Going Virtual on Short Notice
When a situation arises that causes schools to temporarily shift all courses to distance delivery methods, it is not be possible to exactly duplicate everything that you do in the face-to-face classroom. However, several tools and techniques are available to help you continue to offer rigorous courses with instructor-to-student and student-to-student interaction using both synchronous and asynchronous delivery. This page provides introductory information about how you might conduct different types of activities, with links to more detailed reference and instructional materials.
Table of Contents
- Your Online Classroom - The Learning Management System
- Live Class Meetings and Conferences
- Recording Lessons and Posting Recordings Online
- Collecting Assignments
- Holding Discussions
- Quizzes and Exams
- Grading
- Additional Resources
Your Online Classroom - The Learning Management System
Many schools already have a Learning Management System, or LMS, where teachers may post assignments and grades and students may submit homework. When classes shift fully to distance-delivery, the LMS moves from being a supplementary tool to being the "home" for each course. In an LMS, you can add links to all of your activities (live meetings, assignments, exams, discussions, etc.) and resources (recorded lessons, videos, readings, etc.).
Note: If there are things that you do not want students to initially see as you are in the process of building them, you can usually set them to be hidden from students.
There are several different LMSs used in K-12 schools. Two of the most popular, due to their combination of affordability and ease-of-use, are Google Classroom and Moodle.
Google Classroom is free, and anyone with a free personal Google account can try it out to see what it is like, However, in order for a teacher to use Classrom at a school with students, the school (not an individual teacher) must sign up for a free G Suite for Education account.
Moodle is an open source LMS that is popular in both K-12 and higher education. Northern Michigan University uses Moodle to power its EduCat LMS. There are no licensing fees for using Moodle, but it does take a skilled system administrator to run a locally-hosted installation. An easier way for a teacher or a school to get up and running quickly with Moodle would be to sign up for a Moodle Cloud plan, which range in price from free to $1000/year, depending on the number of students using it.
Live Class Meetings and Conferences
While much of the teaching and learning in a distance delivery situation is likely to be accomplished asynchronously, you will probably still want to maintain some real-time contact with your students. Perhaps you will want to meet with the whole class once a day or a few times a week, or to conference with individual students or parents. Web-based video conferencing makes that possible.
For one-on-one or small group meetings, you may opt for basic video chat tools. Google Hangouts or Skype are two that work on PCs, Macs, Android devices, and iPhones/iPads. Hangouts and Skype are designed primarily for conversations among friends and family, where no one is managing the conversation.
While that's fine for small groups, for larger class meetings you will probably want to use more powerful a more powerful web-based video conferencing tool that gives you more control to manage your students. One of the most popular of these tools is Zoom. Free Zoom accounts allow for meetings up to 40 minutes long with up to 100 participants (paid accounts with more features are also available). Zoom allows you to share audio, video, a whiteboard, and presentations or other content from your computer. You can talk to your students via voice and chat, and students can raise their hands to ask questions. You can also manage audio options individually and ask students to mute when not addressing the class. Students do not have create their own Zoom accounts to attend a meeting. The instructor creates the meeting, then provides students with a link to access it.
For schools with G Suite for Education accounts, Google has made their premium Google Meet video conferencing tool available at no charge through July 1, 2020. Though its features aren't quite as robust as Zoom's, Google Meet does not limit meetings to 40 minutes, and it allows up to 250 participants.
Recording Lessons
You may elect to record some or all of your lessons rather than holding "live" class meetings. Lessons can be recorded from your own laptop, with narration, using screen recording software. The most common thing that teachers record is probably PowerPoint slides, but you can also make videos from any other software on your screen, such as math or drawing programs. Some screen recorders also allow you to superimpose a small webcam video of yourself on the recording. Most screen recorders include at least a basic set of editing tools that allow you to tweak your videos before publishing them.
Screencast-O-Matic is a web-based basic screen recorder with a nice set of features, including the ability to publish directly to YouTube. Its free version allows for recordings of up to 15 minutes, with a watermark. Its low priced paid versions remove the watermark and allow for longer recordings.
Camtasia is a a more expensive, but also more powerful, screen recording tool. It is installed on a PC or Mac and features powerful editing tools.
Posting Recordings Online
YouTube is the most popular place to post videos online, and probably also the easiest place. However, you should check your school's policies for online video before posting videos. Due to concerns about advertising or "related videos" that may be inappropriate, your school may have established rules for where and how videos may be posted.
Collecting Assignments
Learning Management Systems all include some variation of an "Assignment drop box," where students can submit any kind of electronic file. For work that can be done on a computer, this is relatively straightforward. If students need to submit handwritten work, it is a little trickier, but still possible. They or their parents can take a photo of the handwritten work and submit it.
Holding Discussions
Discussion is an important part of many face-to-face classes, and fortunately there are several options for holding discussions in the online environment. As mentioned above, web-based video conferencing tools like Zoom have both chat and audio/video tools for synchronously holding discussions.
You can also hold discussions using asynchronous tools. Most LMSs have some type of "forum" or "threaded discussion" tool for traditional text-based discussions, similar to what you would see on many Internet sites. You and your students post and reply to each other's comments.
If you are looking to move your discussions beyond text, you might consider using VoiceThread, which provides a more robust option for asynchronous "multimedia discussions." In addition to text, participants in VoiceThread discussions can post audio, video, and PowerPoint comments. K-12 educator licenses are relatively inexpensive.
Quizzes and Exams
LMS's typically include a tool that can be used to administer assessments ranging from short quizzes to long exams. They generally support a variety of question types, including multiple choice, true/false, matching, and essay. Test integrity can be a concern with online assessments. To discourage cheating, techniques include:
- Drawing questions from pools so that students receive different exams.
- Limiting exam time so that students who don’t know answers don’t have time to look them up.
- Allowing students to use outside resources, but placing grading emphasis on items, such as essays or difficult problems, that require students to demonstrate mastery gleaned over the course of a unit or semester.
Grading
Most LMSs include a gradebook that tracks scores of activities completed within the LMS, and also allows you to add "manual" grade items for activities completed outside of the LMS, such as presentations made over web conferencing. They typically offer options for categorizing and weighting grade items and supports importing and exporting grades from Excel spreadsheets.
Additional Resources and Help
The ideas and tools listed above are intended to give you a basic toolkit to start adapting your course for distance delivery, but this information is not comprehensive. There are many other tools available, and, with schools across the country facing similar situations, many resources are being made available to help provide tools, ideas and guidance. Here are a few:
- Article "The coronavirus may force American schools to teach online. Are they ready?"
"Ryan Baker, Director of the Penn Center for Learning Analytics, is an expert on what works and what doesn’t in blended and online learning. We asked him what school leaders, teachers, and parents should be thinking about. His advice: stay flexible, take out some library books, and understand that the coronavirus could change online learning going forward." - Britannica Digital Learning - Free Emrgency Virtual-Learning Resources for Every School
- Discovery Education Virtual Learning
"The expansive platform provides access to 180,000 "assignable, editable" activities, videos, ready-to-use lessons and other resources" for K-12 math, science, social studies, English language arts and health." -- The Journal, 3/13/2020 - Educational Insights At-Home Activities for Kids
"Our team of parents, teachers, and play experts have compiled all of our favorite at-home activities that kids can enjoy on their own or with their parents, from puzzles and coloring pages, to math and reading worksheets." - Kahoot Premium - Free During COVID-19 outbreak
"Kahoot! delivers engaging learning to billions.Teachers, students, businesses and parents all use Kahoot! for group learning, e-learning, distance learning, and self-study everywhere!"
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MathTutor Educational Software
"MathTutor Educational Software is making its Grades 6-12 math tutorial software available to schools at no cost through June 30, 2020." - RTOL - Rapid Transition to Online Learning
"RTOL is a free emergency roadmap for making a rapid transition to remote learning during forced school closures. This quick-start guide will walk you through a simplified step-by-step process to maintain your continuity of teaching and learning in a crisis. This program is based on a simple question, If an educator had just one hour to prepare to teach remotely, what are the most essential things she would need to know and do?" - The Smithsonian - Digital Learning Resources
"The Smithsonian is committed to supporting teachers and their students around the globe as they face unprecedented new learning challenges. Here, on the Learning Lab, teachers have access to millions of digital resources from across the Smithsonian's museums, research centers, libraries, archives, and more. You will also find pre-packaged collections that contain lessons, activities, and recommended resources made by Smithsonian museum educators as well as thousands of classroom teachers like you."