Remote Teaching Notes from LEARN and LTC
Campus Instructors,
This is it! You made it! This wasn’t what you had planned for the semester, but you provided the best learning experience that you could for your students. Thank you. Thank you for the hours spent learning new tools. Thank you for the hours spent preparing online lectures and other activities. Thank you for continuing to connect with your students even as you shepherded yourselves and your families through this crisis. We see you. We celebrate you and your work and your struggles. Our annual Celebrating Teaching and Learning conference may have been postponed out of necessity, but we wait for the day when we can all celebrate together again.
Teaching Talk
We have our last “Teaching Talk” session this semester from 1-2 p.m. on Friday, May 8 in Webex (https://uww.webex.com/meet/webern). We hope you’ll join us to reflect on your semester, discuss challenges and strategies, and what LEARN and LTC can do to help you over the summer to prepare for the unknown.
In last week’s session, we discussed what sorts of end-of-the-semester activities instructors were doing with their students. The group chatted about different ways of conducting final assessments (e.g., oral exams, application projects) and gathering feedback from students (e.g., what went well, what could have gone better) to help them in the future if remote teaching happens again. We also talked a little about the unknown of fall and different ways to balance workload by preparing pieces of instruction that would work for any modality (e.g., designing courses in modular pieces that can be shifted and creating short videos to introduce these chunks). Interested? Visit our Remote Teaching website to view the recording!
Quick Tips
Here are a couple of quick tips for this week:
- Think about different things you can do to reflect on the semester. It’s a great idea to do this with your students and individually. Make notes on what went well and what could have gone better. As you revisit changes you want to make to your class next time, the “could have gone better” section is a great place to get started!
- Think about ways to recognize your graduating seniors if you have them in your class. Some instructors have shared that students are wearing their caps and gowns for their final presentations!
- Remember--Canvas does have a few different tools to support your end of the semester work. Once you create the assignment online in Canvas you can use Speedgrader to give grades and feedback, as well as interact with your student in the comments area! You can also create a rubric, connect a rubric to an assignment, and even use the rubric in Speedgrader! In Canvas you can also exclude assignments from the final grade, give extra credit, and excuse a particular student from an assignment.
Getting Help
As always, the LTC and LEARN are here to support you!
- The LTC is available to help you transition things you may have done face-to-face to alternate delivery, as well as help you with our different technology tools that support remote teaching and learning. The LTC is available Monday–Friday from 8 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. via phone (262-472-1004) and email (ltc@uww.edu).
- The LEARN Center is available to discuss options and new ideas for activities or assessments via email (learn@uww.edu). You can also reach the LEARN Center via phone (262-472-5134).
Best,
Heather Pelzel (LEARN Center Director)
Nicole Weber (Director of Learning Technology)