As we move toward the goal of a fall term at K that is “fully on campus”, people are in different places with their comfort, options, privilege, and vulnerabilities in spending more time in-person on campus. In some ways, the move back in to the classroom will be as fraught and uncomfortable as the exit. […]
Blog Posts
“Sometimes I Don’t Know What I Don’t Know Until I’m Taking the Test…” Rethinking the Midterm — Siu-Lan Tan
After attending Dr. Amer Ahmed’s faculty workshops on Intercultural Skills and Inclusive Pedagogy, I have become more aware of how the teacher is traditionally positioned as the “knower”, and students are expected to give as “perfect” as possible a “performance” of knowledge dispensed by professors and textbooks. And I began to think about how our […]
My Favorite Online Teaching Tool: Google Jamboard — Kathryn Sederberg
I know, I know…you’ve heard about a million different tech tools to be used for online teaching –and you’re overwhelmed. But I promise you, this one is worth checking out. It’s called Jamboard, and it’s a Google collaborative tool like Google Docs or Slides. Jamboard is basically a fancy digital whiteboard. Share your screen, and […]
Feminist Pedagogy Online: Lessons from Fall 2020 and Practices for Winter 2021 — Anne Marie Butler
From a pedagogical perspective, I am primarily influenced by practices of feminist pedagogy such as knowledge co-creation, empowerment, and community building. These three tenets each serve to deconstruct the professor/student hierarchy and have also become particularly important for my online teaching. In my classes, we begin with the recognition that each person, including the professor, […]
Asynchronous Lecture “Viewing Parties” with TwoSeven — Santiago Salinas
A terrible movie called “Click” came out ~15 years ago. The whole plot revolved around Adam Sandler discovering a remote control that allowed him to pause or fast forward real life. As someone who spills coffee and instinctively makes finger movements to hit the ‘command’ and ‘z’ keys (control-Z for PCers), I’ve always wanted that […]
Using Flipgrid for Asynchronous Video Discussions — Leihua Weng
I used in my language classes in the Fall “Fligrid,” an app/website provided by Microsoft. It is a video app that instructors can use to assign asynchronous video discussions to students. It worked for me as a nice supplement to Moodle since Moodle can hardly accommodate any video discussions. I discuss here my experience of […]
Batten Down the Hatches: Making Moodle Home — Mika Kennedy
I’ll admit: Prior to Fall 2020, I was never an LMS person. I was trained in a program that lived and died under King Syllabus, where you’d give your students a 15-page syllabus and that would serve as the longform compendium of all of the course’s worldly knowledge. But with the move to virtual learning, […]
Five Things: What I learned from reading course evaluations for Fall 2020
I’ve just finished what turned out to be an emotional week reading all the course evaluations from the fall term and soaking up those powerful bite-sized reminders of the difficult times everybody has been through. I saw reflected in those comments the typical mix of contradictory classroom frustrations: too much/little workload, too much/little groupwork, too […]
Boosting Response Rates for Online Course Evaluations in Your Online Course
For fall 2020, the student response rate to online course evaluations at K was 65%. In the paper-and-pencil era of course evaluations, response rates to the the in-class surveys were typically around 90% — dependent simply on the proportion of students in attendance on evaluation day. Winter 2020 was the first term of online course […]
Building in Asynchronous Participation with Discussion Leadership — Mika Kennedy
While the phrase “discussion leadership” typically brings to mind the work one does to facilitate a conversation in real-time, the shift to virtual learning due to COVID-19 invited two elephants into my Zoom room: The grim likelihood that our students would be facing a lot more disruption to their ability to attend class regularly, and […]