My best tip is that I reduced the number of assignments by one. I felt a little guilty at the beginning of the fall but so glad by the end.
What have you figured out to make this bearable?
Best time-saving tips for teaching online
-
Don't lecture or record lectures at all. I provide a guide to the assigned materials. Inevitably a few people in my course evaluations complain, but my evals have always been strong reaffirming time and time again that the majority of people taking online courses are capable of self-directed learning and actually seek out this format specifically because it facilitates an alternative to an in-classroom learning experience. Once the course is prepped, it really just comes down to fielding emails throughout the week and grading occasionally.
-
Automate everything that can be automated. A lot can be automated in the LRM itself--submission, quiz grading, etc.
I used to have a script that would automatically log me into BB twice a day and click on any unopened discussion links, in case anyone ever checked how often I was on. Then I enhanced it to check the ungraded discussion posts and give ten points to everyone who made a post.
Then I changed jobs to a Canvas school, and never got around to automating that.
-
Then I changed jobs to a Canvas school, and never got around to automating that.
It'd be great to see some examples of this. The ideal Canvas script would log me in, give standard points for students' weekly discussion comments, and randomly give out feedback from a list of options, like "interesting points" or "very thoughtful."
-
Then I changed jobs to a Canvas school, and never got around to automating that.
It'd be great to see some examples of this. The ideal Canvas script would log me in, give standard points for students' weekly discussion comments, and randomly give out feedback from a list of options, like "interesting points" or "very thoughtful."I last used my BB program ten years ago so I doubt it works any more, even if I could find it. I think I wrote it in Python, but probably any scripting language you know that can open URLs would suffice.
-
Don't lecture or record lectures at all. I provide a guide to the assigned materials. Inevitably a few people in my course evaluations complain, but my evals have always been strong reaffirming time and time again that the majority of people taking online courses are capable of self-directed learning and actually seek out this format specifically because it facilitates an alternative to an in-classroom learning experience. Once the course is prepped, it really just comes down to fielding emails throughout the week and grading occasionally.
On the subject of recorded lectures... to keep the workload reasonably minimal...
A few of the Crash Course videos have helped me in a pinch and say 80% of what I would have wanted to say anyway, so assign those instead of your own lectures where appropriate.
Put most of the test material in readings / interactives / documentaries / whatever. If you record lectures, keep them short. Students won't watch something absurdly long. Aim for 10 minutes, and try your damndest to keep them under 15. I assign maybe three of these a week at the absolute most.
You can also keep lectures broadly generic so the same one can be used for more than one class. You can also have introductory and concluding slides that you tack onto a PowerPoint to help weave that lecture into the present class a little bit more.
-
Don't lecture or record lectures at all. I provide a guide to the assigned materials. Inevitably a few people in my course evaluations complain, but my evals have always been strong reaffirming time and time again that the majority of people taking online courses are capable of self-directed learning and actually seek out this format specifically because it facilitates an alternative to an in-classroom learning experience. Once the course is prepped, it really just comes down to fielding emails throughout the week and grading occasionally.
What do you mean by a guide?
I have PowerPoints from when i taught this in person, but my lectures are usually much more than what's on the slides, of course.
But if nobody wants to actually listen to me, I'd love to not record lecturers. I'm at a mrm R1. Could i just upload the ppts, assign some discussion board questions, grade the open book tests, and get decent course evaluations? That's the dream....
-
Then I changed jobs to a Canvas school, and never got around to automating that.
It'd be great to see some examples of this. The ideal Canvas script would log me in, give standard points for students' weekly discussion comments, and randomly give out feedback from a list of options, like "interesting points" or "very thoughtful."I've wondered how many others do this.
You want to really tech out your script, write some generic comments that are related to the actual discussion board item. This is a bit more work upfront when you prep the course, but it makes it so much less chat bot-esque. Also has the added bonus of actually being (potentially) helpful to the students. For example, some of the snippets I use in my automated comments elaborate on something from the assigned text and reference page numbers, etc. I set up a handful of those for the script to choose from when I made the discussion board question.