Shifting Online

Elisabeth Kubler-Ross identified five stages of emotion experienced by the terminally ill: denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance. The analogy may be tasteless and unfitting, but many faculty members forced to go online with little training, preparation or support are also experiencing wrenching emotions: apprehension, trepidation, anxiety, nervousness and foreboding.

How, then, can you make this transition as painless as possible, both for yourself and your students?

Here are six guiding principles that might prove helpful.

1. Keep it simple, stupid.

In an emergency, don’t let the best be the enemy of the adequate and the doable.

• Digitized PowerPoint slides with lots of text are certainly not ideal -- but they’re accessible to most students.
• Videostreaming can work, but only if it is accompanied by detailed class notes or transcription.

2. Give your students clear, concise directions.

Structure is essential if students are to remain on track. Keep your directions as succinct and straightforward as possible. For example:

• View the PowerPoint presentation or the lecture.
• Complete the week’s assigned reading and watch a video.
• Respond to the prompt on the discussion board.

3. Be present.

If you want your students to be engaged, you need to interact with them.

• Send out regular announcements.
• Answer email in a timely manner.
• Respond thoughtfully and thoroughly to their posts on the discussion board.

4. Make sure your class remains substantive.

Don’t lower your expectations about what students should learn or be able to do. If you don’t take your class seriously, rest assured your students won’t either.

• Spell out your learning objectives. Be explicit about the content, skills, conceptual understandings and analytical methods you want your students to acquire.
• Align your assignments, activities and assessments with your learning goals.

5. Engage your students.

Make your assignments interesting.

• In a history class, you might ask, wow do we know? Or what-if? questions.
• Or you might ask your students to make an Ngram to chart the shifting use of a word, or examine how people’s names have changed over time or analyze the etymology of a term.
• Or ask your students to analyze the iconography of tombstones and what these can tell us about life expectancy and naming patterns and attitudes toward death.
• Also, consider organizing each session around a problem that needs to be solved or a provocative case study or a puzzle or an ongoing controversy.

6. Don’t overdo it.

Online teaching is generally much more demanding than its face-to-face counterpart. It requires more up-front planning and more individualized responses to students. In this stressful moment, take things easy, both for your sake and your students’.

• Instead of standard quizzes and exams, you might want to require your students to frequently contribute to a discussion forum and to respond to their classmates’ postings.
• But make sure your discussion prompts focus on higher-order thinking skills -- analysis, synthesis, application and evaluation -- and require your students to draw on the course lectures and readings.
• Also, don’t feel that you need to grade or even comment individually on every student response. It may make more sense to provide the class with more general comments.

I find it helpful to think about online teaching as a design challenge and an intellectual puzzle. In an online environment, engagement, motivation, structure, scaffolding and interaction are even more important than in a brick-and-mortar classroom. Consider yourself a learning architect who must connect with a virtual audience, keep your listeners focused and devise strategies to ensure that your students master the learning objectives you’ve defined.

It’s not an accident that many of the faculty who taught MOOCs came away from the experience energized about teaching. For perhaps the first time in their professional lives, teaching was transformed into a research problem that was essential to solve.

Steven Mintz is senior adviser to the president of Hunter College for student success and strategic initiatives.