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I think it is a good sign that I’m not making new discoveries in online teaching on a daily basis anymore. But, this past week, I finally felt like the students had got used to the general rhythm of watching video lectures, taking short quizzes or posting in the forum, and doing coding activities while I was available for one on one questions. I was hearing the students were starting to miss interacting with each other.

So, this past Friday, I got students back working together on coding tasks during class time. I’m not worrying about audio or video – I know some of them are having connectivity issues (heck, I’m having bandwidth issues I never used to have…) And I’m really pleased with the results.

My morning programming class went particularly well. I created a bunch of chat rooms and assigned students to them in groups of 3 or 4 as they let me know they were “in class”. I had a set of coding exercises that usually I ask students to write up solutions for on paper or the whiteboard – instead, I asked them to discuss possible solutions in their chat room. Once they were done, they would test their solutions by actually compiling and running them and debugging as needed. I spent the class session rotating between rooms at a pretty frequent pace. Early on, I had to remind each group not to just write the code on their own and then copy their solutions into the chat when they were done – they were supposed to be discussing. But, with a reminder, they all went along with that strategy and had really great conversations about the problems they were solving. For the few students who weren’t able to be in class, I gave them their own room they could use at a different time outside of class to do they same exercise but still get the benefits of collaborating.

Looking ahead, I think I’ll finish out the term with each class having at least one day where they interact live during class time if possible, and one day where they don’t have to necessarily be “in class” (though I will always be available during class), and the third day being played by ear. This seems like a good mix of maintaining some collaboration and community, but also giving students space and flexibility in their schedules for everything else going on. And, of course, making the option available for students to complete in-class activities at other times if needed. I’m posting these schedules at least two weeks out so students can plan.

I know nothing I’m creating here is new or particularly earth shattering in the realm of online teaching. But I’m pleased to be finding options that work to let me adapt my course without having to throw out all of the preparation I’d done for the second half of the term. And I suspect that the success is as much based on the students having settled into the new routines enough they are ready to work together again.

Week one of online teaching is wrapped up, and week two is on its way, though with my office and classroom being the same space and also where I spend time hanging out in the evening reading or getting work done, the days are definitely blending together.

New adventures for the coming week include:

Giving an exam – this is coming up Monday morning and the students seem to feel pretty good about their ability to take an exam from home with the technology available to them. I’ve communicated many times that I’ll be understanding about connectivity glitches and the key is just to let me know about problems if they crop up. Exams are really useful checkpoints in this class so I want to see if I can keep them in the course, but if it is a disaster I’ll be prepared to adjust.

Lab session in Chat – I’m starting a hands-on coding unit in my AI course and I’ve shared a Jupyter Notebook file that has prompts for questions to answer about the code and small TODO tasks to start editing the code and experimenting with the results. Normally, this would be a lab session style class period in my classroom. I want to use a chat channel for the course to collect answers, provide feedback on the fly, etc. Because people will work at different paces and be focusing on their code at times, I am hoping text chat will work well as compared to having audio going in the background while you work which you’ll inevitably tune out while concentrating and then miss something relevant. The hope is that as students have answers to share or questions of their own, they can catch up in the chat channel.

Small group problem solving in Chat -Back in my programming class, I am going to try to break students into smaller groups and given each group their own chat channel to solve a few problems “by hand” as we get started with loops. This is an activity that I usually have students do on paper or the whiteboard in small groups before testing out their solutions at the computers. I’m hoping I can recreate that here, though I know it is going to be tempting for the students to all just solve the problems on their own by developing/compiling/testing their code as they are used to. I’m planning on dropping into each of the chats on a pretty regular rotation to prod the teams that seem to be doing less chatting.

Department Open House for advising – We always hold a big advising open house at the start of registration for the next semester for both our declared majors but also minors (who do not get an official advisor in the program), students in our affiliated concentrations, and undeclared students thinking of taking some computing courses or potentially majoring. It’s always a nice event with cookies and upper-class students helping advise newer students on good courses to take at the same time (or not take at the same time) and the faculty are available to provide more information about their courses than is available in the catalog or help review schedules. That event would have been this coming Thursday, so we’re going to move it online as a drop-in Zoom event, BYO cookies. We’re encouraging students to connect in even if they just want to say hi and be social or see a faculty member they aren’t currently in a course with. I’m looking forward to seeing how this goes, not just for helping students find the right courses for next semester but also to provide some social interaction for our students.

I’m also going to start having some “big” grading projects (as compared to the now seemingly unending checking in on CMS quizzes and forums and exercise checklists). I may be revisiting my technology choices for office hours. And if things go very well, I might try to use our department Twitter more to maintain some connection with our students.

Well, I survived, and my students survived, and I am now officially teaching online.

I’m also left too exhausted to do much more than a bullet list of events and lessons learned:

• Every one of my students submitted the assignment due today (originally due last Monday when we returned from break). I am so proud of them and the effort they are putting in right at the start to be engaged.
• Since last time I installed Java, there is a new version out, and JavaFX doesn’t appear to be part of the install, so many students were unable to do the exercise planned for the day. My first class session was split between helping half my students figure out how text fields work and helping the other half of my students figure out why they couldn’t compile. That was a rough start at 9 am.
• I had a scheduled advising appointment and a drop-in advising appointment during my office hours. I was able to have a nice conversation in both cases about their goals for their education and some things to think about as they start planning for next year. The meeting with my research student and my committee meeting also went off without any technological hitches.
• Students really seem to prefer to have their video cameras off during class, even when they have video capability. It’s early days, and I’m worried about bandwidth, so I’m not forcing the issue. Lots of participation through text chat, particularly if we take it out of a group meeting and they can all just individually chat at me more privately. For some purposes, that will work fine, and I’m particularly open to it as we all get our feet under us with the technology and my priority is making sure I’m in contact with them all.
• To that end, make up a paper grid for each of my classes that lists off student names versus dates, and I’m going to check off for each student any day I hear from them, in any venue. I’m doing a fair bit asynchronously and I don’t want to lose track of anyone – I’m hoping this will make it easy to check at a glance if someone has be quiet for a few days and should be getting an email. Paper will make it much faster for me to mark down a tick mark whenever I acknowledge a chat, reply to an email, read in the forum, etc.
• I absolutely loath grading electronically. I made it through the pile of programs that came in this morning and typed up my comments as I worked through the code, but my grading brain doesn’t work right without a pen in my hand. My prediction right now is that this is the part of online teaching that I never adjust to. Which is funny because I suspect it’s the part of online teaching that many of my colleagues may have already switched to.

Today, I didn’t prepare any new material. I reviewed my plans. I thought through what needs to happen tomorrow – what I need to communicate to my students and what questions I should be prepared for. I thought through all my troubleshooting strategies for when Teams doesn’t work, people can’t find the chat, or Sakai crashes at 9:00 AM when we all log into it simultaneously. I’m happy with my decision to keep content focused on a small number of platforms, but tell students about other out-of-band ways to reach me so that if (when?) those platforms go down, I’m not inaccessible.

I made up my to-do list for next week, but I’m also treating that as tentative until after I get through tomorrow. The good thing is that I have two MWF classes that will have students engaging in them, an advising appointment, office hours, a research meeting, and a committee meeting all scheduled. So in one day I’ll get to test out a pretty wide swath of the types of things I have to be able to do.

I also finished tidying up my home office. I had already cleaned up the bit that is visible through my web cam, but my craft shelves were a bit of a mess and I’ve been spending a lot of time staring at them. So I feel ready for a start for a new format for the second half of the term with things nice and organized here.

So, the countdown is over, and tomorrow morning we see what happens.

Today was Saturday so work on my courses was sandwiched between grocery shopping in the morning and cooking meals for the week in the evening (plus a big pot of spaghetti sauce to share with my family). It was an uneventful day in preparing for my classes, which is reassuring.

The new piece I added in to my repertoire was a couple of videos capturing my problem solving process as I developed a few programs from start to finish. There was a lot of switching back and forth between the problem prompt, the editor, the compilation/run window, and the API documentation, but I only flubbed it once. I stuck with problems I’ve had students solve frequently in class in the past so I could try to incorporate I’ve seen students make into my code and they talk through how to figure out where the error is. I’m going to be very curious to see how much students make use of these videos versus more traditional lecture content (where I do code some, but generally not start-to-finish on a complete problem).

I’ve started to get emails from students working on assignments that were handed out before the break. It’s good to have that bit of normalcy back in my inbox. I’ve got an advising appointment scheduled for Monday and think there are a couple of students who may “stop by” office hours as well.

The big news today is that Commencement won’t happen in May – the current goal is to hold it late July/early August and seniors have been told they should mark that weekend as a tentative “save the date”. Hearing that announcement from our President was the first time in this whole situation I got teary – I had realized we wouldn’t be getting our seniors back together, but having it be official was hard. We’ve already started thinking about things we can do to offer students in our department some recognition and closure, even from a distance. I’m glad that the College is going to try to provide them with a celebration at some point, even if it’s not on the usual schedule.

Today, enough pieces clicked that I have a picture of what the rest of the semester will look like.

One challenge to this transition is that one of my courses is a new offering. I had a plan for the course, but I didn’t have a bank of entirely complete materials to fall back on. But I got the detailed project document for the second half of the term done and posted with its deadlines set, and things are falling into place now that I have that as a framework.

I’m still structuring my content around “class days” because it helps me make sure I’m parceling out work at a reasonable pace. Otherwise, I could see myself pushing in just one more activity or reading each week. For students, it doesn’t particularly matter if Monday’s work happens Monday, or Sunday, or Tuesday, or sometime roughly around Monday.  But for some of them, I also think it might help them to have the work parceled out in bundles of a size they are used to thinking of as “what I do in the next day or two”.

I have got used enough to lecturing into my monitor/webcam that I can hear myself getting my “teaching voice” back. I’m resisting the urge to go back and look at my first couple of videos I filmed and seeing how bad they are.

I’m guessing that as a mass, the faculty all have enough content and information starting to flow out that students are starting to test out their technology setups and use the second half of this week to figure out what online learning will look for them. So support for student technology is ramping up. This included working with the College to make sure that students who need a computer to complete our coursework and have been relying on the computer labs have loaner machines they can use now that the campus is in essential-services only mode. It seems like the gaps are getting plugged, but I worry about the gaps I don’t know about yet.

One of today’s lectures focused on getting students set up to build a machine learning classifier using the classic Iris dataset – it’s a nice, simple starting point that is small enough you can actually look at the data as well as train the system to predict what species an Iris is based on measurements of its flower. I introduced a personal touch by going out front and taking a picture of the irises growing in my yard to illustrate where the petal and sepal are and acknowledge that I, in fact, could use a machine learning system like we are building because I have idea what species of iris I planted in my yard two years ago.