(July 13, 2020) See more fall 2020 resources, blogs and articles here.

How do faculty prepare to teach in very uncertain times in just a few weeks? Covid-19 has kicked many of our traditional teaching methods to the curb. Fall plans could easily change in the next few weeks, so we will need to stay nimble, but we can already know that we are likely to face a dramatically different set of assumptions. 

• Fewer or no students on campus.
• Fewer students in individual classes.
• 6 feet separation in and out of classrooms and masks.
• Everyone will be in quarantine at some point.
• Many classes only online
• Many classes with both F2F and virtual components (a version of HyFlex—but please consider not doing both together and synchronously.

            This is more work and more change than anyone can really handle, so here are so guidelines and resources to help you prepare.

1. Less Bandwidth, Less Motivation, Less Effort and More Anxiety

Both you and your students are going to have less bandwidth for learning and work this fall. That means more distraction and less self-control (if even the smell of cookies can reduce how many math problems you attempt, just think what worrying about jobless parents, avoiding a deadly pandemic, racial tension and an important national election will do.^[i]) Add the stress of isolation, boxed meals and new draconian residential contracts (like Harvard’s “I will not have guests in my residential suite”) and even being on campus is not going to feel remotely normal. What can you do?

• More Support: Reach out early and often that you care and will be flexible. Ask students often about what they are feeling and how they are coping. Ask students if they are feeling extra stress, maybe they are far from home, a relative has died or they are a member of a minority group. Seek and you shall find. Students learn more when they perceive that we care and building relationships will allow you to understand student needs and build both motivation and relevance to your content.
• More Scaffolding: When we are overwhelmed it is hard to start—anything. Breaking large tasks into smaller bits (or chunking) is one form of scaffolding. It is easier to do one thing at a time. But students often do not know even what study activities are effective (more highlighting?) This Study Smarter technique will allow you to help students plan, implement and then reflect on how to manage their own study time. This will only increase in importance as stress and uncertainty increase.
• More Motivation: All of this will also be demotivating (for you as well). Reminding students of their larger goals and purpose (so you will need to ask and find out about this), emphasizing the importance of self-belief and making relevant connection for every topic can increase effort and motivation. Pay attention to the energy and engagement levels: yes this is harder on Zoom, but monitor when assignments are coming in on your LMS and we willing to address mood and current news.
• More Community: Hopefully these last few months have reminded you, that going to campus and to class fills a human desire for connection. Everyone is feeling depleted and the foreignness of sitting 6 feet away from others in a mask is unlikely to feel much more connected then being on Zoom. The normal pre-and post-class friend and flirtation period has vanished: perhaps you need to open your Zoom room 15 minutes early and encourage just social mingling. Allocate time for students to get to know you and each other. (Perhaps you can design a new first assignment with intros?) Perhaps you need to institute study circles or buddies (share your answers with one person in the group) this semester. You might need to spend more time on social media—start a LinkedIn account if you don’t have one. Find a safe platform to read student posts. You will need to think differently about building community on Zoom.
• More You: Students need to hear and see more of the real you this fall. Start with a welcome email that goes out before class starts! Focus on welcoming them in hard times and building trust. Make short videos, be vulnerable and be explicit about how you care and how we are all feeling weird about our lives at this moment. If your LMS allows video feedback—use it! More ideas from Flower Darby.
• More Communication: You will need to communicate more often if you want to provide more scaffolding and more motivation and build more community. Yes even email can feel like caring. Your response time is a demonstration of your caring.

2. Equity

There is compelling evidence that Covid-19 is having a dramatically different effect on white, Black and Latino communities, with three times as many cases/capita for Latinos. Students from these communities are already less likely to be engaged and persist at predominantly white institutions, and face a range of further indignities and stresses that white privilege avoids. Start by taking extra care to listen to determine what else you can do. Does every student have access to the technology and space they need? Who is working in their car? 

Despite your best intentions, when you say there is a research opening in your lab or a scholarship available, students who do not look like you are more likely to think this opportunity is not for them: they are less likely to apply.^[ii] You don’t need a special announcement for Black students, but you might take the extra effort to encourage and make sure your minority students know you think this is opportunity is for them. Even if you do not suspect there are microaggressions happening in your class, ask your students (in private). Students have just experienced the largest protests in American history, you cannot ignore this and appear inclusive.

Inclusive Teaching starts with asking if everyone is included but also if there are things you could do to help everyone but have a disproportionate positive effect on new, first-gen, non-trad or under-represented students: john a powell calls this “targeted universalism.”^[iii] In addition to the caring practices above, you might also consider these:

• Acknowledge your bias: All of us bring biases and think with an accent. Say something about this in your welcome email.
• Content: Can you diversify your content or the perspectives on it? How is race embedded into your topic in ways you might be ignoring?
• Diversify examples and analogies: Do your test questions, essay examples and problem sets use a variety of names and analogies that will connect with a wide variety of students? 
• Different questions: The science you teach is determined, but what questions led to the discovery of that science? Who benefited from that research and who sacrificed? 
• Highlight scholarly achievements of minorities: You can and should continue to discuss the contributions of White Europeans, but can you also find others to name and highlight?
• Ask for early and specific feedback: Tell students you are trying to be more inclusive and ask for their help.
• Provide early feedback and assessment: Be the tennis net with immediate and non-judgemental feedback. Earlier feedback will most benefit the least prepared.  
• Vary teaching strategies: Can you try some different class exercises, strategies, and discussion techniques that might vary who benefits most from your methods? 
• Vary demonstrations of learning: You do not need to abandon all tests, but you do need to consider who might thrive more with presentations, short-papers, creative videos and other ways to demonstrate learning.

Do not assume your good intentions will be enough. Race is a complicated topic and you will need to educate yourselfand spend some time reading, reflecting and talking to others before you attempt to tackle these issues in class. Even then, you can easily create negative outcomes for both Black and white students. Regardless of what you teach, however, you need to think about your discipline and your content. Even if all you do is say (more than once) that you are struggling and want to help and would appreciate any feedback on this issues, you have taken a first step.

3. The HyFlex (Socially-Distanced F2F plus Virtual) Classroom

Anyone who has ever taught online will tell you that while it can be just as good, it is different and requires adjustment. Trying to teach simultaneously F2F and online is an enormous challenge, and to make it even harder, the F2F classes will feature students in masks and 6 feet apart. (See these infographics.) Early trials have involved expensive new equipment but have been disastrous. I have been trying to encourage many institutions to try a different approach, but assuming you are stuck with an everyone-at-once approach (and assuming your technology is adequate) what can you do?

• Groupings: Cynthia Brame, Associate Director for the Center for Teaching at Vanderbilt has done a great job (including graphics) or outlining the choices for groupings. Groupings will help build community, but they may be mandated in most places since classroom capacity is going to be reduced. One way to do that is to meet 3x a week but rotate who is allowed in the physical classroom (her Option 2). Some students will always be virtual and at some point in the semester (when any one student becomes ill) you and all of your students will be quarantined.) Another division (her Option 3) would be to have groups that always have one person physically in the class. This also mitigates the problem of the F2F students being separated from each other; now every F2F student can work with you, but is also working with two students online. I think the best option, however, is to meet only 1x per week with each of three groups, which makes it possible to have some exclusively virtual and the rest F2F only groups (her Option 1). Everyone gets less face-time with you (so you need other asynchronous delivery) but this is probably better time and much easier to design and deliver. Most of us have experienced that being the only person not at a F2F meeting is not a good feeling. If you are going to do discussion, then smaller groups with separate online and F2F is probably the way to go. 
• Student Backchannel: You need a separate backchannel (which could be Zoom chat) and you should ask some students, either online or in the F2F classroom to monitor this.
• Active Learning: Techniques like the Jigsaws, Polling, Collaborative Notetaking and Fishbowls will work with these mixed groups. In a Fishbowl, only one group gets to discuss at once while the other groups award points, make comments or take notes. Derek Bruff has a good list of more active learning strategies for this environment and also make a good case for having a separate backchannel.  Steve Mintz has an excellent list of active learning techniques that work virtually and many of them will also work in a hybrid classroom.
• Physical Limitations: One new problem is that we won’t be able to lean over students to see their work, and they won’t be able to huddle together either. (Even if you can gather all of your students in a tent, you still have this individual problem.) Making sure everyone can hear you is a priority that your tech folks have certainly thought about (assuming you stand at the front), but having online students hear others in the room (wearing masks) will be harder. So one reason for smaller groups is that then students can work with individual students in the room and online. If everyone is one a laptop then Zoom will allow you to create breakout groups. Still the time for collaborative online tools is certainly now. You probably know about Google Docs, but should probably try Google Slides, a virtual whiteboard (like Padlet), and some annotation tools (Perusall is free, for example). This, of course, might make your classroom feel like a semi-virtual one, with students sitting in front of you all on laptops talking to other virtual students. 
• Think Online First: You will have to teach only online at some point this semester, but even if you were HyFlex all semester, thinking of it as an online class, with some hybrid F2F time, will lead to better design. Use that F2F for building relationships, not more content. Making sure everything is available online, is also an essential way to put equity first.
• The Paper Whiteboard: A low tech way to share images is with a piece of paper, a phone and a Twitter account—no document camera needed. Students can draw a concept map (Mindmeister will allow you to do this more collaboratively) or solve a problem and then tweet a picture to your class hastag.
• Lectures: If you are going to lecture, please record them now and deliver them asynchronously. With all of the other issues, asking students to come to class or log on at a specific time just to hear what can be taped is not going to be welcome. This can then free up time for Option 1 above. 
• Asynchronous Discussions: These should be in your toolkit anyway. Some people think on their feet and other people process more slowly. Our world needs people willing to think slowly and you should encourage this. It is also a way to foster engagement and hear more voices when F2F discussion will be more difficult. Again, Perusall is free. Flipgrid does asynchronous video discussions.
• Games: I’m a huge fan of the Reacting to the Past role-playing games. You will need to make some changes to plan for some virtual and some F2F students, but this is the time to try it. 
• Labs: Since you will need to reduce capacity, and probably run multiple sessions, make everything you can—instructions, orientation and analysis—virtual, so that students are only in the F2F lab for as long as they absolutely must be. Instead of assigning students to sections at all, you might just have open hours, with an online sign up. You will need F2F tech support and supervision in the lab—and perhaps more academic support on call– but this will space out student usage and accommodate changing schedules

4. Going Fully Online

I’ve already suggested that you design even you HyFlex courses as if they were online only. This also allows you to take full advantage of all of the best lessons of online design, and you only have to worry about one mode of delivery at a time. Your remote spring classes were probably disappointing—students thought so too—but designing for online is very different than taking a F2F class to remote. Think of the difference between Star Wars the movies and Star Wars the play. Stage and movies are great for different things. This time around, you need to take advantage of the best features of the virtual environment and not just make a video of your Star Wars play. 

This will force you to rethink all of your content and pedagogy, and this is a good thing (and while much of your design will change once you return to F2F, engaging in the best practices of how students learn online is great preparation for bring the same science of learning to all of your teaching. There are specific techniques for online teaching, but the human brain you want to reach is the same. Now is the time to embrace the explosion of cognitive research that is improving learning everywhere.

Start with this fantastic summer syllabus from Sarah Rose Cavanagh. She has great specific suggestions for better learning outcomes and more flexible course policies, as well as great readings and resources for designing an online course. But the people she recommends are all great teachers first, and online designers or video-creators second. Following her syllabus will lead you through many important ideas about any kind of teaching.

Here are a few more ideas for things that might be especially appropriate now, and online, but are part of any good teaching.

• Reading: Students read a lot on social media but need help succeeding at academic reading. Now is the perfect time to try more focused reading, and especially to experiment with paper. Screen time has gone up, and students may welcome the chance to do something else for a while. Even if texts are online, students may be much more willing to try reading as a release activity: something that requires shutting down your email or Zoom, switching devices (which can also help with managing battery life) or even getting away from screens entirely. Start with small steps: ask them to read a short article or story without their phone (or their notifications off and other windows closed) or to maybe read short passages out loud to someone in their family, their dog or even to each other on Zoom. 
• Reflection and Slow Thinking: This is an essential part of education but Covid has only accelerated our FOMO and the news cycle is keeping us wound up. Scaffold time for reflection—this might be a good synchronous activity, but also ask students to ponder and live with ambiguity as they wrestle with new ideas. If online dating apps can build relationships and engagement online, then so can teachers. Teaching critical thinking can happen without physical proximity. It is needed now more than ever.
• Complexity Nuance: With all of the politics and shouting, Twitter is hardly the place for complexity. Humans are adapted to cooperate but also to go along with our tribe: doubt in community values is and was not the best way to ensure your genes reproduce. Changing your mind is hard, and it requires communal trust that this is a safe and respected process. Ask students to find potential pitfalls and counter arguments. Now is the time to build tolerance for ambiguity. 
• Teaching the Pandemic: I’ve suggested elsewhere that now is not a time to shy away from current events. They can’t be ignored and they offer a chance to pursue nuance and ambiguity.

Online learning is normally proposed in tandem with cost savings. If education is about content delivery, then this will eventually be the case, but few of our institutions are cheap. We will need to deliver more than just cheap content. That requires more thoughtful design. 

Some of this is drawn from my new book, A New 3Rs: Learning to Change through Relationships, Resilience and Reflection (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2021)

See more fall 2020 resources, blogs and articles here. Study Smarter Templates HERE.

Further Resources

Brian Beatty, an early SFSU pioneer, provides an open-source book: Hybrid-Flexible Course Design.

Kevin Kelly, another early SFSU pioneer provides a great article with ideas for Covid HyFlex.

David Rhoads shares info on his HyFlex dissertation on the Bonnie Stachowiak podcast.

Khan Academy has free resources for remote and online teaching: 

Jenae Cohn blog: Hybrid, HyFlex, Online, and Everything in Between: Course Models at a Glance.

Active Learning and Equity in HyFlex.

“The HyFlex Flip: Planning for Courses in Fall 2020,” my guide to a different approach to HyFlex. 

A guide from the University of Pittsburgh CTL.

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^[i] Baumeister, R. F., Bratslavsky, E., Muraven, M., and Tice, D. M. (1998). Ego depletion: is the active self a limited resource? Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 74, 1252–1265. doi: 10.1037/0022-3514.74.5.1252

^[ii] Wood, W., Pool, G. J., Leck, K. and Purvis, D. (1996). “Self-Definition, Defensive Processing, and Influence: The Normative Impact of Majority and Minority Groups.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 71(6): 1181–93. 

Kitchen, J. A., & Williams, M. S. (2019). Thwarting the temptation to leave college: An examination of engagement’s impact on college sense of belonging among Black and LatinX students Journal for the Study of Postsecondary and Tertiary Education, 4 2019

^[iii] john a powell (2008), Post-Racialism or Targeted Universalism Denver University Law Review, 86, p. 785-806)