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.

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!