This post starts off a series of posts about adapting a course for asynchronous online learning. The University that I teach at, UMass Amherst, is interested in expanded its catalog of online-only asynchronous courses. I start with a long-winded description of my goals for developing an online asynchronous version of my course at UMass Amherst, COMPSCI 532 – Systems for Data Science. Then I will brainstorm some specific ideas to implement for the first offering of the course.
Please note that my words here are my own and not endorsed by the University of Massachusetts Amherst.
Course Development Goals
Currently, my class is primarily lecture based, which tends to get boring in the 75 minute lecture format typical for an in-person course. I am currently teaching the course in a hybrid online synchronous format over Zoom and an asynchronous format using echo360. We frequently take breaks from the slides and lecture format in between each 15-minute lecture topic. In those breaks, we fill out a Figma shared slide with open-ended questions about the just covered materials. I also like to end each lecture with a non-graded Kahoot quiz. Students have said that they value these formative evaluation activities in course evaluations. We also have summative assessment in the form of homework, programming exercises, final projects, and a final exam.
That said, some of these techniques (especially the lecture related) are only appropriate for synchronous learners, and I would like to adapt them to an asynchronous online context that reduces instructor feedback load to a level appropriate with the requirements of my institutional goals.
I am working with a UMass Amherst provided online course development coach to develop the course materials. We will probably be focusing on the syllabus and aligning course learning goals with assessment, but there is also an opportunity to develop some of the course learning materials. I imagine that the development of the online course will be iterative, and I won’t have a smash hit with my first try. Follows are some ideas that I have brainstormed for adapting the course.
Brainstorm
- Required online discussions – The Canvas LMS we use seems to support graded course discussions. I imagine writing a weekly prompt and then a TA overseeing the group.
- Required readings – The Perusall platform offers good tools for group discussions of shared texts. I’m interested to see how the automated grading tools perform.
- Weekly Announcements – Course staff writes a weekly state-of-the-course message that reminds students of upcoming deadlines, summarizes the topics of the week, and maybe spotlights discussion for the previous week? Many options here.
- Lectures broken into smaller topic videos – For the first pass, I imagine cutting the lectures into smaller sections, hopefully around 10-15 minutes.
- Inter-lecture formative assessment – Short quizzes between the topic videos to give students a break from video instruction and provide feedback on how effectively learners engaged with the materials. These would likely be completion graded or offer unlimited retry’s.
- Preview or “sizzle” reel – Provide students with an entry point to the class. Introduce myself, motivate the topic, explain the course goals, and demonstrate some of the learning tools. Likely short (2-3 minutes) and highly scripted.
- Student experience feedback – Provide students with a private venue to provide feedback to the staff on a variety of topics related to their experience as a learner in this specific course. Probably provide different prompts for different weeks. Topics like: “video technical quality,” “evaluation frequency and difficulty,” “course discussion climate,” etc. Especially important for the first offering.
Conclusions
This all said, I’m interested in learning more about the state of the art techniques for online coursework. I’ve completed a Coursera course in the past, but it was a long time ago. I would like to engage with one of the Georgia Tech courses to see what the most scaled program has done. I’m also concerned with the limited resources available for developing this course, so I will have to carefully budget my time.