Post-Remote Teaching

POST-REMOTE Teaching

This page provides you with suggestions, based on our work with hundreds of instructors, on what to keep among remote-era teaching innovations and what to leave behind. Furthermore, as illnesses will continue to contribute to students temporarily being unable to attend courses in person, we've emphasized teaching practices that allow for greater inclusivity of all students.

Please also check out the following resources.

NEW: Downloadable printable office signs

From In-Person to Remote.pdf

stuff to keep

This section includes recommendations from Online Education and CITL on remote-era innovations worth considering for ongoing inclusion in post-remote pedagogies.

Tech innovations that make teaching better

  • Using shared documents in small group activities

  • Using practical apps like Hypothesis (to promote collaboration) and Gradescope (to standardize grading)

  • Using Canvas as a tool for posting course materials, receiving/assessing assignments, and keeping track of grades

  • Using pre-recorded lectures content/media viewing

  • Recording lecture material and sharing slides, recordings, and tablet drawings for students to review

  • Giving students surveys to assess where they are with their learning (mid-quarter feedback questionnaire, etc.)

  • Teaching with tablets - connect classroom computer to Zoom

community-Building Practices

  • Using Canvas to create a welcoming landing page and build a class culture; include easy-to-find instructor/TA bios, contact information, and office hours signups

  • Be explicit about intentionally setting guidelines for engagement/interaction; include students in collaborative discussion on guidelines where appropriate

  • Welcome videos on platforms such as Flipgrid

  • Incorporating written discussion forums and discussion apps (Slack, Discord) that promote community building and collaboration

  • Crafting small-group activities designed to promote true engagement -- whether they’re happening in a traditional classroom or on Zoom

  • Rewriting syllabi and assignment prompts in a more welcoming and inclusive tone

Intentional, learning-centered course design practices

  • Using pedagogical techniques such as backward design to ensure that assignments are aligned with learning objectives

  • Employing flipped-classroom approaches to spend more classroom time on active learning activities

  • Continuing to move toward formative assessments and away from traditional high-stakes exams

  • Exploring innovative, evidence-based teaching practices such as memory retrieval, interleaving, etc. as a replacement for or adjunct to traditional lectures

  • Encouraging students to reflect on their own learning and study habits to foster self-efficacy

support-seeking practices

  • Collaborating/sharing ideas with colleagues about changes that have worked for us in learning communities and other informal networks

  • Reaching out regularly to the support teams at Online Education (OE) and the Center for Innovations in Teaching and Learning (CITL) for help with technology, course delivery, assessment structure, and other elements of course design

  • Taking advantage of resources such as the Accessibility Corps for assistance with caption review, course readiness checks, and/or accessible PDFs

  • Attending workshops and events sponsored by CITL and OE

  • Participating in self-directed study or discussion groups on teaching and learning (both general and discipline-specific)

Student-centered course organization practices

  • Continuing to use thoughtfully organized Canvas courses -- especially Modules -- for organization that enhances students’ ability to easily access and navigate through course materials

  • Keeping the syllabus on Canvas -- either in its original format or chunked out in Modules

practices that enhance student success, convenience, & equity

  • Holding group office hours/homework club/study sessions on Zoom

  • Maintaining increased flexibility with deadlines

  • Promoting online collaboration between students

  • Using remote labs as supplemental resource/asynchronous option

  • Continuing to provide asynchronous participation backup options -- e.g., posted lecture recordings and/or slides -- for sick students, strikes, or just to review course material

  • Using Canvas to host shared portfolios in arts and performance classes

  • Keeping our focus on equity and universal design

  • Giving pre-recorded instruction options for digital production/computer lab work

  • Using captioned, pre-recorded lectures and content/media viewing

  • Keeping accessibility of course material and lectures at the fore when planning our classes

  • Continuing to engage in trauma-informed teaching, with the recognition that many students are living through trauma outside of a pandemic

  • Giving a pre-course survey to better understand students’ access to technology, commitments outside of school, and their questions and concerns at the start of the quarter

stuff to toss

These are the pre-pandemic teaching practices that CITL and Online Education recommend leaving permanently behind. They didn’t work well in the past, and we know from our experiences this year that there are better options – options that are more humane and more effective in generating real learning.

"before times" default ways of doing things

  • Class sessions determined solely by the availability of physical classrooms

  • Most high-stakes assessments

  • Very long lectures with no student interaction

  • The peaks and valleys of the traditional midterm/final exam format

  • Either/or thinking about courses as fully asynchronous or fully synchronous -- instead, consider hybrid model

Blended Synchronous might be useful in specific situations (e.g., to facilitate Emergency Remote Attendance), but it is a challenging format to teach in due to the required focus on students who are both attending in person and remotely.

Blended Synchronous_10SEPT21.pdf
Technology Tips for Blended Synchronous Instruction

individual inquiry

These questions are designed to guide your thinking as you consider your own plan for transitioning back to a post-remote world.

  • What is best for your students, for you as the instructor, for other members of the teaching team, and for learning?

  • How can you best leverage technology to open up more time for authentic learning experiences and personalized instruction?

  • What aspects of remote learning have eased your students’ access to education and enabled greater participation?

  • Who among your colleagues could you have a conversation with about sharing your innovations, successes, and struggles during the past year?

  • With regard to the pedagogical changes you’ve made during the Pandemic Times, what have your students reported finding helpful or onerous?

  • What changes have you made that are supportive of your own mental/physical health? How many of these could you keep without compromising the quality of your course?

  • In thinking about accessibility, how can we continue to provide choice in learning environments? How can we vary our content and learning activities to open up academic discourse to ALL students, not just our ‘ideal’ students? What barriers do we create when we move back to physical spaces and how might our insights from the Pandemic Times help eliminate them?

  • In what ways do the changes you’ve made align with the goals of students, your colleagues, your department, etc.?