Back To Remote Learning In Fall 2020

While there has been no official word yet, there are strong indications that come Fall 2020, my classes will go back to totally remote learning once more, continuing what happened during the second half of Spring 2020.

It is not surprising to me. I've been expecting it, and in some ways, I've been preparing for it. I mentioned earlier that I've enrolled in Quality Matters courses to give me formal training and credentials in running online and hybrid courses. I just finished the first workshop, and I have one more to do with them before I do the last required course with my own institution.

I must say that the one course that I've completed so far was more useful than I initially expected. There were a few "eye-opener" moments that I never realized before. It is one thing to anticipate and guess what a student needs from an online course, it is another when one actually goes through it, and are shown some of the best-practice methods of online education from the point of view of the student.

At the end of the first course, I realize that what I've learned was not only useful for the next time I have to teach a remote or online course, which will be this Fall most likely, but I'm going to take what I've learned to also improve my face-to-face courses, whenever I get to teach one. I know that many of the things I put on the Learning Management Systems can be reorganized better, because if it is suitable for online students, then it certainly is appropriate for face-to-face students.

But of course, one of the unique challenges with teaching a science course is labs, and how one can effectively do such a thing with a remote class. I've been looking at material put out by Pivot Interactives, which looks promising. I attended one of their webinars, and I like the way they show the experiments. I intend to sign up for the instructor trial version during the next week or so to check them out further. Do you have any experience with using them, either as a student or as an instructor? If you do, I'd love to hear from you.

There are more challenges unique to teaching math and science online, and I'm going to explore them during the next few weeks. I'll post them here whenever I encounter them, and maybe you might have an idea on the best-practice way to tackle them.

Zz.