At long last, I am able to update this post with how I have hybridized my class. I meant to write this sometime around late February 2020, but, as we all know, schools were switching to emergency remote learning around that time (officially or unofficially, it made no difference) and such a blog post got put on the back burner. I discuss below how I hybridized my class and, as an update to something that was never initially posted, I discuss how such a format allowed for an easier transition to emergency remote teaching.
First, and foremost, it took a lot of planning on my end prior to the beginning of the semester.
I had to figure out how to use OneNote and how I was going to use OneNote. I watched a number of videos freely available on YouTube to get an idea of how to create Sections and Pages in OneNote, along with some of the better practices people have developed when using OneNote. With technical hurdles overcome, I needed to figure out exactly how I was going to use OneNote. I determined I was going to use it for homework collection. Students could easily upload a PDF of their hand-written exercises and I could easily grade these on my iPad with my Apple Pencil (really, any tablet and stylus would do).
But the real hurdle was not in getting technical details figured out or figuring out how I would use OneNote, but how I was going to get my students up to speed.
The solution to this problem was an orientation. I spent the entire first lecture in a computer lab with my students getting them comfortable with the following platforms:
- Piazza.com
- Blackboard (used minimally)
- OneNote (used extensively)
Piazza.com is a wiki-style platform that allows for the easy posting of homework questions and discussion. I have used this over the years with varying degrees of success. The reason why I use it instead of Blackboard is that Blackboard does not allow for as easy of typing of LaTeX (crucial for mathematics) and 2) Blackboard is clunky and outdated. The ease with which a student can post to Piazza is only matched by MS Teams, in my experience, which is why I’m switching to MS Teams in the future (more on that below).
During the orientation, I made sure all students were set up to use Piazza. They saw the platform and they asked questions if any. To get students comfortable with posting on Piazza, I required they make three posts to Piazza in the first three weeks of the semester. This helped break down any anxieties students may have about ‘looking dumb’. When they saw their own peers had the same questions, they became more comfortable asking questions on their own. I encouraged them to post not because they were lacking something, but because they had an opportunity to gain something.
Blackboard, while used minimally, served as a convenient place to post homework exercises. While I had a captive audience, I showed students where homework assignments could be found on Blackboard. In retrospect, I could have used OneNote to push the homework to each student, but in the future, I will use MS Teams and/or Eduflow.com to assign and collect homework.
I also used Blackboard to post recorded lectures. I used my iPad and the screen-recording feature built into iOS to record the lectures. Such lectures were projected onto the screen in the face-to-face classroom and later uploaded to Blackboard for students viewing pleasure. One thing I would suggest is cutting videos up into manageable chunks with an indication of what each chunk is about. This was particularly useful for any student who could not attend lecture.
Since many students were almost surely not familiar with OneNote, a good chunk of the orientation was spent showing students how to use OneNote. They were required to do the first assignment on the spot and it was a basic “getting to know you” assignment. With that assignment done, I asked students to upload a PDF and to ‘print it out’ in OneNote. This means that whatever PDF a student uploads and ‘prints out’ it will be displayed page-by-page within OneNote. This allowed for easier grading and reading of their work, instead of having to download it to my own computer, grade and return via email. Keeping everything contained to as few platforms as possible was key.
Lastly, I gave students a guide to professionally writing e-mails. This helped many students understand that they were not texting one of their friends, but were corresponding with their professor. They needed the little nudge at the beginning to know that they shouldn’t be starting their emails with “Hey”, but “Dear” or “Hello” and that first name usage was, typically speaking, not acceptable. In turn, I would always address my emails to my students as “Dear Mx. LAST NAME”, as a means of demonstrating the same level of respect that I expected.
I also used an OER text. The benefit to this was that students could print out as much as they wanted, comment on the PDF as they saw fit and I could make changes to the text as necessary. I provided students with a copy of the PDF showing them how to annotate and encouraged them to annotate the first three sections of the text in OneNote. They were assigned reading from these sections and had to bring three questions on the reading to my office hours in the first three weeks (in addition to the three Piazza posts).
So, how did I get them to come to my office when most students can’t find the building? We went on a field trip. Since the computer lab was elsewhere on campus, I walked all of the students back to my building, through the doors and to my office. They had to come to office hours or make an appointment in the first three weeks and now could not claim to not know where my office was.
This all worked fairly well, with the usual students either putting in way too much effort or not enough. I could recognize that my hand-written comments on their hand-written assignments were being taken into consideration, so I was satisfied that many students were growing from the experience. But it was highly time-consuming and exhausting having to read over so many assignments.
And then COVID-19 forced us all home to teach and learn remotely.
This is where I saw the time I invested in hybridizing my class pay off tremendously. I already had students watching videos. Homework as already being turned in by hand via OneNote. Students were already attending office hours in a digital environment. With that said, it was still psychologically difficult for my students and myself to make the change. Luckily, I had spring break to ‘prepare’ for fully-online lectures.
How I did this underwent many iterations until I settled on something like this: https://youtu.be/zFD_69b5uA8
I started with thinking I could create a OneNote page (in the other blog entry on using OneNote, but the link has since expired; email me if interested) with screen captures of important definitions and theorems alongside a short video discussing said theorem or definition. This worked well for some, but I was unsatisfied with the format. It was a bit haphazard and difficult to follow. I was still using my iPad to record these videos in the same way I did in a face-to-face classroom, but the delivery was not great.
I then stumbled upon software called OBS (Open Broadcast Software). Many gamers apparently use it to create streams of their gaming alongside their talking heads. I was unsatisfied with any platform that would put my talking head atop the very document I was talking about, so I went with OBS since I could have complete control over 1) the number of feeds and 2) how those feeds were positioned.
I turned my iPhone into a webcam using an OBS plugin, wrote up some PowerPoint slides and plugged my iPad so that the screen could be shared. With a cheap green screen and image of a mad scientists office ‘plucked’ from the interwebs, I was read to create online lectures that were as close to face-to-face as I could muster. Such videos were also the culmination of frequent feedback from a few students. Each time, the font changed color, the feeds grew or shrunk and went from white too black.
Now, with emergency remote teaching being the standard for our summer courses (and potentially the fall of 2020), I have had to rethink how I use the various platforms: Blackboard, OneNote, Piazza, E-mail.
And in comes Microsoft Teams, a ship still being built as we fly it, but does it fly pretty darn well already. It has its issues, believe me. But it has a lot of potential and already seems to provide a setting where 1) video lectures can be automatically recorded, 2) homework help can be provided, 3) video office hours can be held on the fly, 4) pre-lecture quizzes can be easily pushed to each student using Microsoft Forms, 5) OneNote can be integrated into the MS Teams Classroom without any effort and 6) links to external apps can be embedded directly.
After watching many more videos than I initially watched to learn about OneNote, I came to understand Teams to be a central hub for communication. Teams uses what are called channels in each team. I have designated each lecture be a channel. The advantage to this is that the video lecture will show up in the channel’s feed and not the general feed. All questions and dissuasions related to the lecture stay within the channel so that students can more easily find answers to their questions pertaining to that lecture and not another one. I’ve also got a channel for each homework assignment where students can ask each other questions about the homework and discuss. Such a setup allows for on-the-fly office hours, where such office hours can be recorded and immediately made available to students who were not aware of such.
MS Teams even provides for the uploading, grading and tracking of homework assignments. You can even have students upload their hand-written or typed work to OneNote through Teams by designating a OneNote resource in the assignment. This feature is what sold me on using Teams exclusively. That is, until I decided to employ peer grading of homework assignments.
Enter Eduflow.com. I’m quite new to Eduflow, but it provides a fairly solid and clean platform for students to upload their assignments, review and comment on other students’ assignments and to then reflect upon the feedback they received from their peers. This is attractive to me for two reasons: 1) students learn to reflect rather than mimic and 2) I am less burdened with copious amounts of grading. Such a platform allows me to see the general comments on a larger scale so that I can provide feedback to the whole class.
While I would ultimately love to have Eduflow integrated into Teams with single-sign-on capability, Eduflow just isn’t there yet. But Teams does allow me to collapse E-mail, Blackboard and Piazza into one platform. Now, Teams does not as of yet allow for the typing of LaTeX symbols, but that’s okay since I am more liable to upload a quick video of me doing a problem rather than typing it out, given the ease of use of Teams and video. In the future, assuming I end up liking Eduflow, I hope to see it more tightly integrated into Teams and the Teams grade book.