“Let’s ROLL with it!”
Rapid OnLine Learning (ROLL) involves the quick transfer of an on-the-ground course to a fully online environment. ROLL is not the same as planning ahead of time for online course development. Rather, it is a way for faculty to continue to teach and for students to continue to learn in a way that optimally addresses course learning objectives.
As we progress with the conversion from traditional in-person teaching to rapid online learning, we will update this site with more information, from UCITE, U[Tech], as well as faculty questions and feedback.
Faculty resources for online teaching
From CWRU University Technology:
Going Online Quickly: A Guide for Faculty
CWRU online resources. Puts specific and thorough emphasis on the effective use of Zoom and Canvas. help@case.edu is the place to go should you need additional support.
Faculty Guide for Secure Online Testing
These resources provide information on how to conduct online testing while retaining a high standard for academic integrity. The guide provides more detailed information on the Respondus Lockdown Browser, which is available for any Canvas course, as well as Honorlock, which is a by-request resource.
The elephant in the room when it comes to administering assessments online is academic integrity; that is, can we trust the work that students submit online is their own, unaided work? As uncomfortable as it is for us to doubt this, it is nonetheless important to do whatever we can to ensure honesty. The Respondus Lockdown Browser, which is linked to our Canvas Learning Management System, allows instructors to literally lockdown student computers when they are online, thus preventing them from connecting to online websites to find answers at the same time as they are completing their assessment.
From UCITE:
Adapting assessment tasks to a changed environment
This resource describes strategies that you can use to ensure your techniques for assessing your students are effective after moving them to an online environment.
Best Practices Across Disciplines, Colleges, and Schools
How to Get started
Keep Teaching: Getting Started
Two key take-aways from this piece is the importance of:
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Maintaining communication with students: email, discussion boards, virtual online office hours, and so on.
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Reviewing your syllabus: what temporary changes will need to be made? For instance: if students need to submit a lab report, but cannot physically be in the lab, is it possible to change the submission date? Or, alternatively, would it make sense to change the assessment task?*
Remembering accessibility
Quick Reference – 5 Accessibility Tips
Five top actions that instructors can put into place for online accessibility.
20 Tips for Teaching an Accessible Online Course | DO-IT
The University of Washington’s Disabilities, Opportunities, Internetworking, and Technology put together these easy-to-implement ideas to help you to maximize your online course accessibility to all students (not just those with disabilities).
Moving from the in-person to remote/online classes
Adapting Your On-Ground Course For Online Instruction
Although most of these resources are about assessment, this site also makes suggestions for alternatives to lecturing online (Point #5).
Developed by the Duke University School of Nursing, this is a thoughtful guide for making the move from traditional classroom teaching to the online environment. It includes additional resources for further information on the process.
Structured Design Approach for Converting Classroom Courses for Online Delivery
The focus of this article is on engineering courses, but it can certainly be adapted for others. The course matrix suggested looks complex, but is a useful way of organizing your thinking about remote/online teaching.
Lecturing
The overwhelming opinion online is that simply uploading lectures to Canvas or any other Learning Management System (LMS) is neither efficient nor useful.
The sites below offer some alternatives to lecturing in the remote/online learning environment, as well as some best practice ideas for those times in which a lecture is the best or only way of teaching a particular topic :
Adapting PowerPoint Lectures for Online Delivery: Best Practices
Keep Teaching: Tips for Engaging Video Lectures
Using technology (Canvas, Chat, etc.)
Best Practices: Online Pedagogy
Some general - but nonetheless broadly applicable - guidelines for effective teaching in the online environment. It includes a useful template for guiding students through the online learning process at the end.
Soundbites & B-roll: Instructor Rick Mohler’s architecture class goes online
A video example of what a remote class might resemble. The class in the example seems to be relatively small, and therefore you need to check whether the online platform is scalable should you have larger class numbers.
This site takes you through the processes of creating various types of quizzes in Canvas. Multiple Choice Questions, essays, file downloads, and questions requiring the use of numerical formulae, are all assessment possibilities.
Assessing students in the online or remote environment
Teaching and Learning Online: Communication, Community, and Assessment
A very useful resource developed by the University of Massachusetts. The assessment ideas start on page 35 of the document.
*JoVE | Peer Reviewed Scientific Video Journal - Methods and Protocols - the Journal of Visualized Experiments provides videos of scientific experiments that could be used as the basis of an assessment task that could, for instance, require students to describe the experimental process, discuss results, predict what might happen if one part of the process were modified, etc. Similar experiment visualizations are offered by labxchange, MERLOT and PhET: Free online physics, chemistry, biology, earth science and math simulations.
Three Ways to Use Google Drive for Student Assignments
Specifically relates to writing assignments, but could also be used for group projects.
Assessing students in the online modality
This entire article is very insightful, but instructors may find the examples (and how they have been thought through) on pages 12 - 20 to be particularly useful.
https://sites.psu.edu/onlineassessment/gather-evidence/
Provides some examples of both formative (feedback-driven) and summative (typical end-of-semester, or end of module 'proof of mastery’) assessment.
Syracuse University has created this one-pager that guides instructors through the thought process of setting up assignments online, and also provides some interesting examples. These could potentially be adapted for summative purposes. Also, Canvas has the same functionalities as Blackboard (referenced in the document).
Best practices for online projects
This resource covers individual and group written reports, oral presentations, and crafted objects. Remember: online projects and group assessments are possible - they will require some additional planning, though (which is never a bad thing!)
Active Learning in Hybrid and Physically Distanced Classrooms
Going from in-person learning to online or hybrid learning
Vanderbilt's Derek Bruff describes some useful active learning strategies that can adapt teaching approaches from a face-to-face class to those with limited in-person attendance requirements, or to a completely online learning environment.
Human Interaction in an Online Environment
Keep remembering that even though the various platforms could feel impersonal, there are ways you can use it to improve engagement. Below are two links to pages that foreground the importance of human interaction in the process of online teaching:
https://create.piktochart.com/output/5383776-how-to-humanize-your-online-cl
This is a wonderful infographic for text-weary eyes!
Humanizing Online Teaching By Mary Raygoza, Raina León, and Aaminah Norris
This article focuses on the non-technical aspects of teaching online. It contains a lot of suggestions; UCITE’s suggestion is to pull out one or two of these, and focus on them for the rest of this semester. Trying to do too many would be difficult to maintain successfully.