A few weeks ago, I was surprised to learn that thousands of my long-time colleagues at a commuter campus across the country were told to plan to teach the fall semester fully online. I immediately thought of my dedicated performing arts colleagues and the challenging decisions they would face. Next, I envisioned thousands of working students struggling to complete a full slate of online courses at home without access to reliable, high-speed internet and potentially sharing one device with several family members.
As it turns out, my colleagues across the country—like so many faculty—are facing a fall semester of unknowns. Not simply teaching classes online, but not being able to know for sure where they will be teaching. Or where their students will be learning. Online for the entire semester? Five weeks online, then shifting to campus? Teaching students who are simultaneously split between a physical classroom and remote environments?
Plus the prospect of again shifting to an entirely online environment on a dime, mid-semester, as local conditions unfold in real time.
In an ideal world, instructors would have time to fully redesign all their courses for this situation using a full-fledged instructional design process. For some, even with institutional support, this is simply not feasible.
Another approach to the many unknowns that is feasible is for faculty to work through each major component of the final grade in a typical face-to-face course and explore how it can be conceptualized to support successful delivery of parts of the course in either a face-to-face or online environment. These types of large-scale decisions can be then represented in a syllabus in a way that gives faculty flexibility to pivot and students clarity. And the decisions can be made with attention to class size, TA support, and many other institution- and discipline-specific contextual factors.
With this in mind, in my last post, I focused on some of the most problematic major assessments of learning in face-to-face courses in this situation: closed-book exams and quizzes. With a quick read through a decision tree, instructors can see how they can reconfigure these assessments in a course that may be partly delivered in an online environment.
In this post, I turn to two other common components of final grades in face-to-face courses: attendance and participation. Courses often illustrate 2 extremes: grading mere physical presence (“attendance”) in face-to-face courses and grading written discussion board posts (“one post and 2 replies” meeting specified word counts) in online courses. Expressed that way, neither translates well to the other environment.
When conceptualizing your course and revising your syllabus, consider instead—What is it that you really want students to do through their participation? Then identify the range of tools you could use, as needed, to achieve that in both physical and online environments:
The items from the first column provide criteria for grading that you can communicate to students in your syllabus. Selected items from the other columns become examples of how you’ll incorporate opportunities to participate in class, tailored to how the COVID-19 situation unfolds. Offered this way, as examples and opportunities in a fluid situation, you’ve built in the flexibility you’ll need to pivot. And students can see how you’ve organized the course in a way that they can succeed, despite the unknowns. Ultimately, giving students choice among tools will be critical in the event that they are learning remotely from home in wide-ranging conditions.