Like every college and university, MSOE shifted to online learning part-way through our Spring quarter in response to the Coronavirus. For me, this meant converting my CS2852 Data Structures and CS3851 Algorithms classes to an online format “on the fly.” Faculty who teach online more regularly have argued that we shouldn’t think of what we have done this quarter as a true instance of online learning. After all, a course designed to be “online first” or “online native” (borrowing from my former life where we talked about apps as being “cloud native”) may look very different and be far more effective. Although I don’t deny this, I do think that moving my class online was an incredibly valuable experience for me, offered me opportunities to experiment, and provided room to reflect and improve as a teacher both online and offline.

Useful Resources

How I Ran My Classes

I didn’t know students’ schedules and home life situations. I wanted to give students maximum flexibility to accomodate their learning to whatever else was going on in their lives. I wanted to support the asynchonous learning with appropriate, low-barrier, synchronous touch points to keep students engaged and motivated. And lastly, I wanted to empower students to be more independent and self-directed in their learning through larger out-of-class activities and scaffolding.

In the beginning of the course, I wrote students a letter explaining what to expect from the course. The letter included topics such as how we would faciliate lectures and interactions, expectations around work load, the types of assignments used, and how I would grade everything. In the letter, I tried to provide justifications and explanations for every decision.

I effectively used a “flipped” classroom approach. I recorded my lectures using Quicktime and posted the recordings on VidGrid for asynchronous viewing. I posted the slides and links to the videos on our LMS. I still met with the class synchronously during lecture times, but we used that time to touch base, talk, and anser questions. I found it incredibly important to engage students in casual talk. Students needed social outlets and it was important to remind them that it was okay to take breaks, have hobbies, and take cares of themselves. The synchronous times rarely lasted near the full lecture time. I credit the synchronous times as helping students keep on track with the asynchronous components and on schedule. I cancelled my normal lab times since I was already asking students to watch lectures outside of scheduled class times.

I found it necessary to modify some of my usual teaching tools. Instead of weekly quizzes, I assigned large homework sets. I had three reasons for this. First, quizzes with coding and short-response questions were difficult to translate to an online format. Secondly, I didn’t want to force students to conform to short, rigid time frames (e.g., return in 24 hours). And lastly, the homework sets gave students opportunities to practice and evaluate their own understanding.

I had already begun to provide additional scaffolding in lab assignments; the additional scaffolding carried over to teaching online. I divided the labs into two parts: implementing an algorithm and then some investigation (e.g., benchmarks) with their implementation. I scaffolded the implementation by providing automated unit tests. These unit tests accounted for 30% of the overall lab grade in most cases. Students said that they found it very helpful to have the tests to validate their understanding of what was being asked of them and the correctness of their implementation.

What Went Well

  • Students appreciated that I clearly laid out expectations and workflows in a detailed letter, especially since online learning was new to most of them
  • Students reported that they liked the additional flexibility of my class
  • Students felt that using the synchronous time to check in, ask questions, and talk informally helped to keep them engaged and feeling supported
  • Students liked the homework assignments
  • I am confident that my students learned the material they needed to learn

Areas with Room for Improvement

  • I struggled to grade the assignments I created. For example, I asked students to submit pictures of their handwritten solutions to homework taken with their phones. I had no easy way to mark up the scans, however. As a result, I often gave very little feedback and took a long time to return grades.
  • Some students struggled to adjust to online learning. It requires far more internal motivation since there isn’t the usual support and schedule that comes from being in a class with other learners. I want to find ways to keep students engaged and motivated.
  • Students had to balance work, lack of dedicated space, living with others, family obligations, and social isolation.

What I Would Do Differently Going Forward

Digital Grading Workflow

One of my largest challenges in teaching online was returning grading assignments in a reasonable amount of time and providing reasonable feedback. I found it incredibly difficult to grade some of the assignments I wrote. For the homeworks and exams from the Algorithms classes, I heavily relied on short response questions that involved writing proofs, analyzing code, writing psuecode, etc. These are not too bad to grade on paper but I was not equipped to grade them digitally.

I intend to make three general changes going forward. The first big change will be to establish a digital grading workflow for PDFs similar to what is described here. Going forward, I will require students to use an app such as Adobe Scan to generate and submit PDFs. I will use the drawing functionality of an app such PDF Expert or Notability to write notes on the PDFs. For my Macbook Pro, Ten 1 Design sells a solution called Inklet that can be used with the Pogo stylus to use the (rather large) trackpad as a pen tablet. I also intend to purchase the Adonit Pixel stylus so that I can evaluate using my iPad Air 2 for grading. Once marked up, I’ll send the annotated PDFs back to the students.

Even with increased efficiency, there isn’t sufficient time to grade all assignments in detail; I intend to handle this in two ways. First, I will restructure my assignments so that they are easier to grade. This may entail making some assignments pass / fail and/or only grading a subset of problems. Secondly, I intend to introduce “grading sheets.” I’ll create Word documents containing rubrics, point break downs, and an area for comments. I’ll return to the filled out grade sheets to students through Box folders.

Start My Courses with Planning Prompts

Many of my students struggled to focus on school while at home. For example, several students struggled to find dedicated study spaces without distractions and had to balance school with work schedules and family obligations. Not all students felt comfortable reaching out to ask questions when they became stuck.

I recently saw a Twitter thread in which Justin Reich introduced planning prompts and described their impact on student engagement and completion rates for MOOCs. In a PNAS paper, the researchers found that planning prompts improved completion rates in courses with global achievement gaps between more- and less-developed countries but that predicting which courses would have global achievement gaps ahead of time was not feasible.

I want to apply this technique in my classes going forward. Although I won’t have adequate sample sizes to evaluate the impact, I believe that the approach can only help (not hurt) students. If they are able to set goals, plan how they will make time and find space to study, and evaluate how to respond to obstacles, I believe that students won’t be as likely to shut down when they run into obstacles.

I want to structure the activity into parts. First, I want to give students an opportunity to fill out planning prompts on their own so they have opportunities to think deeply and reflect. I would use the three questions suggested in the Twitter thread:

  1. When and where do you plan to spend time engaging the course content?
  2. What specific steps will you take to ensure you complete the required course work?
  3. How will you respond to obstacles that you might encounter during the course?

Secondly, I want to review the prompt through a class discussion. I would collate the responses, remove duplicates, and present them without identifying information to the class. I believe this will give students feedback, ideas for improvements adjustments, and normalize challenges, obstacles, and associated feelings that students may encounter.

Detailed Course Outcomes

Students do better when expectations are clearly laid out. Previously, I created bulleted lists of detailed course outcomes by unit at the end of my classes to help students study for the final exams. Now that these outcome lists are constructed, I want to share them with students during the first week of class. My hope is that students will go into each unit knowing what they need to learn and get out of that unit. I am hoping this will contribute to my goal of empowering students to be independent and self-directed in their learning.

Conclusions

My approach for adapting my class worked well for both my students and myself. I generally aimed for small but effective adapations that were aligned with teaching techniques with which I was already comfortable. (This is consistent with the advice of the book Small Teaching Online, which I found helpful when preparing my reflection.) Recording my lectures for students to view asynchonously was easy enough. I already had a preference for curating streamlined slides and lecturing off of them. In the past students have found my slides to form a useful set of notes for studying and reviewing. Similarly, homework sets were similar in format to my quizzes but longer and more comprehensive.

I would feel comfortable teaching online again. In some ways, I prefer the asynchronous nature of online teaching since I greatly appreciate having a more flexible schedule and being able to teach from home. I recognize that I may hold a minority view among both students and other faculty. (It helps that I worked entirely remotely for my four years in industry.)

Even if I don’t end up teaching online again, however, my experience from last Spring and subsequent reflection have provided opportunities to improve my teaching overall.