we don’t have the luxury of that right now. On top of the time crunch (and for many of us still, the
An Equitable Transition to Online Learning – Flexibility, Low Bandwidth, Cell Phones, and more
Discussions about temporarily converting our face-to-face courses to an online environment have been circling both my university and the larger academic community in the past few weeks. As large institutions like UW, Stanford, and Princeton prepare to make these shifts, it’s likely to expect that other colleges and universities will follow suit. The first suggestions I heard for this shift were those of operating a large lecture or discussion class via Zoom, synchronous with the time the class usually would have met. Foremost on mind then have been questions of equity. What if some students (or faculty) don’t have access
