I’m still thinking about how to use my synchronous time on Day 1 for creating community, but in the meantime I do have 3 ideas I’m planning to use:
1) Before spring quarter began, Sally Reed (Psych.) offered the suggestion to create a PowerPoint deck and have each student contribute a slide introducing themselves. I used that idea in the spring, asking students to contribute their intro cards before the first day of classes, and found it helpful for me (thanks, Sally!). I don’t think the students used it to get to know each other, though. So, for Fall I’m thinking of asking students to go through the cards in Week 1 and find 3 other people that have something in common with them, and then in Week 2 add some new item to their own card and then find 3 new connections. (Or something like that.) The template I’m providing students and my own card are below:
2) I plan to break my class down into “lab subgroups” of 4-5 people and give each one a channel in the course team site. A big part of Day 1 and Week 1 will be having students get to know the others in their sub-group. I’m going to encourage them to communicate with their lab sub-group when working on assignments and ask each other questions, and I’m going to check in with each sub-group twice a week. I’m still trying to decide whether to shuffle all of the sub-groups every few weeks, or let productive, collaborative sub-groups continue together and just shuffle sub-groups that haven’t particularly gelled.
3) I have added a “Community” channel to my course Teams site. I’m going to try to encourage students to post things there that one might put on a shared bulletin board — photos of pets or favorite travel pics, links to cartoons or relevant (or irrelevant articles), etc. I have no idea whether anyone will contribute, but we’ll see!
K’s “online backbone” plan for fall courses is designed to provide the flexibility we need to keep community members safe while allowing students to continue to experience the hallmark features of a K education, whatever the public health situation brings. Designing effective courses that meet those goals is the singular challenge of our lives as educators. This year, in keeping with the challenges before us, we are replacing our traditional in-person fall gathering with the aptly named #KTeachDev2020, a mix of faculty-contributed blogs, tutorials, and conversations that start now and will continue to evolve throughout the summer. We invite you to interact with, and contribute to, the #KTeachDev2020 collection of resources.
A 5-minute Video Tour of #KTeachDev2020 resources
The #KTeachDev2020 Homepage
The #KTeachDev2020 homepage can be reached by links at the Teaching Commons Site and the TLC Site, as well as from links at the other #KTeachDev2020 resources. It contains blog entries from a variety of contributors about lessons learned from the online teaching experience in spring and plans for fall.
The Teaching Development Moodle Site
Josh Moon is developing a Moodle site Teaching Development for Online Learning – Summer 2020 that contains lots of resources about teaching, as well as providing a field-tested model for the kinds of things you can do with your own Moodle site.
The Teaching Commons Teams site with Channels for sharing ideas
The most interesting and dynamic part of the #KTeachDev2020 is the discussion it generates among colleagues. We’ve created a space for that at the Teaching Commons Teams site. Members of TLC will monitor the Discussion Channels. We hope you will post your ideas, respond to others, and check back often to share in the collective wisdom of your colleague instructors.
Here I share how I used Instagram as a replacement for slideshows and more traditional Moodle posts, allowing students to engage aesthetically and analytically with course materials in ways that felt personal and accessible.
I’m sure we all have salient memories of March 13, that final day of classes at K when we knew coronavirus was looming, when we were just wrapping up the Winter term, completely unsure of what was to come. We had just begun carrying around little bottles of hand sanitizer with us, masks were not yet a thing. Maybe we had a pack of Lysol wipes in our offices. Our students sat close together, sharing bagels and iced coffees. We stood close together in the library elevator. At the end of my morning class, not knowing when they were going to see me again on campus, a couple of students asked if we could give me a hug. They were the last people I hugged outside of my family.
That morning students in my Religion and Masculinity class were chatty and restless as we sat in our library classroom. Rather than discuss the reading for that day on the intimacy of 19th century men’s studio portraits, we spent the class time imagining what an online class at K might look like. The first things my students dreaded was having their only meaningful interaction with course texts be through Moodle posts. My brilliant colleague, Ambre Dromgoole, a PhD Candidate at Yale, had tweeted a few days prior about using Instagram Live in lieu of other lecture-delivery platforms. I loved the idea of using Instagram and floated it by my students. Instantly they agreed that it would be fun and accessible to use social media for classes. I was preparing to teach my Catholics in the Americas class in the Spring. Usually my slideshows at the start of each class are full of Met Gala costumes, skulls, bones and other macabre relics, cathedral interiors, statues, woodcut images of burning convents, festivals, and processions. A course on Catholicism begs for visual richness and interactions with objects, architecture, and art. Instagram is the perfect platform for students to think about the relationship between tradition, practice, texts, objects, and images.
As I told my students, Catholics are EXTREMELY ONLINE, by which I mean many of them use social media, whether that be Instagram or Twitter to share dimensions of their religion, to post images of saints and rosaries, prayers, and increasingly the internet and social media platforms have become a media of presence. Blessings and the presence of Christ can travel through computer screens and Twitter posts. Just before the Spring term began, on March 28, 2020, Pope Francis delivered the Urbi et Orbi [to the city and the world] Blessing to an empty St. Peter’s Square. In the blue glow of night tens of thousands of people all over the world tuned into a livestream. Catholics watched as the Pope adored the Blessed Sacrament, and as he walked out onto the square in the rain holding the gold monstrance with the body of Christ at its center. This was not simply a symbolic gesture, but an efficacious one. From the square, through the cameras, through thousands of screens Catholics were not only blessed, but could receive a plenary indulgence, a remission of temporal punishment for sin, if they tuned in by internet, radio, or television. In short, the internet, social media platforms, and other digital media technologies are central to how Catholics stay in touch with Rome, with each other, and are essential to contemporary devotional culture and practice. So Instagram seemed the perfect way for students to engage with historical and contemporary Catholic culture, and curate their own images to go with their thoughts on the readings and materials each week.
Every student was required to make a new Instagram account that they would use just for class—to minimize the awkwardness of using their personal accounts, and I too made an account that was private and just for class use. On their account they would post weekly in response to the readings, films, or sources for that week. Each week they would post what I called a “Virtual Provocation:”
These posts should include a reflection on something that interests you in the day’s readings and questions for discussion. Your post can be a combination of your own thoughts and quotes, passages, images, memes you have made, media clips etc.
Use these posts to raise provocations—what stood out to you? Can you make connections with other texts, examples, classes, events etc.? Did something in the text jog your memory? Do you take issue with any of the author’s arguments? Why? These should help jump start discussion and you should read and comment on each other’s posts as well. Posts should raise substantive issues rather than noting minor curiosities or posing purely informational questions. These will demonstrate your engagement with the texts and themes.
For this kind of assignment, fewer guidelines helped the students find their own voice and style. K students, creative, curious, independent thinkers that they are, rose to the challenge and I was delighted with how thoughtful their posts were. In response to videos, readings, and primary sources, students would select an image—sometimes this was a family photo, a picture from their time abroad, a painting, a building, a devotional image etc.—and their caption would contain their response to the readings. They knew these would be read by me and others, so it was the perfect place to ask questions, quote the text, and voice their own perspectives on the course readings. Sometimes these were personal, as students who had gone through Communion and Confirmation themselves, or went on pilgrimages, shared how the text complemented, complicated, and illuminated their own religious histories and experiences. Often these were critical, when they were voicing frustration with an author’s argument or critiquing missionaries and their role in colonization, or the Church’s theology of gender and sexuality, or the entanglement of religion and politics. I found these posts were of much higher quality than any Moodle posts had been in past classes, perhaps because of the reflection and thought required in pairing text and image, or the accessibility of the technology and their ease with the platform. For me, reading their posts was as simple as scrolling my feed, something I would do naturally. Due the night before our synchronous discussions, these posts were useful as I prepared discussion questions, and helped me prompt students to share their ideas and stories. The posts helped me create personal connections with students who I had never met in person, allowing me to learn their voice, and their unique perspective on the world. This made what could sometimes be awkward video chats run smoothly and much like an in-person class discussion would. Students would read each other’s posts and be ready not just to talk to me, but with each other about the materials, and they really enjoyed the use of social media for distance learning. Some student comments:
“Instagram was used so well!!! I don’t know if you have been considering this yet, but when you go back to in person you might consider still using it. That was really amazing.”
“The class platform was super enjoyable – connecting over social media to post provocations and other interesting things. That was super different and exciting, not to mention creative on Dr. Maldonado’s part.”
Some samples of student profiles:
Some students made memes, which takes a deep understanding of the material, and I love the remixing of old and new media forms. In the one below, a student thinks about Jesuit’s glorification of martyrdom in New France in their missionary work with the Iroquois. The student even tagged each of their Instagram accounts in the meme.
In the pandemic, sometimes with shoddy WiFi, or devices shared between multiple siblings, it is important for students to be able to access course materials and even engage in course requirements on their phones. If I feel like I have low bandwidth for watching videos and other recordings, students might too. Instagram stories became a perfect way for me to deliver background content and share visual media with students without the need for video streaming or even sharing or downloading attachments. They could casually click through an Instagram story wherever they might be, and at whatever time of the day they find time. About once a week, I used Instagram stories in lieu of PowerPoint to create stories that students could click through to learn about historical background and context, whether that be the origins and development of devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus, anti-Catholicism in the 19th century, violence between Protestants and Catholics, or why saints are so important. I prioritized choosing a compelling image for each slide. I then typed out a couple of short sentences to go along with the image—slotting lecture notes right into a slide won’t work as each needs to be easy to read and minimal. Attention to color, contrast, font size is important for readability too. Just seeing these images helped build a familiarity and facility with Catholic iconography and material culture, an important part of this course. An example of a cover slide and two informational slides:
Using Instagram helped students not only understand Catholic objects, spaces, and aesthetics (and learn that Catholicism is about much more than the hierarchy and theology), but also learn and display facility in how to discuss them. They were able to think critically about representation and practice, and about the pervasiveness and diversity of Catholicism in their towns, cities, and online worlds. I found it to be an equitable way to share content and have students engage in the course and contribute their own thoughts using only their phones. The flexibility and creativity of this platform and their facility with posting and viewing text and images in this way yielded strong work, critique, and analysis in ways that directly fed into our class discussions. More, this platform pushed me to consider how to deliver information in bite-sized and visually interesting ways, and it helped me connect with my students outside of learning management software. It met me where I was and met them where they were. I imagine these kinds of posts and stories could work well for a variety of disciplines to help students connect in meaningful ways with class materials and develop and share their own written perspectives, questions, and critiques.
After you upload your video to Streams, you need to choose who will be able to access it. You can allow any user with a kzoo.edu account to see it, or you can limit access to individuals or groups of your choosing. Perhaps the most common way to do that is to grant access only to members of a Teams Channel—like for your course!
This 2-minute video demonstrates what you need:
If you want to bypass the video, here’s the step-by-step in pictures
There were certain poems that I did not understand… but going on the discussion forums really helped me understand [those texts]. I liked the element of responding to two different responses from students each week because it was the closest thing we can do to make it seem (almost) like we were back in class again
(Advanced Poetry Workshop)
Boler (1999) introduced the idea of a pedagogy of discomfort in her book Feeling Power: Education and Emotions. This principle is one around which I design my classes; I believe learning happens best in a zone of productive discomfort, and aim to enlist my students in embracing and engaging such discomforts as challenged assumptions, self-doubt, perfectionism, confronting a “shitty first draft” (Lamott 1994), fear of receiving feedback, interrogating one’s relationship to language, etc. Yet I had not prepared for teaching amid the profound discomfort of a global pandemic. When in spring 2020 the details of what we were facing crystallized, magnifying existing precarities and generating new ones to worry about, the baseline teaching condition changed. Discomfort, yes. But productive? How? How to recalibrate the writing workshop? I have tried to describe some possible approaches, and because the pandemic conditions continue, I continue to tinker.
As a poet myself, I was eager to engage my students about what changes they noticed to their writing practices under the conditions of pandemic, quarantine, social movements, etc. Many of them lamented the absence of unexpected sensory stimuli on campus. They missed being able to write a poem inspired by intriguing snippets of conversations in the dining hall, or a few bars of a song from the window of a car passing down our red brick hill. They missed writing quietly in the same room as other writers. They were tired of the view out their window. I shared their longings and laments. So I held some optional synchronous sessions just for writing alone/together (and plan to do even more of that this fall). We discussed how to find the muse on YouTube, and we read Pablo Neruda’s poem “Horses,” a poem full of figurative language, based on observations looking out a window. “I was in Berlin, in winter. The light/ had no light, the sky had no heaven.// The air was white like wet bread.” Reading that poem and writing our own “window poems,” students found solace and connection with a writer from across time and space. Who doesn’t love the feeling of “being together” with characters on a page when reading details so vividly rendered? In a writing workshop, connection and learning are intertwined; there is hardly continuity of one without the other. In the profound discomfort and dis-ease we continue to face, I hope to offer my students co-presence in this long winter.
There, in silence, at mid-day, in that dirty, disordered winter, those intense horses were the blood the rhythm, the inciting treasure of life.
I looked. I looked and was reborn: for there, unknowing, was the fountain, the dance of gold, heaven and the fire that lives in beauty.
The exchange of feedback is at the core of a writing workshop, yet there is never any guarantee that conventional frameworks for group critique will transform into conversation. The typical MFA workshop method (which has also trickled down into undergraduate settings) mandates that the writer stays silent while the full class offers oral critique. Yet simply being in physical proximity to one another does not alone create the conditions for connection, belonging, or learning. In her essay “Unsilencing the Writing Workshop,” Nguyen (2019) discusses some ways the above method has failed writers, particularly writers of color and other marginalized experience, and offers an alternate model for the creative writing workshop as a conversation, one which includes the writer. Lerman (2003) outlines a multi-step group process for constructive dialogues about works-in-progress, in her book Critical Response Process.
I needed to figure out how to facilitate this conversational workshop model not only over the internet, but also basically asynchronous. In one approach, I decided to invite students to add a note/message to their drafts when they uploaded them to their small group workshops; they could pose a specific question to their readers, or otherwise communicate what kinds of feedback they were most after. (My one caveat is they can never use this note to apologize for their work.) Students almost always chose to add such a note, and often the note was about their draft, but just as often it included other pleasantries, updates, or greetings to each other. In this simple act of writers uploading a file to their small groups, and being encouraged to add a note to the file, the interaction between reader and writer became a tangible and social one that helped them relate to and reference one another, even in our virtual environment.
Menon and Phillips (2011) found that small groups of even-numbered size (for example, 6 or 8) experience lower group cohesion than groups of odd-numbered size. Of course, group sizes are determined by overall enrollment combined with attendance on any given day. “Workshop math,” or trying to determine a workshop rotation schedule, is notorious among creative writing instructors for being a fraught task full of unknowns, broken printers, and, well, math. Yet it can be an opportunity to design for connection and belonging. Typically, I have found the ideal small group workshop size to be five. As we pivoted to suddenly-virtual instruction, I pondered even more factors. I wanted groups that could carry on even if several members faced simultaneous challenges to participation, yet small enough to make in-depth conversation possible.
In the end, I split my intermediate poetry workshop into two groups of 7 for workshop, and advanced poetry workshop into two groups of 9. If that sounds big for any given week, read on. I also wanted to figure out how to design some flexibility so that the inevitable unknowns wouldn’t torpedo an entire workshop rotation. So I asked students to turn in a poem draft in at least 6 weeks of the term in order to receive credit for that portion of the course. That gave them the flexibility to step back back some weeks for any reason. In addition, I asked them to provide feedback to 2 group members’ poems for at least each week that they themselves posted a draft, draft, and to help me ensure that each draft received feedback from at least 2 group members. I had no idea in advance how this “workshop math” was going to work out, but for the most part, it really did. They were attentive to each other’s drafts, and each group stayed in motion. One intriguing result of this structure was that the small group workshops on any given week took on a “fishbowl conversation” quality, where members in each group took turns participating or observing the conversation. I learned even more about this accidental fishbowl from Teaching Tolerance, a project from the Southern Poverty Law Center:
Fishbowl can be used to explore the ideas of membership, identity, belonging and shared experiences. The structure lends itself well to discussions of complex texts and to challenging topics of cross-cultural significance. By providing all students both a speaking and listening role and a stake in the discussion, fishbowl can help build an inclusive and supportive learning environment. The observation aspect of the activity allows students to identify appropriate ways to participate in discussions. If used on a consistent basis, fishbowl discussions can establish boundaries and norms critical to anti-bias communication.
While the fishbowl effect was unintentional in my Spring 2020 poetry workshops, I will now approach it on purpose, as part of designing for connection and belonging.
I was fascinated with the earliest poems I read and heard that gave insight into all the secret territories of the human spirit, our relationships with one another. Somehow those glimpses felt comforting, like looking through the lit windows of other people’s homes at dusk, before they closed the curtains. How did other people live their lives? Just a sense of so many other worlds out there, beginning with the next house on my own street, gave me a great energy. How could anyone ever feel lonely?
Naomi Shihab Nye, “Lights in the Window”
When you picture a writer, what comes to mind? Likely some version of a writer toiling away in isolation, an iconic image of a solitary genius. Yet for most of us, writing happens in context and community, in response and reference to others— like the way I felt compelled to bring the above Nye passage into this post for you, reader. I often refer to writing as “this solitary thing we do together.” Even Emily Dickinson, often imagined as a lonely spinster in an attic, circulated her poems among family and friends and wrote copious letters.[1] Louise Rosenblatt (1978) describes texts as being made up of not only the words on the page, but of a mutual interaction between the writer’s words and the reader, with the response of the reader actively co-creating the meaning. This interdependence between writer and reader underpins a writing workshop. I have been thinking a lot about how to design for connection and belonging in a virtual setting.
One of my immediate goals, then, in the emergency spring pivot to online, was to set up a virtual platform that offered a strong sense of being together, or what some in online learning call “co-presence.” And to do that really quickly. Gunawardena & Zittle (1997) found a sense of social presence to be a predictor of student satisfaction. Biocca, Harms, and Gregg (2001) define co-presence as “the degree to which the observer believes he/she is not alone and secluded.” In an online learning context, it’s about interaction and how real people feel on the other side. For our discussion forums and small group workshops, I chose a collaboration hub called Slack. Having previously used Slack in a remote working context, I felt comfortable with how to navigate its features on such short notice. My students reported stress-free adoption and seamless mobile access, and appreciated its intuitive, connected user experience. The platform is just a platform, though; there is still the question of how to build interaction. Here are some reflections from my students that I believe describes a sense of co-presence:
Poetry is a class that I feel like you can’t just slack off for. Being engaged with one another and your own work is really crucial to understanding the content and really engaging with the course as a whole. The way this course was established using Slack helped to create an environment where you were held accountable without being judged. Seeing one another’s comments every single week helped encourage you to read more in depth, read again, write in a different way, and challenge yourself. The opportunity to reply to the poems of my classmates made my own poetry stronger because I could take an objective view some days. I really loved this class
(Intermediate Poetry Workshop)
Even though this class has been under less than normal circumstances since we are online, I feel like this class maintained workshop atmosphere to the best of its abilities. It’s hard to connect with people when you don’t see them every week, but Slack helped a lot with connecting to one another’s poetry and reading discussions. We saw a wide variety of different kinds of poetry and prompts and in working in smaller groups, we also saw how individuals interpret all of them differently.
(Intermediate Poetry Workshop)
In the “before” times, my workshops at K had an entire sensorium grounded in social and physical proximity. Chair legs rattling against carpet. Shuffling and swapping of papers as group members huddled up around annotated drafts. Caramel syrup in someone’s coffee. Black-capped chickadees darting around in the evergreens outside the classroom windows. That buzz of conversation. In some ways, the conditions of pandemic are antagonistic to co-presence. Yet it is possible to design for a feeling of being together in a virtual setting.
Biocca, F., Harms, C., & Gregg, J. “The networked minds measure of social presence: Pilot test of the factor structure and concurrent validity.” Paper presented at the 4th International Workshop on Presence, Philadelphia, PA. May 2001.
Boler, Megan. Feeling Power: Emotions and Education. New York: Routledge, 1999.
Gunawardena, C.N., & Zittle, F.J. “Social presence as a predictor of satisfaction within a computer-mediated conferencing environment.” The American Journal of Distance Education, 11(3), 1997. 8-26.
Lamott, Anne. “Shitty First Drafts.” Bird by Bird. New York: Anchor Books, 1994. 1-2.
Lerman, Liz, and John Borstel. Liz Lerman’s Critical Response Process: A Method for Getting Useful Feedback on Anything You Make, from Dance to Dessert. Takoma Park, MD: Liz Lerman Dance Exchange, 2003. Print.
Menon, Tanya, and Phillips, Katherine W. “Getting Even or Being at Odds? Cohesion in Even- and Odd-Sized Small Groups.” Organization Science, Volume 22, Issue 3, May-June 2011.
Neruda, Pablo, and Stephen Mitchell. Full Woman, Fleshy Apple, Hot Moon: Selected Poems of Pablo Neruda. New York: Harper Flamingo, 1997. Print.
Nye, Naomi Shihab. “Lights in the Window.” Lofty Dogmas: Poets on Poetics. Fayetteville: The University of Arkansas Press. 2005.
Rosenblatt, Louise M. The Reader, the Text, the Poem: The Transactional Theory of the Literary Work. Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1994. Print.
[1] If you’re looking for a good movie to stream online at home, try Wild Nights with Emily.
Everything You Wanted to Know About Teams but Were Afraid to Ask!
This video features a meeting in which we discuss how to start or join a meeting in Microsoft Teams, how to participate through features such as raising a hand, muting and unmuting video or audio, or chatting on the side, how to share your screen, and how to record a meeting. We also talk a little bit managing meetings and how the Meet feature integrates with other Teams components.
Air handling is different than temperature/humidity control, but those are related
Different classroom buildings have different needs
Portable air purifier units
1. Dilution is the Solution to Pollution
The key idea is to dilute indoor air, and any infectious material in that air, with fresh air from outdoors. The air handling systems in classroom buildings at K have the capability to do exactly that with large outside air intake devices on each building. In fact, that was the case before Covid19 too. In the past, the mix of recirculated air and fresh outside air was achieved automatically by instruments that detect and maintain carbon dioxide levels in the building at healthy levels while improving energy efficiency by recycling some of the indoor air that has already been heated or cooled.
As we turn our attention to preventing possible spread of Covid19 by particles and aerosols in the indoor air, these systems are being reconfigured to increase the amount of outside air being brought indoors. This, together with the lower building occupancy associated with the College’s distancing and de-densifying plan, increases the effective dilution ventilation per person.
2. The Unintuitive Thing About Windows — Leave Them Closed.
In my house, the easiest way to dilute the inside air with fresh air from outside is to open a window. The situation in classroom buildings is different: The systems that detect and control the amount of fresh outside air in the building are tied directly to the outside air intake location in each building and not to any given room. Opening a window in one room disrupts the fresh air sensing equipment for the whole building, resulting in less fresh outside air being brought into the other rooms in the building.
3. What you feel in the air: Air Handling and Temperature Control are Different Things
The aspect of the building’s indoor environment we are most aware of is the temperature and humidity. The environmental control systems in the classroom buildings at K maintain a comfortable interior environment by two separate processes: air handling and hydronics.
Air handling is what we’ve been talking about in the points above. The hydronic system involves moving air past coils filled with heated or chilled liquid. That heating and chilling happens in the boiler/chiller plant at the bottom of Academy Street, with the hydronic liquid passing through underground pipes to the classroom buildings.
The air handling systems will be configured to bring more outside air into the mix to achieve greater dilution in each building, but of course we know that for most of the academic year in Kalamazoo, that outside air is cold! The amount of fresh outside air that can be included in the air handling mix will need to be balanced with the capacity of each building’s hydronic system to maintain a comfortable and safe temperature.
4. Different Buildings, Different Systems
What about my building? Here are some things to know:
Dow Science building, because of its design for preventing airborne health hazards from chemistry and biology labs, has always included 100% fresh outside air in the air handling mix. There is no recirculation of interior air at all. The extra-high capacity hydronic system designed for that building maintains the indoor environment at comfortable temperature and humidity.
Olds-Upton Hall has an air-handling system which is adequate for its traditional usage, as well as high dilution with greater proportion of fresh outside air discussed here. The hydronic system in OU is undersized for that purpose however. For that reason, it is possible that temperatures in OU will be less comfortable this year. To help maintain interior comfort, portable electrostatic air purifier units are planned for classroom spaces in OU, allowing for fresh air levels to be better balanced with the capacity of the hydronic system while at the same time actively reducing the concentration of any infectious material in the air.
Dewing Hall is a tale of two zones. The air handling unit for the 3rd floor is not configurable to bring higher amounts of fresh outside air into the mix. For that reason, portable electrostatic air purifiers are planned for any classroom space in use on Dewing 3rd floor. The other levels of Dewing hall have a separate air handling system which allows for the greater dilution with outside air we’ve been discussing here.
Light Fine Arts has generally adequate air handling capacity for including greater dilution of outside air. The special purpose uses of many spaces in LFA — for activities that traditionally bring large groups together in close contact while singing, acting, playing wind instruments, etc — bring with it special considerations.
Upjohn Library Commons has generally adequate air handling capacity for including greater dilution of outside air. The need for special climate control in the rare book room brings extra considerations into play.
5. Portable Air Purifier Units
A lot of portable electrostatic air purifier units are on order now for use in classroom spaces in Dewing and OU, with deliveries scheduled to begin in the first few weeks of the term. As with other high-demand items — remember that every other higher education institution is making similar orders — the delivery dates are likely to change. These units are rated to handle large rooms from 1500 to 3000 square feet (1500 square feet is 30×50). We won’t know until they arrive how much sound they generate and the resulting impact on classroom acoustics.
At the beginning of my course, I ask students to complete a survey to provide me with some information I need to make the course best fit their needs. Especially with online content, it is important for me to know about time zone differences, technology needs, and student preferences about what name to use when I address them and how to pronounce names.
Years ago, I just sent an email to my class and asked each student to reply. That left me with a lot of information to process. More recently I have used Google Forms and Microsoft Forms to easily make and distribute surveys and collect the responses. Now that Moodle is a part of everyone’s life at K, I’ve switched to the built-in survey feature on that platform. Here’s a five-minute video that shows everything you’ll need to make a survey using the Feedback activity in Moodle. This approach has the advantages that
It is immediately visible to my students without the need to send a link by email
it doesn’t require students to sign in at another platform
it is available only to students in the class
the data lives securely with all the other information at Moodle
it has roughly the same rich features as the more famous solutions Google Forms and MS Forms
you could reward students with some points in the Moodle grade book for completing the questionnaire!
