Dr. Emily Riddle,
Department of Human Ecology,
SUNY Oneonta,

I haven’t introduced any new resources that I could link others to in my classes since transferring online. However, I have continued to use in-class participation activities, in both my synchronous and asynchronous classes. For asynchronous classes, I record 3 mini lectures for every 1 normal class lecture. To encourage students to keep up with course material, I embed “participation activities” into my lectures in a random fashion (not every lecture has one, but I usually have students do 1-2 activities per week). Students needs to listen to the lectures or read through the slides to find the participation activities; I do not tell them which lectures they are in. They then complete the prompt or activity that relates to the lecture material and submit their response to me via blackboard by the end each Friday. I have found this to be a very low stakes, easy way for students to keep up with course material and stay engaged. You could also easily run this as a discussion board. I chose not to because I wanted to mimic what I would do in class. When teaching in person, we frequently do in-class group work that I collect for participation points.

This is part of a series of posts collected by the TLTC and Faculty Center to share ideas and tools that have been helpful in the shift is teaching during the Spring 2020 semester.  If you are interested in sharing either a tool that you have found very useful or a method that you are now using in your courses, we would love to hear from you. Send your video or brief description to Chilton Reynolds and we will post it as a part of this series.