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My recommendation for people planning their courses, is to stop thinking about ‘contact hours’. A contact hour is a constraint that is applied to the learning process because of the organizational need to have people share a space in a building. Also called a credit hour, (particularly for American universities) this has meant, from a workload perspective, that for every in class hour a student is meant to do at least 2 (in some cases 3) hours of study outside of class. Even Cliff Notes agrees with me. So… for a full load, that 30 to 45 Total Work Hours for students per course that you are designing.

Simple break down (not quite 90, yes i know) Watch 3 hours of video* – 5 hoursRead stuff – 20 hoursListen to me talk – 15 hoursTalk with other students in a group – 15 hoursWrite reflections about group chat – 7.5 hoursRespond to other people’s reflections – 7.5 hoursWork on a term paper – 10 hoursDo weekly quiz – 3 hoursWrite take home mid-term – 3 hoursWrite take home final – 3 hours

A thousand variations of this might be imagined

This level of surveillance is “not too over-the-top”, Ingrid said, and she feels her classmates are generally “accepting” of it.

One leading student privacy expert estimated that as many as a third of America’s roughly 15,000 school districts may already be using technology that monitors students’ emails and documents for phrases that might flag suicidal thoughts, plans for a school shooting, or a range of other offenses.

Some parents said they were alarmed and frightened by schools’ new monitoring technologies. Others said they were conflicted, seeing some benefits to schools watching over what kids are doing online, but uncertain if their schools were striking the right balance with privacy concerns. Many said they were not even sure what kind of surveillance technology their schools might be using, and that the permission slips they had signed when their kids brought home school devices had told them almost nothing

Resist the temptation to dive right into curriculum at the start of the school year. Things will go more smoothly if you devote the early weeks to building community so students feel connected. Social emotional skills can be woven in during this time. On top of that, students need practice with whatever digital tools you’ll be using. So focus your lessons on those things, intertwining the two when possible. 

Online instruction is made up largely of asynchronous instruction, which students can access at any time. This is ideal, because requiring attendance for synchronous instruction puts some students at an immediate disadvantage if they don’t have the same access to technology, reliable internet, or a flexible home schedule. 

you’re likely to offer “face-to-face” or synchronous opportunities at some point, and one way to make them happen more easily is to have students meet in small groups. While it’s nearly impossible to arrange for 30 students to attend a meeting at once, assigning four students to meet is much more manageable.

The Green Zone: Underappreciated Workhorses Starting with the green zone in the lower left, we have readings with text and images. These types of assignments may not seem exciting, but sharing readings with students in a consistent and organized way provides your online course with a very practical, solid foundation. Email and discussion boards also belong in this quadrant.  Online instructors have been using these three tools—file sharing (for readings and such), email, and discussion boards—for decades. And while that might make them sound boring, you can create some fantastic instructional experiences with just these three tools. 

The Blue Zone: Practical Immediacy Moving over to the lower right, we have low-bandwidth tools that can add immediacy to student interactions. If you’ve used Microsoft Office 365 or Google Drive, you’re probably already familiar with some of the features and benefits of collaborative document editors. These tools allow multiple people to edit and comment on the same document, spreadsheet, or presentation slides. Depending on how you structure your assignments, students could collaborate over an extended period of time, or they could go online at the exact same time and write and edit each other’s work simultaneously.  When it comes to group chat/messaging, there are lots of free apps that can be useful in an educational setting. Slack and GroupMe are two popular examples. These mobile-friendly apps allow students to post text-based messages and images without requiring anyone in the group (including you!) to share their phone numbers. These tools allow students to communicate quickly and easily without scheduling an entire day around a formal video conference.

Screencasting adds a human element to online courses because your voice creates a sense of presence that plain text can’t. 

In an online environment, seminars will work best if they occur asynchronously in the discussion boards in an LMS

The 4 key elements for a seminar that need to be replicated during remote instruction include: A prompt or text(s) that the student considers independently in advance Guiding questions that require analysis, synthesize and/or evaluation of ideas The opportunity to share personal thinking with a group Ideas being developed, rejected, and refined over time based on everyone’s contributions

Students need specific guidance and support for how to develop, reject, and refine ideas appropriately in your course.  If you want students to share well, consider requiring an initial post where you and students introduce yourselves and share a picture. Describe your expectations for norms in how everyone will behave online Provide a lot of initial feedback about the quality of posting.  Consider giving samples of good and bad posts, and remember to clarify your marking criteria. Focus your expectations on the quality of comments, and set maximums for the amount you expect to reduce your marking load and keep the discussions high quality. Someone will need to moderate the discussion. That includes posting the initial threads, reading what everyone posts all weeks and commenting to keep the discussion flowing.  Likely, the same person (you or a TA) will also be grading and providing private feedback to each student. Consider making the moderation of a discussion an assignment in your course. You can moderate the first few weeks to demonstrate what you want, and groups of students can moderate other weeks. It can increase engagement if done well, and definitely decreases your work load.

How and why do well-educated, well-intentioned scientists produce biased AI systems? Sociological theories of privilege provide one useful lens.

Scientists also face a nasty subconscious dilemma when incorporating diversity into machine learning models: Diverse, inclusive models perform worse than narrow models.

fairness can still be the victim of competitive pressures in academia and industry. The flawed Bard and Bing chatbots from Google and Microsoft are recent evidence of this grim reality. The commercial necessity of building market share led to the premature release of these systems.

Please do not conflate word form and meaning. Mind your own credulity.

We’ve learned to make “machines that can mindlessly generate text,” Bender told me when we met this winter. “But we haven’t learned how to stop imagining the mind behind it.”

A handful of companies control what PricewaterhouseCoopers called a “$15.7 trillion game changer of an industry.” Those companies employ or finance the work of a huge chunk of the academics who understand how to make LLMs. This leaves few people with the expertise and authority to say, “Wait, why are these companies blurring the distinction between what is human and what’s a language model? Is this what we want?”

argues for radical reform of college teaching, advocating a move toward a "flipped" classroom, where students watch videos from superstar professors as homework and use class time for group projects and other interactive activities

it's much harder to then take it for the broad set of students in the institutional framework and decide, OK, where is technology the best and where is the face-to-face the best. And they don't have very good metrics of what is their value-added. If you try and compare two universities, you'll find out a lot more about the inputs—this university has high SAT scores compared to this one. And it's sort of the opposite of what you'd think. You'd think people would say, "We take people with low SATs and make them really good lawyers." Instead they say, "We take people with very high SATs and we don't really know what we create, but at least they're smart when they show up here so maybe they still are when we're done with them."

The various rankings have focused on the input side of the equation, not the output

a site that wants to look at the intersection of productivity, technology, and pedagogy in higher education

showing that the barrier of entry to this new stuff is lower than it seems

One hundred percent of this stuff we bring into our own classroom. If the slogan for software development is to eat your own dog food, we are always eating our own dog food. These are our assignments, our best practices.

Can you give me examples of programs that are rooted in, speaking to, and resonant with conservative and religious communities in this country? In particular, I’d love to know about programs that work in conservative white Evangelical and religious black and LatinX communities? I’d love to hear how educators integrate progressive social justice values into conservative cultural logics. Context: To the best that I can tell, every program I’ve seen is rooted in progressive (predominantly white) ways of thinking. I know that communities who define “fake news” as CNN (as well as black communities who see mainstream media as rooted in the history of slavery and white supremacy) have little patience for the logics of progressive white educators. So what does media literacy look like when it starts with religious and/or conservative frameworks? What examples exist?

Can you tell me how you teach across gaslighting? How do you stabilize students’ trust in Information, particularly among those whose families are wary of institutions and Information intermediaries?Context: Foreign adversaries (and some domestic groups) are primarily focused on destabilizing people’s trust in information intermediaries. They want people to doubt everything and turn their backs on institutions. We are seeing the impact of this agenda. I’m not finding that teaching someone the source of a piece of content helps build up trust. Instead, it seems to further undermine it. So how do you approach media literacy to build up confidence in institutions and information intermediaries?

For what it’s worth, when I try to untangle the threads to actually address the so-called “fake news” problem, I always end in two places: 1) dismantle financialized capitalism (which is also the root cause of some of the most challenging dynamics of tech companies); 2) reknit the social fabric of society by strategically connecting people. But neither of those are recommendations for educators.

One of the most interesting changes that I saw in terms of online learning was the use of WhatsApp, a text and voice messaging app that is very popular in South Africa. Through the app’s group chat feature, instructors can moderate the discussion and students can leave voice notes, which gives them the ability to have their voices heard asynchronously

I’ve imagined a north–south dialogue. Now, due to COVID-19, it’s happening organically, and I’m in the process of reimagining the course I would have been teaching in Vancouver this summer as an online course. I need to factor in which apps to use, how to prepare for students who only have cellphones, and the reality that many students come from other countries to study at Emily Carr, and now they’ll be learning remotely. It’s fascinating that the forced global aspect of the classroom will influence the way I design the educational technology for my program

In the past, some educators might have been excited to tear everything apart and build it back up with a goal of helping students learn in a better way, but the institutions wouldn’t be able to support it. Not because they didn’t want to, but because it was difficult for them to do it. Now there’s an opportunity for institutions to let the reins go and encourage creative and new approaches. It’s scary, but it’s also inspiring for educators to have that freedom. The research is available, the interest is there, and the resources are open, so now is the time to make it happen

About that obsession you’ve got with students turning on their cameras during class. I understand why you’ve got it. I’d like to help you deal with it. I say “deal with it” because many students complain to me that they don’t like being forced to turn their cameras on

it’s probably essential to our wellbeing to see human faces. As a teacher and presenter and facilitator, seeing facial expressions and reactions of audience/participants makes a huge difference. I get it. I get that you need to know someone is listening, and see those reactions. I get it. I recently gave a keynote and asked a few friends to be on webinar panel so I could see their smiling faces. However, when I am in a position of power like in the class, I never ask students to turn on their cameras. And my students were *almost always all engaged* last semester in our Zoom calls.

You can’t make eye contact online