Like many during the covid 19 pandemic, I had to develop a remote learning/online learning option for courses that students would take under a variety of circumstances. Some students were on campus, some were out-of-state and remote, others were working full-time in healthcare while also trying to finish their classes and take care of their family.
Given all of these variables, I thought the best approach to creating an online course would be one where I made an asynchronous class that students could access when they were able to and didn't feel beholden to any particular online meeting time. I also did this because I checked with my colleagues and found that they were all doing synchronous Zoom classes which meant that students would be pretty zoomed-out by the time they got to my class. These factors led me to design the course to be as accessible and as flexible as possible for students. I wanted them to be able to feel like they could jump in at any point and know where they were, what was due, and where they were headed next.
Given all of these variables, I thought the best approach to creating an online course would be one where I made an asynchronous class that students could access when they were able to and didn't feel beholden to any particular online meeting time. I also did this because I checked with my colleagues and found that they were all doing synchronous Zoom classes which meant that students would be pretty zoomed-out by the time they got to my class. These factors led me to design the course to be as accessible and as flexible as possible for students. I wanted them to be able to feel like they could jump in at any point and know where they were, what was due, and where they were headed next.
I followed Jose Antonio Bowen's "Teach Naked" approach to give students a way to easily move through the course. Each unit followed a similar structure, each component had the same due date each week, and students could always email me if they needed assistance or clarification. Students began with an intro to the unit video that would help them both encounter the material and learn the motivation for doing this particular unit. Next, students would read or watch primary source material that they would later be asked to write a short response about. The response was almost always the same format to allow students to have familiarity with what they were writing while also prompting them to think about the reading materials before watching the "Considered" videos where I would explain, expand, and complicate the main ideas for the course unit. Finally, I would answer questions they had posed to me in either the Friday Night Livestreams or the response videos that I made for the end of the week. I tried to provide students with elements of the face-to-face classroom via these end of the week videos while also given them the flexibility to engage the course when they were able to. A number of students either got covid, were asked to quarantine, or had family concerns arise that made this flexible, asynchronous approach the right choice.
The final piece of the unit was a reflection on the unit itself as well as what the students did to prepare, what they wanted to know more about, how they might connect the unit to their background knowledge. The purpose of this end of unit assessment was to help students form habits of metacognition or thinking about their thinking and the concrete steps they could take to make the information stick.
The final piece of the unit was a reflection on the unit itself as well as what the students did to prepare, what they wanted to know more about, how they might connect the unit to their background knowledge. The purpose of this end of unit assessment was to help students form habits of metacognition or thinking about their thinking and the concrete steps they could take to make the information stick.