The Philosophers' Cocoon

My university, like many others across the world is moving to teach online in the light of the Covid-19 pandemic. Given that many of us have little prior experience with this (I personally have none), the Cocoon thinks it is useful to host a series on this. Anyone with experience in online teaching is welcome to submit material for this series. 

Our first post is by Fritz McDonald, Associate Professor of Philosophy, Oakland University, Rochester, Michigan

I have been teaching online for about a decade. In fact, my whole course load this year is online. It’s a matter of convenience for me and my students—I have a long commute to my university, and so do many of my students. I am still not sure, as I’ll note below, that online classes really are a good substitute for the work we typically do in face to face classes. All of us should do what we can, no matter how we teach, but within reason.

The first thing I would stress to those of you new to online instruction is that instructor presence is a big deal in online teaching. Email your students to keep them updated on exactly what they need to do, how they need to do it, and when. Don’t just assume they will read what’s on the learning management system page. Keep on top of students who are not doing the work, or not doing well.

This is a lot of work, obviously, and so is converting a face to face class into an online class. Online teaching is not easy. Making a face to face class into an online class is not a simple matter. It took me years, not days, to figure out better ways to teach online. I spent a good two years researching best practices in teaching logic online, and I’m still not sure I have it figured out.

If your university has a center for online teaching, take advantages of all its resources. Don’t be afraid to look dumb or silly—you’re learning a whole new way of teaching, and it’s best to be humble about what you know.

As you may know, there are two general approaches to teaching online: asynchronous courses and synchronous courses. Asynchronous courses can be done on a student’s own schedule, with materials like recorded videos used to substitute for lectures. Some asynchronous classes are run in a way that allows all the work to be completed as the student sees fit, others have typical weekly schedules and deadlines. Synchronous courses involve a set meeting time, achieved through either video conferences or online chat forums.

A lot of what you can do easily on a learning management system platform like Blackboard or Moodle can be done in either synchronous or asynchronous classes. Useful resources include multiple choice quizzes, short and longer writing assignments, and online discussion forums. Any learning management system will be able to handle your materials in ways that make them easy for you to grade.

I think a lot of people will be inclined to try running a synchronous course. I have seen a number of philosophers post on Twitter and on blogs that they are planning to run class sessions on video conferencing platforms like Zoom. In my first five or so years of online teaching, that is how I tried to run my classes, and it did not work especially well. It was only after taking a course on online teaching with one of the learning designers at my university (Oakland University, Rochester, Michigan, USA) that I moved away from synchronous, video conferencing sessions and towards asynchronous activities. In the ideal world, I would like to use a mix of the two, but there are many issues with synchronous courses and video conferencing.

First, any of your students who have taken an asynchronous online class with another professor might be surprised that you are setting required meeting times. One student I taught, who was familiar with asynchronous online classes, called my decision to require synchronous video conferencing sessions in my early online classes “the stupidest fucking thing I have ever heard.” (That is a direct quote). I do not entirely agree, but I had been hoping to do some things online with synchronous courses that asynchronous courses cannot easily achieve, particularly interaction among students.

I think students enjoy asynchronous courses more. In typical circumstances, they might sign up for an online course expecting not to have to sign in at some specific time and date. In the current hectic conditions we live under, this sort of requirement to be online at a given time might be too much to ask.

The problems with scheduling are not the only issue with synchronous classes. There are many technical problems that can arise with synchronous courses. Long video conferencing sessions are difficult to run and manage. Not everyone will have a microphone and web camera set up in an ideal way to allow for a seamless online chat. It’s not like holding a one to one conversation with a technologically sophisticated friend on FaceTime. There will be distracting noises and images, cameras poorly placed, and poor sound quality from your students’ microphones. Joshua Kim has an excellent discussion of these kinds of issues in Inside Higher Ed:

https://www.insidehighered.com/blogs/technology-and-learning/running-synchronous-online-classes

As Kim wrote in 2013, regarding audio issues: “The other audio problem that I see is feedback. Students forget to mute their computer audio, causing terrible echoes. Or background noise, the barking dog or busy office, makes it difficult for everyone to hear. Online meetings are often loud and distracting events. I'm not sure how to achieve a quieter experience.”

Short, recorded videos work better. You can control the environment for your recorded videos. I would strongly suggest making videos rather than just posting your PowerPoints and lecture notes online. Students, in my experience, are much more likely to watch a video than read another text. I post my videos to YouTube. This helps because everybody knows how to use YouTube. You can also track how many views you have on YouTube.

If you are going to use video conferencing, see if your college or university has a resource that will allow you to both share video of yourself and handle a screen capture. The videoconferencing software that my university uses is Cisco WebEx, which is very good. You can broadcast your screen as well as a video of yourself. That allows you to run a PowerPoint, Keynote, or other presentation while your video of yourself is running. It allows students to ask questions and broadcast videos of themselves. Their video pops up automatically when they raise their voice or virtually “raise their hand.” You can also discuss with students over chat, either person to person or to the entire class. The entire session can be recorded on WebEx and then watched later by students who could not attend at the scheduled time. This is sophisticated software that is better than running a Zoom or Google Hangouts session. Still, it’s hard to get students to get the hang of it. My main goal in using it, in the past, was to get students talking to each other. The technical limitations got in the way of that kind of interaction.

If you transition from face to face to online, you should consider altering your assignments significantly. To address student to student interaction, you can try to foster discussion by having graded discussion forums. Those have their limits, though, as is detailed here:

https://www.insidehighered.com/blogs/higher-ed-gamma/beyond-discussion-board

If you have not been using graded discussion forums so far in your class, your students may not like it if you try to add such an assignment in the middle of the semester. In my experience, students are much more likely to interact with each other in a graded discussion forum. Ungraded discussion forums typically receive little to no posts from students in my classes.

There are positives to trying different kinds of assignment in an online environment. I see online classes as an opportunity to get my students to do new and different kinds of writing. The main instructor-to-student discussions I have in my online classes involve writing. I give them short, low-stakes writing assignments, detailed essay exams, and papers that require serious revision. If it’s structured correctly and written in a way that tests students for producing their own work, a take-home exam or paper can be used to assess how well students are learning the materials and vital philosophical skills. I would structure your exams in a way that allows for open-book, open-note, take-home exams. You can hire a service like ProctorU to monitor your students while they are doing their work. However, I think it’s more interesting to consider ways to restructure your assignments to get students to demonstrate their own thinking.

One major issue with this kind of assignment and class is that I do not really know how to prevent a student from cheating by hiring a paper mill to write their assignments. This is an issue with typical term paper and take-home exams in face to face classes, but that is not a reason not to be concerned with this issue in an online class. In fact, it’s worse as an issue in an online class, because you cannot balance out take-home work with in-class assignments.

It is probably a good idea to lower your expectations about what you can achieve in these circumstances. Even with all my efforts, training, and experience, I am still not sure online education, as it currently exists, can foster learning in a way that traditional face-to-face learning can. I’m only one professor, though, and I’m willing to learn more. You might need to alter your learning outcomes, and many elements of your syllabus, to reflect the realistic limits of the situation you find yourself in.

I posted a version of this essay to my Facebook page, and a good friend who works as an adjunct pointed out that he does not have the time to seriously change his course given his low pay and the lack of commitment of his employer to developing good online courses. I am highly sensitive to this issue. In my opinion, nobody should be paid what colleges and universities typically pay adjuncts. Teaching is much more valuable than universities and colleges recognize. We should not demand too much of adjunct faculty. If you are underpaid or overworked, practice self-care while trying to do what you can with this difficult situation. I’m passionate about trying to get online education to work. You might reasonably not share this passion, especially if you’re drastically underpaid. Do what you can for your students, and do what you need to do for yourself.