Hello comrades!

I really liked thinking about some of the ways of migrating our teaching principles to online formats. I have four principles that I’ve been thinking a lot about this semester, as I pilot some online teaching principles in my f2f course.

• Intuitive & Interactive Access:
  • Last semester, students expressed some difficulty navigating my Canvas site. I initially provided all the readings for the whole semester at once in the modules section (also I didn’t delete ANY of the side links… Major oops!). The combination of these circumstances, left students slightly unsure of when do what readings until I walked them through the process a few times. This semester, I have adapted my Canvas page to take advantage of a more intuitive and interactive style that uses a combination of pages and buttons (like curry’s course). Links to each week’s readings, discussion board, educational resource, and looming assignment are posted each week on the front page, so students see them immediately when they access Canvas. Rather than requiring students to guess where to find the materials, I make try to make it super duper obvious and easy.
• Community-Building & Collaborative Learning:
  • Building a tight-knit and collegial classroom is a core element of my f2f courses. In order to translate this to online courses, I want to engage with more digital platforms that enable students to read and write collectively. In the “Writing with Machines” workshop, we briefly discussed the possibility of organizing students into reading groups using platforms like Hypothesis. Rather than having students experience reading as an isolated, individual experience, I want to give them the tools to support each other. Additionally, I want to give them tools that they can use in other classes or even in their careers. While I haven’t yet introduced this tool into my course yet, I am considering doing so around week 8 after I am able to introduce students to the software.
• Productive Redundancy:
  • In f2f courses, scaffolding redundancy happens every day in implicit and explicit ways. I feel like OWCourses are actually incredibly well suited to productive redundancy. Not only can we encourage students to engage with our course material in set pathways (while giving them some degree of freedom as curry highlighted), but we can also ensure that they see the same material multiple times, in multiple ways. This semester, I’ve begun trying to scaffold this redundancy into my Canvas site more, as I’ll explain in the video. I don’t know if I’ve reached 100% efficacy. JK I can still do better.
• Multicultural Responsiveness:
  • So I usually design my courses to celebrate the intersectional experiences of students by countering deficit messaging in course readings and visual images. While I think my readings and visuals in my f2f course meet this threshold, I’m not sure my actual Canvas site does. It wasn’t until today that I thought about how I don’t include cartoons with characters of color in the ‘buttons.’ Additionally, I think I could even expand this moving forward by inviting students to recommends objects (clips, images, texts, etc.) that exemplify issues raised in each weeks’ readings. This ‘show and tell’ would give them a chance to write about a found object from their lives using the course material. In short, maybe I could use Jim’s portfolio-oriented blogs to give students space to make the course site responsive to their own cultural perspectives.

Screencast-o-Canvas: https://screencast-o-matic.com/watch/cqnXrN3s4s