Registration: 2 sections of 25

My plan is to conduct my Social Psychology class all online. I’m combining my favorite parts of asynchronous and synchronous teaching online. I also am trying to be as flexible as possible, knowing that some students and their families are not out of the woods yet, that home responsibilities may take priority occasionally, or a student may become ill!

It’s a Tues/Thurs class. For Tuesdays and Thursdays, there will be mini-lectures (about 20 minutes) students will watch before we meet online (they’ll be posted about 20 hours in advance). Then we will meet virtually for about 45 minutes every Tuesday and Thursday. I want to use the mini video lectures to cover content I used to do in class, and use the 45 minutes of in-person time to introduce an activity, problem, or discussion topic.

A typical 45-minute class session

• First 10 minutes introduce the activity/problem and any content that didn’t fit in my mini-lecture;
• 15-20 minutes where students work in pairs (and I can pop in and out of their groups);
• 15 minutes to debrief the activity together, have a pair or 2 share their work and I can give feedback on their response.
• 5 min for technical difficulties

Planning for Contingencies

If a student misses a class session due to illness, an emergency, or other responsibilities, then I’ll allow them to do the activity/problem on their own. I’ll have a copy of the problem/activity, and the student will write-up their response. I expect this to be the exception rather than regular way students engage with the class.

This idea of a contingency plan has come up in conversations our department has been having over Teams. Another idea that allows flexibility is to require something like 8 out of 10 of the class meetings or class components (and also “secretly” add in a last opportunity event that’s not announced ahead of time, to help students who’ve fallen behind for whatever reason – then I don’t have to make a determination of which excuses/reasons are more deserving than others).

A typical week

Registration: 27

I’ve put together a mock-up model below that I think would work for an intro-level history class. I wanted to add as a caveat that this is not actually the model that I’ve decided to use in the fall – I’ve decided to run with an online class with synchronous discussions on Teams (that will move between small groups and the whole class) instead. This is partly because my classes depend on having students working together collaboratively, and my thought is that as long as the technology works, they’ll be able to do that more effectively online than they would be able to while sitting six feet apart and wearing masks.

As I was trying to reflect on how to build a hybrid class that incorporated both online interactions and discussions with small groups of 10 or fewer students (to meet social distancing requirements), I really struggled with the question of how to create meaningful in-person interaction without creating two versions of my course. My introductory-level history course moves chronologically and thematically over a four-hundred year period, and I had a hard time envisioning how I could divide the class into recitation sections that would cover the same material on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday and still have that material make sense to all three groups within the framework of the class. But I also had reservations about covering different material in the Monday, Wednesday, and Friday meetings, because that seemed like it would essentially amount to running an online version of the class and an in-person version of the class simultaneously. (The students that I was not meeting with on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, would also need to be able to engage with that material, after all).

I decided that instead of seeking to cover material in person, it would make more sense to do skills-based workshops in person that students could rotate through over the course. My introductory-level history class focuses on primary source analysis; the class’ existing assignments work to scaffold primary source analysis skills over the course of the term. So I thought that designing in-person workshops that students would rotate through would contribute to my goal of building primary source analysis skills, and it wouldn’t interfere with the chronological structure of the class.

On Monday, I would meet either in person or online with a small group of students, and we would do an in-depth dive into one primary source that we’d discussed briefly the week before (that way, the students would have the historical context for the source). I’d also give them a new source to look at – something that would be more challenging or unusual – to see what they could make of it. Then, I’d devote Wednesday and Friday to covering course content – so on Wednesday, for example, I’d post a lecture on the industrial revolution, they’d do some readings, and we’d have a 45-minute synchronous discussion on Teams about those readings. On Friday, we’d follow the same model to discuss European colonialism.

A Typical Week

The drawback of this model is that I would only meet with every student in person three times over the course of the term. (Group A would meet in Week 2, 5, 8; Group B in week 3, 6, and 9, and Group C in Week 4, 7, and 10). Students also would not be able to collaborate closely with one another in the workshops due to social distancing requirements. But I do think that the workshops would contribute directly to my overall pedagogical goals of helping students build primary source analysis skills over the course of the term.

Registration: Lecture 23, Lab 12

Registration: 30

The students in this class are typically sophomore math majors for whom it serves as an “introduction to theorems and proofs” course, math minors for whom this serves as the final course in the “applied mathematics” minor sequence, and senior math majors who are interested in gaining familiarity with a new mathematical topic.

The students’ submissions for routine assignments are typically quite short once written, but require a lot of thought on their own time. This is what sets this — and other abstract proof-based mathematics courses — apart from students’ earlier work in calculus, for example.

I often reassure frustrated students that everybody who ever got good at mathematics has felt exactly the same frustration. This fact makes it especially important for this course design to provide opportunities for students to share their experiences and their thought processes with other students and for these groups to have support and guidance from the instructor.

Workload in a typical week of MATH310

I plan three 45-minute class-time group meeting per week, 10 students per group. I’ll make a single active learning plan to re-use in each group session during the week. We’ll synthesize material from earlier weeks and build context for future weeks. A typical meeting plan will be: chieck-in and questions, a context-building discussion, brekout pairs, wrap-up. A pair of students each meeting will post notes about the student questions to an accumulating group notes document. I’ll welcome auditors to the online group(s) to provide flexibility for students who need to quarantine or who may be feeling unwell that day.

The video lecture recordings will be 10-15 minutes. I’ll structure the homework so that it is quick to grade, allowing me to provide feedback on the same day work was due.

Load balancing online and on-campus sessions

My plan is to structure the real-time meetings so that the student experience and my workload is approximately the same whether online or on-campus. Some decisive action will be needed at the start, once it is clear which students will be on-campus and which will be online. I imagine a few scenarios:

• Assuming there are different but sizable proportions of onsite and online students, the scheduling is natural for the face-to-face work: do the real-time sessions proportionally onsite and online to balance the size of each session.
• If in a given class has ALL onsite students, there’s no problem at all
• If there are only a few online students in a class full of onsite students  (I think that’s the worry, right?) I would structure my course as in the first case, and cycle the onsite students through the online group. 
• Another idea for the lots of on-campus learners and only a few online:  Enlist on-campus students with suitable devices — like phones— to buddy up with online students using Teams, acting as micro-moderators between the on-campus and online live participants! 
• Finally, if a given class has only a few onsite students among mostly online students:  God bless them.  I think I’d privilege them with a smaller weekly session of their own, and split the online students into as many groups as I can sustainably handle.  Here I’m counting on reusability of group materials to make that burden seem less heavy

Can groups learn from each other?

• Assuming the online sessions are really “all together” and not in breakout groups, they could be recorded easily
• I’m planning to assign a pair of students, on a weekly rotation, to post notes from the meeting to an accumulating notes document.
• The technical challenges of recording the onsite meetings are immense:  a single camera and mic may be OK for a single lecturer, but of course I’m planning for that kind of one-way content delivery to happen asynchronously.  An onsite recording that captures classroom discussion adequately would require lots of cameras and mics which won’t be available. 
• I think I’ll welcome students from other groups to “audit” the online group meetings, either to get extra time in the discussion or to make up for a missed on-campus meeting.

(Spring 2020, Re-envisioned for future hybrid offering)

Enrollment: 37 students  (should have been more like 15)

Under normal circumstances, this course meets three times a week for a mixture of lecture, some group-work, and weekly presentations by students.  When enrollment is high, students present in small groups with each group presenting just once in the quarter.  With smaller enrollments, students have presented individually or more than once.

In Spring 2020 we went completely online and, since this course had students in South Korea, San Diego, and many places in between, completely asynchronous.  Given the number of students, I switched from weekly homework assignments to weekly reflective journal entries, a successful change that I intend to keep regardless of the size or format of the course in the future.  One thing I would do differently, though, would be to add a synchronous component consisting of the student presentations and possibly a class-wide Q&A.

Enrollment: 32 students

Usually would meet 4 times a week (3 lecture/mini-lab classes and a full lab each week); there are usually 2 lab sections of approx. 15 students each.

Under normal circumstances, the most valuable interpersonal interactions are during the lab/mini-lab times, when students work side-by-side, asking questions and comparing approaches, and I circulate, checking in with students and answering questions.  Clustering around laptop screens is the norm.  Since this is the antithesis of social distancing, our most significant interactions will move to software-based screen sharing.

For the fall, there are 32 students enrolled. I plan to break them up into 4 sections of 8 students each, since that is a reasonable “covid-cap” for the lab/classroom space. I will probably also break each section into 2 smaller “support groups” of 4 students each.  My plan for Week 1 (and possibly Week 2) is to meet with each section twice in person, once during a usual class time and once during the lab.  The focus will be on introductions, community-building, and answering questions.  Content engagement (reading, short videos, mini-labs) will be asynchronous, on their own.