Documentation:MECH Online Teaching
A space for collecting online teaching best practices for Mechanical Engineering
Background
This section presents brief definitions relevant to online learning: online course, blended course, and emergency remote teaching.
Useful references
Selected references for best practices in online teaching appear below.
APSC CIS
APSC CIS has a site with online teaching information and recommendations.
Small teaching online
The articles below are based on the work of Flower Darby, as presented in her 2019 book Small teaching online. This book adapts the "small teaching" principles proposed by James Lang to the online format. "Small teaching" is a term coined by Lang in 2016 to describe evidence-based improvements to our teaching activities that are simple to implement yet have an important effect on student learning.
- How to be a better online teacher, in the Chronicle of higher education. This is a useful article written by Darby that summarizes many of the principles in her book.
- Interviews with Darby about her book in Inside higher education (written) and Teaching in higher ed (podcast.)
Other books
- The Online Teaching Survival Guide (Boettcher, Conrad, 2016) has straightforward lists of best practices and ideas organized by start, middle and end of the course
Lectures and tutorials
Online lecture and tutorial best practices
For equity reasons, instructors must make lecture content available for at least 24 hours after the scheduled lecture time. That is, either a pre-recorded video that everyone views, or a recording of a live-streamed lecture.
For equity reasons, tutorials should be run twice, at least 8 hours apart, so that students in any timezone can attend during their waking time. For more information on how to schedule evening synchronous activities, please see the module on Augmented Evening Schedule (AES) on the MECH Canvas site.
Further best practices here.
Teaching hardware
The current recommended hardware for lecturing online includes dedicated microphone, and a tablet with pen. A document camera is an alternative to a tablet with pen, but as of this writing we have no first-hand experience of using one from home. Ahmad Mohammadpanah will test online teaching using a document camera this summer term; please contact him in July for details on his experience.
Further information on teaching hardware here.
Teaching software
This section is limited to software for delivering lectures.
Software for live lectures
We recommend using Collaborate Ultra for delivering live-streamed courses. More details on software to facilitate live-streaming, including software for interactive elements, here.
Recording software
We recommend using Camtasia for screen capture and editing on Mac and Windows laptops. Further information here.
Discussions, Q&A forums
For equity reasons, we recommend moving in-class discussions to an asynchronous format.
Forums (fora) are useful to publicly answer student questions (reduced email burden).
See this page for tools and details on implementation.
Office hours
For equity reasons, more office hours will need to be held to allow every student to meet synchronously with instructors during the student's waking hours.
See this page for further information.
Building Community
- Have students create introduction posts
- Have a general forum for students to ask for and give help (e.g. Piazza or Canvas Discussion Boards)
- Divide the class into small groups of 4-6 that can be a point of contact and support for students[1]
Could create some fun class activities (e.g. generating a class playlist, take/share photos with a common theme, discussion post questions (e.g. favourite fun fact)).