Emergency remote online teaching

This semester started off so great. My students were developing their group work skills and would have such great conversations with little prompting from me. The project for calc 2 was interesting and most of my students had pulled together a nice intro to what happened during the Gulf of Mexico oil spill. My abstract algebra students were about to wrestle with quotient groups (which has been the hardest concept for most of my algebra courses), but many were really starting to understand cosets.

My department began talks about how we would shift to online courses before the spring break even if our college did not make the decision. Then during our spring break Covid-19 was declared a pandemic. We got the email the next day. We would delay opening the college for a week, and when we’d get back we’d be all online.

Many of my students spent the week moving out of dorms, figuring out how they could make rent, deciding if going home was the best option. All in all, my courses were not going to be their priority. I read so many blogs that week about teaching online and expectations I should set for myself. They mentioned that I should only really worry if I was teaching core classes. Given that I was teaching Calc 1, 2 and abstract algebra which are all core classes for the math major and many other stem majors this did not alleviate my stress.

I’m still wrestling with the morality of grades in this situation. Many of my students have more pressing problems than can they take an integral? Many of my students wifi is spotty if not non-existent, most don’t have cameras, some told me about how they did not time manage well in online courses, can’t make rent. So what does an ‘A’ mean in this situation?

Transitioning to online/remote learning

I decided to still hold class sessions and record as much as possible for my students that needed to have a schedule (and for myself because I need routine to function). I uploaded videos to youtube and shared them with students if they couldn’t attend. Most of my students are using Khan academy; I am thankful for all their professional videos. My college is a Microsoft campus, but I made all my decisions on what to use before I had enough training to be confident I could use Teams. So I didn’t use Teams.

I chose to have class in Zoom, and use Slack for my breakout sessions and for students where Zoom wasn’t working. I was lucky to already have a document camera from experimenting with it last year. So it hasn’t been hard to share math with students in this way. I then would take pictures of my notes and post to Slack.

My students would break up into groups and work on activities through the bulk of class. Ideally, they would then respond to polls or post their work, or ask questions. In practice, I worked through a lot of examples in most class because they weren’t comfortable/familiar with sharing their work in this format.

Many of my calc 2 students adapted to this format fairly well and many participated in the Slack channels. They would have good conversations and questions and would encourage me to go more in depth on certain ideas. Their project also changed to modeling Covid-19, and those have been real interesting reads.

Abstract and Calc 1 have been more quiet during our classes, but many students are still turning in the work and dming me on the regular for help with the assignments. I think I will try to adapt using a chat room like this one for regular in person classes because I think more of my students that didn’t engage as much before found it to be a better way to engage with the class. I wonder if Canvas has an easy to use chatroom feature?

Plus side

My cat has never been happier. She loves having both of us home to spend time with her.

Juno is so content.

Animal crossing is awesome and has been a fulfilling quarantine activity. I even got to have a birthday party through animal crossing. Complete with piñata!