Basic Toolkit for Remote Teaching
We encourage faculty, especially Emory College faculty, to first and foremost begin with their school-specific information and resources to transition to online classes.
Online Discussion Boards in Canvas:
- Supports interaction with content, feedback, space to make mistakes and challenge ideas
- These are also a great way to support community engagement. Try to keep at least some of them less formal (i.e. not requiring academic writing/citations); that being said, they are a great place to share academic writing!
- Online discussion boards often more fully engage the class because everyone has an equal opportunity to speak and there is no time limit
- You might be surprised to see that students who may tend to say less in a face to face class discussion have more to say in an online discussion. Having more time to think about the question and response removes the added pressure of having to be able to respond on the spot, speak loud enough for everyone to hear etc.
Online Quizzes in Canvas:
- Supports interaction with content, feedback, recall, repeated practice, space to make mistakes
- You have many options with online quiz questions:
- Self-graded questions like multiple choice, true/false, and matching are useful because you don’t have to do any grading, and they support recall and repetition, two important factors in long-term retention.
- Short answer and essay questions give you as the instructor more insight into what they know and don’t know, and allows you to personalize feedback. Try to come up with a few strong questions rather than a lot of short questions – quality over quantity is good for everyone!
Assignments in Canvas:
- The Assignments tool is a great place to collect assignments (research, analysis, media, presentations etc.) and give personalized feedback (SpeedGrader is easy and amazing!)
- While “Assignments” itself is pretty vague and general, take some time to think about how they could be used in a creative way to support student learning. Students could create a research-based short story, music video, or blog. They could upload an interview, presentation or demonstration. All of these things support interaction with content, repetition, space to make mistakes and get feedback. It can also give them a chance to be creative and have fun, something that I’m sure is much needed!
- This is also a great place to collect work they might do by hand like math/science equations or drawings. Simply have them take a picture of their work and upload it.
Google Apps (Docs, Sheets, Slides, Forms etc.):
- Perfect suite of tools to use for collaboration.
- Courses where the learning goals might be more focused on soft-skills like communication, leadership, collaboration etc., will especially benefit from using these. You are able to track student participation and project iterations, so it’s a great space to provide ongoing feedback and see growth.
- You can even set up a Google Doc right in your Canvas course!
The Teaching and Learning Technologies team is offering continuous Canvas workshops that cover many of these tools, and here is a direct link to the Official Canvas Guides.