Expertise@Scale: How Do I Move My Class Online This Week?
We’ve done 7+ years of research on creating better online learning opportunities. With the rapidly worsening situation with the Coronavirus, many teachers need to go online, and in a hurry. This page is a combination of best practices and evidence-based advice, mixed with personal opinions where appropriate. Note that this is not official advice from Carnegie Mellon.
If you would like to email me, my email is chinmayk@cs.cmu.edu. I will try and answer as soon as I can.
The basics
Recording lectures: Counter-intuitive though it may be, my preferred method of doing this is with Zoom. The way to do it is to start a “meeting”, with just one participant (you). Then, share your screen/slides with this meeting. Start recording. Zoom will record both your slides, and your face. Make sure to create a brief test recording first to make sure your audio is working properly, the slides are readable within the recording, and so on before trying to tackle a longer lecture. You can upload the resulting video to Youtube, Canvas etc.
Speaking of uploading video, Youtube will auto-caption your video if you enable that option. If you’d like a human-created transcript, try Temi. They are somewhat expensive, though.
Also, based on Rene Kizilcec’s research, students like seeing the instructor’s face if they are watching a video, but it doesn’t change what they remember. I don’t bother with recording my face. This lets me record anywhere. See original research
Discussion groups: Zoom has a break-out room feature. So if you want to really have a synchronous discussion in class where students are in smaller groups, it’s easy to do. Zoom will automatically handle assigning students into the smaller video discussion rooms (or you can do it manually), and you can drop in on different rooms while they’re discussing.
Office hours This one is hard. Zoom works in a pinch. The most useful feature is the “Hand raise” feature, CONTINUE READING: Expertise@Scale: How Do I Move My Class Online This Week? | National Education Policy Center