Jennifer Jaiswal, Instructional Designer & Sr Instructional Technologist 

The pandemic and move to remote online learning over the last year and a half or so has exposed the realities of our students’ lives and highlighted some of the inequities that exist. It is important to be mindful that our students may have been affected by these social changes. Maintaining the empathy and compassion from the past year will be important as we transition and move forward and ask: What have we learned from our remote teaching experiences that we can continue to incorporate into our courses?

Communication: 

Communicating regularly with our students and being very explicit about course information, course expectations, office hours, policies, etc., should be detailed in the syllabus. One strategy to ensure students read the syllabus is to give them a low stakes quiz about the important information or record a syllabus overview video and make it available in Blackboard.

It is considered good practice to send an announcement via Blackboard at least 24 hours before the start of class. This might include explicit directions to your classroom if you are teaching face-to-face as well as the schedule and other important information for the first day of class.

Resources:

During the pandemic, many faculty incorporated more technology into their course to help with the transition to remote learning. Many of these resources can be helpful and useful for students even when returning to face-to-face instruction.

Blackboard is a great repository for course materials and resources and many other technologies like Zoom, VoiceThread, Echo 360, etc., are integrated into Blackboard. Using Blackboard as a resource repository helps you and the students manage course documents, media, grades, and communication in one place. Using the discussion boards, VoiceThread, and Zoom recordings can help extend the learning environment beyond the classroom and class time. The Zoom integration allows you the opportunity to to record short demonstrations or clarifying remarks and posting them for students to watch or rewatch as many times as they need to.

Assessment and Grading:

Having a couple of small, low stakes assessments in the first couple of weeks can help students build confidence and ease anxiety about the course. Providing flexibility in assignments and exam design such as using more open assessments and less closed assessments (i.e., multiple choice tests) follow good assessment practices. We recommend that rather than having a few large, high stakes assessments that you break those assessments into smaller ones with each having less overall weight on the students’ grade. 

Group Activities:

Getting students working together became more important but also more challenging during the pandemic. Consider how you might group students and possibly keep them working together for a large part of the semester. Returning to the classroom after the pandemic, students are likely to be eager to connect with their classmates. What technologies (VoiceThread, discussion boards, etc.) might be used to facilitate those groups in and out of the classroom?

Group Contracts – for project-based groups, they can be useful as they lay out expectations of the group members including communication policy so the groups have a guideline on how to interact. 

As we return to campus and into the classroom, it will be important to continue to extend the empathy and understanding to our students as they return. With the situation ever changing, it will be important to be flexible as institutional protocol may change throughout the semester.

Dickinson, A. (2017). Communicating with the Online Student: The Impact of E-Mail Tone on Student Performance and Teacher Evaluations. Journal of Educators Online, 14(2), n2. https://eric.ed.gov/?id=EJ1150571