Feedback From My Fully Online Class

My first fully online class wrapped up a few months ago, and it went well. I posted about recording lectures back in January, and I had a little update in February. I recieved good feedback all semester, and I wanted to share 3 bits of that here.

First was a note I got from a student as we were working our way through the "nerdy" lectures early in the semetser:

Maybe she was sucking up, or maybe she was sincere.

Second is a note I got from an advisor about a different student:

I really tried to give a LOT of feedback as they weren't getting any peer feedback.

And finally, here's a note after the semester was over from an advisor and program director. As I already mentioned, I really pushed out the feedback, and I also utilized one of the features of the class to give "kudos" when someone does something well, or to raise "flags" for specific academic issues. And I used those each week of class for students excelling or having issues:

I'll be teaching this same class in the fall, and now that I've done a LOT of the groundwork, it should be easier (and more fun) this time around!

Online Teaching Update

My first fully online class is still going well! It wraps up NEXT WEEK - it was a full 3 credit class held online over 8 weeks instead of the normal 14 to 16 weeks.

I've been finding notes from recording my lectures laying around:

I have 1 more short video to record, but I'm up over 9 GB of lecture recordings already.

One of the biggest things I did to help myself out was print out weekly graphs to help keep track of a few things:

That's basically a version of my usual attendance log, only I printed a page for each week (instead of just 1 page/semester). And then I could note when I updated the class website, when I reached out to students, who had the projects turned in on time, who I needed to contact near the end of the week to remind them about upcoming deadlines, etc. It basically made my job easier being able to just glance over a sheet to see who's done what, and it allowed me to make sure I was getting info from (and giving info to) everyone.

Next year, I'm planning to make at least 2 adjustments to those weekly pages: first, I'll make the "boxes" maybe twice as wide (for more space to write and because I never came close to filling up a page). And second, I'll put large rectangular boxes at the bottom so I can label the columns. But these have worked great and saved me a lot of headaches.

Here's last week seen in my book.
(I create a new "book" for each semester.)

Here's a post from last month as I was preparing a lot of lectures and getting ready to kick off this online class.

Recording Lectures

Over the weekend, I prepped for my first fully online course. Like, SUPER prepped. I moved a table (that had an iMac locked to it) in position in front of one of my classrooms, erased the board, and then started giving lectures to the (recording) computer. Here was the scene 7 hours later when I was wrapping up on Saturday night:

CLICK HERE for a large version.

That image shows my laptop on the far left (because I had to glance at the syllabus now and then), cameras and other things to discuss in the back left, the iMac propped up and pointed at the white board to record, and my 2nd camera on the far right. And obviously, a board full of notes at the end of the day.

I was there for 2 days recording demos and recording lectures. By the end of the weekend, I had about 2.5 GB of videos (just the ones worth saving), which totaled nearly 3.5 hours of video. Whew! (And this is all moving "faster" than a normal in-person class because I know students can pause to get caught up and/or rewind for a moment to reiterate a point that they didn't quite understand the first time.)

I have the video files saved 5 different ways/places right now: on that iMac, on a flash drive, on Google Drive, on a private (new) YouTube channel, and on North Central University's video sharing platform. The whole idea with the YouTube channel is that they are not public, but anyone with the direct link can view them, so I can share them in the future when I have a student miss an important class: "Here Johnny, check out this video. It's not EXACTLY what we covered, but it will get you mostly caught up!"

The start of a new (and private) YouTube channel.

On top of everything listed above, I have 4 more videos ready to upload as well: the running total is now just over 4 hours, and I've got close to 4 GB of video files. Sheesh!