Pandemic Tip #9: Hack it 'til you make it.

Image by Steve Buissinne from Pixabay

Are you exhausted after teaching a your newly online course?

Of course you are!

 This is new. You have no mental models to fall back upon, so everything takes your full attention and needs to be developed from scratch. You have not yet developed habits, hacks, and other survival skills that come with practice. (By contrast, your habits and hacks for F2F teaching are probably so familiar that you don’t notice them anymore.)

For example, my home program (Technical Communication) requires 90-minute synchronous chats one evening per week. When the program went online in 2004, research showed that the synchronous component increased student engagement and retention, and our anecdotal experience (plus data from an alumni survey) have supported that assertion.

But in the late 2000s, our institution offered a two-version out of date Adobe Connect and bandwidth was unreliable. So after some trial and error, I developed several hacks to make the meetings work for me and my students.

• Hack #1: I opened the meeting with a live feed, then froze my image and relied on audio for the remainder of the meeting. The video went live again in the last 10 minutes. 
• Hack #2: Students were permitted to participate by text chat for large group discussions. 
• Hack #3: Students were required to change the color of their names in the text chat to help us locate their comments within the growing transcript. 
• Hack #4: An agenda was posted for the entire meeting, including a handful of discussion questions. Hack #5: Lectures were posted as videos. I wasn't going to waste my precious interaction with one-way communication!
• Hack #5: I would read the discussion question, give them a 2-5 minute time limit, then mute my microphone while they composed their answers. Then I would either ask for volunteers or call on students in groups of 5 to post their responses, giving the class a few minutes to read through before moving on. 
• Hack #6: Every meeting began with 2 minutes of announcements and 5 minutes of Course Q&A (because they often forgot to post questions on the Q&A discussion thread in the LMS).
• Hack #7: Every class ended with 10 minutes of General Q&A. Questions could be about the course, the graduate program, the university, current events, etc.

Most of that is logical, right? But Hack #3, the color-coding name thing, was one of the most useful hacks for following a text chat, and it came from a student who was exploring Connect features one day while waiting for the meeting to begin.

So this is all new to you, so give yourself a break. The switch is consuming your cognitive load as you learn about online teaching right in the middle of doing it.

Don't try to take on too many new technologies or activities. Keep things as simple as possible.

Join teacher support groups like Pandemic Pedagogy on Facebook or the Keep Teaching group on Mighty Networks.

If your institution has instructional designers, use them! If it has a Center for Excellence in Teaching and Learning, use it!

Don't hack accessibility accommodations. Go to the pros at your institution's Accessibility Resources office for guidance.

Let your students help you troubleshoot solutions. They are in courses with multiple instructors so they are in a better position to spot hacks that could be adapted into other courses than we are.

You can do this!