Life Update + Updates about this blog

Hello, hello! Long time no see. When I started this blog in March 2020, I intended it to chronicle my experience of moving my Calculus 2 class online in light of Covid-19. Having said that, I did have plans for what this blog would become after my class ended: I wanted to continue writing about techniques that have helped me improve my teaching, as well as pedagogical tools that I have considered implementing but haven’t yet (and why). 

Once Spring 2020 actually ended, though, I hit a metaphorical wall: the structure that having a class to teach was giving me suddenly disappeared, and I had a hard time reinventing my schedule from scratch. So I took an unintentional 5-week hiatus from this blog and spent some time (finalizing grades and) tending to other aspects of my personal and professional life. I spent more time doing research and writing, learned to cook more delicious food, started learning how to draw and illustrate on my iPad (using Procreate).

I recreated a Brooklyn Nine-Nine poster using Procreate.

I also started coding a board game in Python, which is a side-project I’ve wanted to work on since freshman year of college and have just not gotten around to it. (If any of this interests you, tell me in the comments: I’d love to chat more about my quarantine hobbies!)

Alongside these personal projects, I got nominated for and accepted a fellowship that will allow me to work closely with math faculty specifically on ways to engage students in an online platform. As part of this fellowship, I participated in a 3-week training that was meant to “help faculty reconceptualize their course materials in order to deliver it an online course or be prepared to move flexibly between different modalities of delivery.”  

The cohort of trainees in this 3-week program included faculty and graduate students from all departments of Emory. The graduate students were mostly those who were nominated by their respective departments for this fellowship. In contrast, the faculty included everyone teaching in the Summer semester at Emory. This allowed me to have conversations with people in all sorts of subjects about effective teaching.

Starting next week, I will help facilitate a similar training, specifically aimed at the math faculty who are signed up to teach in the Fall. I’m excited to get to talk to people who have taught math for years and years, about the challenges and opportunities of teaching an intentional, engaging, and rigorous online course.

What this means for this blog for the next few weeks, is that instead of posting about things I’ve done and whether they helped, I might post about challenges I foresee in remote learning and possibly ideas about how to overcome them. Since I’ve never taught a real online class before, most of these blog-posts might feel unresolved and might end with more questions than answers. I hope that writing these questions down will help me clarify ideas in my head and help me gather ideas from the internet hive-mind.

So I hope you will engage, and if you have ideas and solutions, you will share. One of my favorite mentors recently told me that she believes teaching should be a community exercise, and that she wants to foster an environment (within our department) where anyone can go up to anyone else and ask “Hey, I’m teaching XYZ and I’ve run into this problem. How did you handle it when you taught something similar?” I hope that I can practice the same in this little corner of the academic internet.

See you guys next week, with the first installment in this series, a blogpost about synchronous vs. asynchronous delivery.

Mini-tip Monday: Zoom Polls

Happy fourth week of online teaching, everyone! Can you believe we made it to four weeks? Today’s Mini-tip Monday is also about the move to remote learning. (See here and here for the previous posts in this series.)

If you’re new to my blog, let me remind you of my set-up. I am teaching Calculus II synchronously using Zoom, the now-famous web-conferencing service. I share my iPad’s screen and use notability to write while I lecture. I use Canvas to communicate with my students, post class recording and notes, and share any other resources.

The set-up has been working very well for me. On average, about two-thirds of my students are attending the class sessions live. The others are engaging via Canvas, and I haven’t had a student completely disappear yet. (I have had a couple of close calls, but reaching out to them has always resulted in them resurfacing. I’m keeping my fingers crossed that my students can all make it through these chaotic times in good health and spirits.)

While I have adjusted reasonably well to teaching online, I really do miss being in a physical classroom. Apart from just missing the energy of a physical classroom, I miss being able to communicate quickly and effectively by virtue of being in the same space as my students. There are just some things that cannot be replicated in an online class, though not for lack of trying. One of the things I miss the most is the ability to get quick feedback from students when explaining a new topic. I do this in a face-to-face class by breaking my lecture up with straightforward problems that I ask them to solve on a pen and paper. I encourage them to talk to each other while attempting these problems, and I do a quick walk-around to glance at their work and gauge where they are. If needed, I pause and chat with the students who seem to be struggling, offering individual help. 

Sometimes I do the same thing before I introduce a new topic. I ask the students to solve a warm-up problem, something that nicely sets up the next section we are going to cover. (I will talk about warm-up problems more in a future Mini-Tip Monday.)

All of this seems impossible in an online class where I can’t glance at their work in real-time. While I haven’t found a way to completely replicate the ease of a physical classroom, one of the most effective tools I’ve used to get me close is the “Polling” option on Zoom.

I have taken the time to reframe the problems I’d usually ask students to solve in a class into multiple-choice questions. Obviously, this reframing would not work for every type of question. Still, when it does, it provides me with invaluable quick feedback that I had no other way of getting in an online class.

Let me explain how Polling works a little bit. You can set up polls you want to use in a class session ahead of time. I usually do this the night before. If you have a recurring meeting scheduled, you can add polls to the meeting at any time, and Zoom saves all of them. Here I will list three examples of questions that translate well to Zoom Polls.

Example 1

Topic: Trigonometric integrals.

Warm-up problem: Integrate sin^2(x) with respect to x.

Zoom Alternative: Which of the following methods would you use to integrate sin^2(x) with respect to x? 

Poll Options:  Integration by parts, u-substitution, a trigonometric identity

(Once students have answered this poll, I would ask them to take a few minutes and try to solve the problem using the method they picked. After a few minutes, I would rerun the poll, asking them to choose either the same or a different approach.)

Example 2

In-class problem: For what values of x does the series {insert some power series here, say with the interval of convergence [-1/2,1/2)} converge?

Zoom Alternative: For what values of x does the series {power series} converge?

Poll Options: (-1/2,1/2), [-1/2,1/2), [-1/2,1/2], (-1,1), I do not know.

(If anyone picks the last option, I would pause and ask them if they have a specific question.)

There are also some much simpler questions one could ask over Zoom. For example,

Zoom Poll: Does the series {insert series} converge or diverge?

Poll Options: Converges, Diverges.

Here’s one I used in class just today.

Zoom Poll: The following differential equation models the growth of a population P: dP/dt=8P(1000-P). If the current population is 200, is the population increasing or decreasing? 

Poll Options: Increasing, Decreasing.

While this approach has it’s imperfections, I have had a lot of success using it. In particular, I like it a lot better than the alternative that I’ve been considering: breakout rooms. Let me know in the comments of any strategies that you’ve developed to make your online lectures more interactive. I am always looking for ideas!

 

Mini-tip Monday: Running to-do lists

I’m back with another Mini-tip Monday, a series where I post a bite-sized piece of information or suggestion that has helped me streamline or improve my teaching. If you missed the one from last week, click here to read it.

For the next several weeks, the mini-tips will specifically be about moving to remote learning amid the Covid19 crisis. We will move to other topics once things go back to some semblance of normal.

This week’s mini-tip is about running to-do lists. 

Since moving our class online, a lot has inadvertently changed. Students were used to a weekly study routine that has had to be modified. I’ve tried not to jostle any of their deadlines drastically, e.g., homework is still due on Mondays, in-class quizzes that used to take place on Wednesdays have been converted to weekly Canvas quizzes, which still take place on Wednesdays, etc. My intention is to keep things as close to normal as possible while being as flexible and compassionate towards their individual circumstances as I can be.

It is a hard balance to strike, though. For example, we nixed a midterm that was supposed to take place right after spring break, since that would not have given them enough time to get used to taking their class online, etc. Emory extended their spring break for a week, which means that we had to rearrange content for the rest of the semester. 

To help students with this transition, I’ve decided to post a running to-do list on our Canvas homepage. I update it as I go during the week, and send out an email with all upcoming deadlines on Monday evenings. Here’s an example of what that email looked like as of Monday evening last week [I’ll add comments and explanations in square brackets, like so. The stuff in blue used to be links that I’ve removed for the blog post.]

"I thought it might help if I made a consolidated list of to-dos for you each week, just to make this transition easier. 

First, if you weren't present for today's synchronous class (and even if you were), please take a look at this page: March 30th, 2020. [links to Canvas page titled "March 30th, 2020. See my last blog post for details about how I'm using Canvas pages.] I have updated it with a link to the video-recording of the lecture, and a PDF file containing notes. 

Then, please complete today's summary exercise [links to the correct page on Canvas. More details about summary exercises in a future mini-tip Monday post!] if you haven't yet. 

This week's WebAssign [online homework] is due on today by 5:00 PM EST. [This is when WebAssign has always been due, and since it's always been online, I decided not to change the deadline.] Please make sure that you have completed it. Feel free to email me any questions. 

There will be a new WebAssign out tonight, which covers Sections 11.10 and 11.11 from your textbook. It will be due next Monday; please plan a time to work on it this week. 

Our weekly quiz will be released on Wednesday at 11 AM. It will available until Thursday at 11 AM. It covers 11.8 and 11.9 from your textbook.

Finally, please attend class (if you can, or watch the recorded video) on Wednesday and Friday, and submit the corresponding summary exercises.

Please let me know if you have any questions/comments or feedback. 
 
Stay safe, 
 
Maryam" 

On my Canvas homepage, that above email just translates to:

• Notes+Recording for Monday’s class: March 30th, 2020.
• Summary exercise for Monday, March 30th.
• WebAssign (due March 30, 5:00PM EST).
• Quiz on Wednesday, April 1st, 11 AM (Sections 11.8 and 11.9)
• Notes+Recording for Wednesday’s class: April 1st, 2020.
• Summary exercise for Wednesday, April 1st.
• Notes+Recording for Friday’s class: April 3rd, 2020.
• Summary exercise for Friday, April 3rd.

This way, they get a reminder on Mondays, but they also have a concise, frequently-updated running list that they can check any day of the week.

In a regular semester, I send students email reminders for any deadlines that they wouldn’t get an automatic reminder for. I’ve never thought of doing one big email with a consolidated to-do list for the whole week before, but after doing them for the past couple of weeks, I like the idea enough that I hope to continue doing this post-pandemic!

As always, please let me know in the comments if you have ideas for making this more efficient and effective. Thank you for reading this far!

Mini-tip Monday: Canvas Pages

I have decided to post a “mini-tip,” a bite-sized piece of information or suggestion that has helped me streamline or improve my teaching, on Mondays. For the next several weeks, these will specifically be about moving to remote learning amid the Covid19 crisis. The hope is that I can keep this going once things are back to normal.

Today’s mini-tip is about Canvas Pages. I have been using Zoom to deliver my lectures synchronously, and Canvas to communicate with my students otherwise. All homework, lecture notes, lecture videos, etc. are posted on Canvas. One consequence of moving online is that there is a whole flurry of information that needs to be communicated to students related to every class period, e.g., class recording, notes, any related hw due that day, summary exercises*, etc.

Even though I’m hosting synchronous classes, I am trying to post extra resources for students who cannot make it to synchronous lectures for various reasons (e.g., students who are in vastly different time-zones) and thus can’t take advantage of the option to interrupt me and ask questions in class.

All this being said, this means that I needed a way to provide them with all of this information in one, easily accessible, user-friendly place. Enter Canvas Pages!

I’ve set up a “Module” in Canvas called “Online Classes,” which contains a Canvas “Page” for each class session that I’ve taught. Here’s a visual of how that looks. The title for each Page is just the date of the lecture.

 

The green tick marks in front of the Pages indicate that these Pages are published.

Once you click on each Page, I have the following template set up. I fill in the relevant information after each class session.

In this class session, we will be talking about Section [section number]: [section title] from the textbook.

Topics and Learning Objectives:

[List of topics and Objectives]

Before you come to class:

[Readings they should do before class and/or problems they should work on before coming to class.]

Links to:

– Class Notes, Class Recording, Summary Exercise, any other resources.

Not every class session needs all of this information, but it is helpful to me to have a template, so I don’t miss anything. Here’s an example from last Monday.

I hope this is helpful for other people who are transitioning their classes to an online remote-learning format. Please let me know if you have any questions about my set up and/or any ideas to make it better!

 

Stay safe and sane!

*I will do a separate mini-tip Monday on Summary Exercises if you're curious.

Update after first online class.

Hello! I’m back with an update after my first Online class. In short, it went really well! Most of my students actually showed up. This was a surprise, considering that last night, on our instructors’ text chain, I was making contingency plans for the case that literally no one shows up.

Me: Would you record a lecture anyway? How long do you wait for people before you start teaching? What if no one shows up, you wait 5 minutes, you start, and then one student shows up 15 minutes late, realizes you’ve been teaching to an empty classroom for 15 minutes, and then laughs at you for the next 10 minutes?!

Friend: These are new and terrifying things I have not thought about, and now I will not sleep.

Anyway, almost everyone who is in the right time zone showed up, and more than that, the ones who did were actually engaged. They asked and answered questions, responded to Zoom polls, and were generally really good about being engaged (which can I just say, I’m genuinely thankful for? It really made my life easier knowing that all of this hard work in putting my course online isn’t going to waste.)

Anyway, to cut a long story short, here are things that helped me, and please send any ideas you might have to improve this system my way.

• I have set up a recurring Zoom meeting just for our lectures. They already have the meeting ID, but I sent out an email about 10 minutes before with a link to join.
• I am using my laptop to host the meeting, which, in particular, means I’m using my laptop’s webcam for video, and my headphones are connected to my computer too. However, I’m using my iPad to share my screen where I’m writing notes.
• I put up a “warm-up problem” on the screen before I began my class so that students who join early have something to work on. I do this in my IRL classes too. I like to be early in my classroom when I can be, and this helps fill in the awkward gaps before we officially start class.
• I found that using chat is distracting, so I turned off the feature where “participants can privately chat with other participants” but left the “participants can chat with everyone” on, in case some people do not have reliable audio.
• The “Poll” option in Zoom is convenient, but I still have to figure out how to make a poll before class that I can pull up whenever I want.
• I set my lecture meetings to auto-record on Zoom, which means that I do not have to remember to record them every time. This also means that if I join early (which I want to keep doing), it also records the first 10 minutes of silence. This is not a problem, though, since Zoom’s functionality of clipping out the first few minutes is speedy and efficient.