How will your students and you complete learning activities?

Consider alternative approaches: Teaching remotely may require new approaches to your course activities. Activities done in class can often, with the tools available, be done in an online format. Consider how you could modify or replicate activities quickly and in ways that students can understand when working by themselves remotely. Rethink what you planned to do during the time the students would normally be in the class.
Demonstrations, problem solutions, or examples can be recorded and posted on the course site. If you planned to teach a principle using some sort of demonstration, particularly one that could be done on a screen or at home, you can record it and post online using Camtasia and Kaltura. For computer-based demonstrations, Camtasia screen-capture can help you record this activity. For hands-on demonstrations, you might can use your web camera or a mobile device to create a quick demonstration video.
Course Discussions: Students can easily continue to communicate with one another via the discussion boards built into Purdue’s learning management software. Discussions allow students to post their thoughts, reply to other students, collaborate, and share their informed opinions. Discussion boards can be open forums (where the entire course participates together) or sub-divided into discussion groups (where students only see the items posted by their group members). LMS discussion boards can be graded, encouraging students to participate. When setting up a discussion be sure to:
- Give students an indication of the topics or questions they should discuss. Provide specific discussion prompts to guide student responses.
- Share clear expectations for student posts. Provide a framework of depth and length of posts and how many replies they should make to their colleagues, to help improve student performance on the activity.
- Give the students time to post and reply. Have the discussion board open for several days, to allow students the opportunity to read their peers’ posts and think about their replies.
Assignments: Students can easily submit assigned material through your learning management system, so email submission is not recommended. Assignment dropboxes are convenient places for students to submit a variety of files (.docx, .ppt, spreadsheets, video files, and PDFs, for example). Not only will these assignment folders collect student submissions under their names, they also allow for a convenient place to grade these files. When creating assignments online, be sure to think about the following:
- Students may not have access to specialized software on their home computers (or their home computers may not be able to effectively run this software). Try to stick to formats that are commonly available to most people at home.
- Give a clear indication of the assignment and expectations for the students. The assignment folders in the learning management system allow you to post detailed instructions or attach your assignment instructions as a document. This will ensure the students know exactly what they need to do.
- Communicate to the students about the due date of material and, in case of unforeseen events, be flexible about late submissions.
Peer feedback can be done either through Microsoft One-Drive, the course discussion boards, or a similar file collaboration software. One-Drive, which is part of the Microsoft suite available to students, staff, and faculty, allows documents to be uploaded and shared. Students can use this service to collaborate on work, give comments to peers, and to peer-edit. Students could also collaborate using the discussion boards, particularly in conjunction with the grouping feature.

How will your students and you complete learning activities?

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