Teaching remotely for the first time this winter and feel like your syllabus is missing something? Teaching remotely for the third time and wanting a refresh? Take this quiz to see which creative pedagogy idea might be right for your course! Or, see the options below.
Interested in employing any of these methods, but need technical or pedagogical support? Schedule a consultation with one of the Humanities Division’s Online Pedagogy Assistants!
Project Groups
It can be harder for students to form bonds in the virtual classroom in the same way that they are used to doing in-person. Perhaps you worry that students are feeling isolated while tackling course work and don’t have any peer support. Try project groups! Assign students a small project to work on in small groups of 3-5, and encourage them to choose their own methods of communicating. Students may choose to create their own group chat over text, on Facebook Messenger, or on What’s App, or they may make their own channel on Discord or Slack. Either way, now each student has an opportunity to get to know a few other students well, plus an existing method of communication should any of them need peer support later in the quarter!
Creative Discussion
Facilitating an engaging Zoom or Canvas discussion can be tough, especially by the second half of the quarter. Whether you’re looking for synchronous or asynchronous ways for your students to collectively engage with the material, there are creative options to help refresh your discussions. Try a Fishbowl Discussion: a small group of students prepare in advance to present a live discussion on Zoom, while the rest of the class takes notes or reacts in the Chat or on a Google Doc. Alternatively, if you’d like everyone to participate equally at the same time, try a Jigsaw Discussion. For this, separate the reading into topics/sections, and have a few students close read each topic/section. Then, populate Breakout Rooms with one “expert” from each topic, and students can take turns presenting their analysis to each other. If you want to try a creative asynchronous discussion, maybe hold a Twitter Debate! Students can create accounts as historical figures or fictional experts in the field, and roleplay a debate based on how their characters might interrogate the topic.
Games
Sometimes, towards the end of a long Zoom class, you might want a fun way to get students engaged with the material and end on a high note. Try hosting a game or competition the same way you might in a physical classroom! One suggestion we have for you is Kahoot! You can log on and pre-prepare your own interactive multiple-choice quiz based on the material, then send students the link over Zoom. Students can create their own nicknames and compete to win the highest score by playing each round with accuracy and speed. This is a low-stakes way to confirm student comprehension and bond as a class! Students may have played this game in middle or high school, so the nostalgia factor is fun too.
Course Blogs
If you’re looking for a way to get students excited about their written work, consider creating a course blog using UChicago’s Voices platform, run through WordPress. It’s easy to create and format a site as you please, giving students a space to upload their short writing assignments. By the end of the quarter, you’ll have a place where students can view their own and each other’s posts, and see how much they’ve work they’ve collectively produced! This may be especially fun for history or art classes, so the finished product looks like a gallery with an analysis attached to each image.
Revised Grading
Let’s be honest: the past year has been really tough for your students. You may have first years in your class experiencing college for the first time, online and isolated. Or you may be teaching fourth years who know they probably won’t have a senior spring or graduation, and will be leaving college into a daunting economy and job market. You might have students learning from home, taking care of grandparents, younger siblings, or sick family members. And everyone, regardless of circumstance, is dealing with limited social interaction and a stressful political climate. Just as you might find it hard to get work done during this quarter, students will be dealing with the same thing. Perhaps you feel that along with your assignment plans and learning methods, your assessments and grading scale should adapt to the circumstances. Some instructors have decided to focus on many smaller assignments rather than a large and heavily weighted midterm and final. Some have added a small grading bonus, 5% or so, giving grades a little padding to represent the difficulty in learning and producing work right now. There are lots of versions of this same intent – perhaps dropping the lowest grade on a discussion post, or only requiring 7 out of 9 of such writing assignments. This is up to you, and depends on the unique nature of your course and syllabus!
Midterm Check-Ins
It can be hard to connect with students virtually, especially if not all of them come to office hours, or participate asynchronously because of very different time zones. You might worry that a particularly reserved student might slip through the cracks. Consider sending out a survey around fifth week to get students’ feedback on how they feel about their progress in the course, and what support they might need. Another option is to schedule one-on-one check-ins with students at that time, so that you can have two-way communication about what each student needs from you and needs to do in order to succeed. Students will appreciate that you care about them individually, and that their feedback is important to you! Of course, you can employ these methods at the beginning of the quarter too. A second-week survey asking students what remote learning methods work best for them – or which methods don’t work – can be useful as you plan the quarter.
Hypothes.is
You may have heard of a collaborative annotation tool called Hypothes.is! You can upload documents to the program, and students can work together to add close reading notes. Like a Google Doc, the document will update in real time, and students can view and reply to each other’s comments. If your course involves a lot of readings or dense texts, and you’re looking for a way for students to asynchronously collaborate on the task of close reading, you might want to try this method out! It can also be beneficial in preparation for synchronous course meetings, since students have already developed ideas together and have a starting point for verbal discussion. UChicago is testing Hypothes.is this year, and you can join the pilot here.
