Setting boundaries: An online learning adventure.

“I have never worked longer hours than I did when we switched to online in the middle of last semester.”

“…there is always something to grade, and I’m able to access it any time, I feel like I have to stay on top of it.”

“One thing that is not very clear to me is how to keep up with all the new comments/questions added to asynchronous discussions…”

“It sounds like we should constantly be on the lookout for new information, and that sounds a bit overwhelming.”

These are all examples of things I’ve been hearing from colleagues assigned the arduous task of teaching online in the Fall. I’ve had a few ideas regarding this concern floating around in my head since my online teaching fellowship in June. (If you have no clue what I am talking about, I explain the fellowship a bit here.) This came up multiple times during my fellowship, not the least because faculty enrolled in that course brought it up as a concern for teaching in the Fall. It also came up because I was a graduate student and a facilitator for a course that enrolled faculty members from my own department. The role-reversal was unusual, to say the least. Luckily, everyone in my department was incredibly supportive and respectful. They let me lead the live sessions without derailing the conversation or putting me in a position where I’d have to choose between awkwardly admonishing them or not doing my job well.

Still, the three-week course was an exercise in setting boundaries and expectations, especially over email. I quickly realized that spending a lot of time thoughtfully constructing an answer to every email as soon as it arrived, or attempting to personally solve every problem brought to my attention, just wasn’t feasible. I also couldn’t possibly entertain requests to meet over Zoom on a Friday evening and keep my sanity. Instead, I learned to delegate, answer emails in bulk, and refer people to resources available online instead of researching how to solve their very particular technology issues myself. This was not easy, since I genuinely like everyone in my department, and I’m conditioned to “be helpful” as much as possible. I also believe this is one of the most important things I learned through the fellowship.

Many of the strategies I learned can be translated into setting boundaries in an undergraduate course taught online. Thus, I thought it might help Future Maryam to have a list of ideas, both ones I have used, and ones I have read about in one place to refer back to as needed. I hope it helps some of you as well!

• Set up work hours. This first one is hopefully relatively obvious. Just because you’re “working from home” and you “live at home” doesn’t mean that regular work hours go out the window. Even if you are the type of person who works better in the evenings, like I am, just because you are working at 7 pm doesn’t mean you’re available for a 7 pm meeting. 
• Only answer emails during work hours. This is a continuation of the previous point. If you respond to emails at 10 am and at 8 pm, people will start to expect a response at every hour of the day. This is especially true if you answer every email within 10 minutes of it being received. Don’t do this. Set aside a time during regular work hours to respond to emails. 
• Make use of schedule-send. Both Outlook and Gmail now have this feature where you can schedule an email to be sent out at a specific time. If you are working at 7 pm and you receive an email that does not require an immediate response (hint: 95% of them don’t), but it would only take a couple minutes to write one, and you’d rather just get it over with, go for it! Write a response, and then schedule it to be sent out at 9 am. This way, it is out of your head, but it doesn’t give the impression that you are available 24/7.
• Get a Google Voice number. I’ve only recently gotten a google voice number, and while I haven’t used it for this purpose yet, I’m definitely intrigued by it. It seems like a suitable replacement for a “work phone” if that’s a luxury you were used to in pre-pandemic times. I never had a work phone, but I wonder if it would still be useful for your students to have more than one way of contacting you.
• Respond to things in one go. Set aside a time to respond to all emails from the past day in one go. I try to do this right after breakfast, at the top of my workday, though you could also do it at the end. If you’re assigning weekly asynchronous discussions, for example, set aside a time one a particular day of the week to go through them and respond to the ones that require a response. This way, you don’t have to constantly be on the lookout for new information.
• Set up an expectation beforehand for when you’d be available and responding to asynchronous content. For example, suppose you assign weekly posts and responses in a Discussion Forum, where the first post is due on Thursdays. You could let your students know in advance that you will read and respond to their posts on Friday. You could then set another deadline for them to respond to each other or you. In my hypothetical example, this deadline might be Sunday.  
• For email, I have seen people add something along the lines of “I will respond to your emails within 24-48 hours, except on the weekends.” to their syllabi. I think this is a good idea. This way, your students don’t have to struggle to decide how long it is appropriate to wait before sending a reminder email. 
• You could also set up an automatic reply to your email: “Hello! If you are a student in my [class name/number] class, please note that I do not check email between [this hour] and [this hour]. Please refer to the FAQs to see if your question has already been answered. If this is an absolute emergency, contact me at [alternative way to contact]” See below for more on FAQs, and note that a Google Voice number might be a good alternative contact method.
• Don’t respond to every single post. Going back to the discussion post example: don’t feel like you have to reply to every post. Respond where it feels natural, on posts that require a response—quality over quantity!
• Get students to respond to each other. There are many wrong ways of doing this, so tread lightly and carefully. Still, if you make it part of the assignment for students to respond to others’ posts, it takes off some expectation from your shoulders and fosters student-student interaction. This is especially helpful in a Q&A type discussion post, where students can ask questions, and other students can help answer. You could assign “bonus points” for solving a peer’s problem, for example. 
• On that note, create an FAQ document and a Q&A discussion board. Instead of five different students emailing you the same question at seven different times of the semester.. wait, that will still happen. The point is that it is easier to link to an item in an FAQ document instead of answering it seven times. On that note, see if you can create a document with embedded links to each question for easier access to each item. 
• The one thing that I dislike about the Canvas Discussion Forum is that you cannot tag users. Get students to type @YourName before a response that they’d like you to see and answer anyway. Then on your assigned day of the week, go through and answer the stuff that explicitly has you tagged first (you can search entries by using CTRL+F or the in-built search functions on Canvas.)
• If you’re teaching a large enrollment class, consider creating a separate email address for your class. I’ve also seen professors ask students to put “[Course Number]–[Course Title]–[optional: Section Number]” in the subject line. This especially helps if you’re teaching more than one Section or course.
• Last but not least: if this is your very first time teaching a course online (Spring 2020 doesn’t count), don’t overcomplicate it. It is deceptively easy to go down the technology rabbit hole and start buying into this myth that the more fancy tech you use, the more impressive your course would be. This is simply false. Remember, if you are overwhelmed — your students will be too!

I hope these help, and please let me know if you have any other ideas or if you disagree with some of mine! Until next time.

Summary Exercises: Students hate these!

…but I still don’t think they are entirely useless.

P.S. Am I doing this clickbait headline thing correctly yet?

P.P.S. the last time I posted, I promised weekly updates from my online teaching fellowship experience. Well, that didn’t happen. *laughs in retrospect.* It’s Monday, though, and I started this thing one time where I post a mini-tip on Mondays, so I’m going to just hop back on that train and ignore my recent pandemic-induced writer’s block.

So, what are summary exercises, and why do students hate them?

I stole this idea from someone on the internet. This was a long time ago, though, and I don’t remember who I should credit for this (sorry!). The original blog post writer I stole this idea from had the following basic recipe: Every day before class, she assigned her students a section of the book to read and write a summary. Then, they covered that section in class. Students submitted these summaries at the beginning of class, and I don’t remember if they were graded. I think even if they were, they constituted a small part of their overall grade.

From what I remember of the original post, her students really hated these at the beginning of the semester. It was so much extra work, and the type of work they don’t come into a math class expecting to do. However, by the end of the semester, they realized that writing these summaries helped them understand the lectures better, and the notes they made were invaluable when exams came around. Happy ending!

In Spring 2020, I wanted to implement something similar, but instead of having students read and write a summary before class, I wanted them to write one after. I worry about the flipped classroom approach in an intro-math class. Learning to read math is a skill, and we shouldn’t just assume that students have that skill down when they first enter a calculus 1 or 2 class. I am more open to the flipped classroom idea if you ask them to watch a video explaining math before class. Still, even in this version, you have to find a way to make sure they are actually following instructions. Anyway, thoughts on the flipped classroom should maybe go in a different blog post.

The way I implemented Summary Exercises was via Canvas. I set up assignments due at 11:59 PM on the day of class, after every class session. Students could enter summaries in a text box, or upload files (PDFs, scans, word docs, etc.). Almost none of the students went for the non-text box option, which surprised me. These assignments were graded for completion, but I encouraged them multiple times in the first few weeks to make them as detailed as possible. The more effort they put in at the beginning, the more it would help when midterms rolled around.

After the first midterm, I gave students their midterm evaluations, and a couple of students commented that they found the exercises “useless.” At this point, I had also gotten tired of them. At the start of the semester, students were just doing them to check a box, so they weren’t that good qualitatively. After I spent some time encouraging them to add more details (and gave them examples of what a good summary looks like — in retrospect, I should have done this at the start of the semester), the quality seemed to improve a lot for the next couple of weeks. 

By the middle of the term, however, students had realized that there wasn’t enough incentive to put effort into them (remember they were only being graded for completion) and so they had gone back to writing a sentence or two with not that much content. After the midterm evaluations, I seriously thought about getting rid of them altogether…

And then the pandemic hit. 

We had to move our instruction to a remote learning model with almost no time to plan. I taught the rest of the semester as live synchronous sessions via Zoom that I recorded and posted online. This gave me an idea: maybe the summary exercises could actually be useful in such a setting. If nothing else, they’d help me track whether students watched the recorded lectures and whether they were getting anything out of them. 

I changed the format of summary exercises to graded discussions on Canvas. After every class session, they still had an assignment to do (now at the start of the next class session instead of 11:59 PM), but instead of submitting their summary just to me, they were posting it in a Canvas discussion board. The discussion board was set up so that you had to post a response before you could see others’ replies. I figured that the prospect of other people reading your answers might motivate students to put more effort into them. I also made them graded for content, which just meant that I won’t give you a 100% if what you’d written was completely irrelevant or devoid of substance.

Well, if my final term evaluations are anything to go by, students hated this new arrangement. Here are some quotes directly pulled from the evaluations.

• Strengths: Quizzes and in class activites were extremely helpful in learning the course material Weaknesses: Summary exercises.

• Remove summary exercises. They do not fulfil the role they are set out to fill and cause unnecessary stress

• …feel that summary excercises were pointless and I never looked back at them

• Strengths: Explained all course material at a very reasonable pace. Did not rush anything. Answered all questions both in person and through emails. Very easily accessible to meet in her office if required Weaknesses: Summary exercises

I almost want to laugh at the intensity of this hatred, but I won’t. Also, I promise that this was NOT the case in my mid-term evaluations, otherwise I would have gotten rid of them altogether. Midterm evaluations were lukewarm, and had a “eh, I don’t hate them but don’t think they are useful” vibe (and that too only from 2 students!)

(Also full disclosure, most students didn’t comment on Summary Exercises at all. One student even said “Summary exercises and index card problems allowed me to go back and learn the broad topic of each class before a quiz or test,” in the end of term evaluation. So it wasn’t all terrible.)

The point is, students didn’t like them, but I thought they were useful for me in the strange times of pandemic teaching, because they helped me keep track of who was watching (and actually learning from) my recorded videos.

I wouldn’t trash the idea completely based on my Spring 2020 experience, but I am definitely looking for a different way to implement them in a future semester. If you’ve read this entire (not that mini-) post and have ideas and suggestions for me, please post them in the comments because I’m all ears!

Be safe, and I’ll see you with another mini-tip Monday on some future Monday. Or Sunday night. (Who knows, it’s 2020, could be Thursday. #Whatistime.)