Taking your in-person course online: A guide for biostatistics faculty*
Assumptions
This document assumes that:
You are teaching an in-person course in Spring 2020, and that course is set up in Canvas or equivalent learning management system
Your primary mode of instruction is lecturing (i.e., student interaction mostly occurs via questions during lectures and/or office hours)
Synchronous or Asynchronous?
The first decision you have to make when transitioning your course online is whether you would like to deliver online lectures synchronously or asynchronously.
Synchronous lectures
A synchronous lecture takes place at the scheduled lecture time, and is streamed to students who join a virtual "meeting room" during that time. Synchronous lectures attempt to replicate the in-class experience, virtually. This has advantages and disadvantages. One advantage is that in a synchronous lecture, students "attending" the lecture can ask questions as they come up, and you can engage them in a live discussion. The drawback is that, as with an in-person class, technological issues can occupy valuable class time. So, it may be difficult to lecture fluidly if students are messaging you that they can't join, or hear audio, etc. Also, as you have probably experienced from Zoom/Skype/Google Hangout meetings, there can be issues with audio and video quality, particularly if some students don't mute their microphones.
If you would like to offer synchronous lectures, you should use Zoom. You can set Zoom to record your synchronous lecture so that it is available for students to replay later, in case they experience technical difficulties accessing the live lecture. (You can also set up your Zoom meetings so that all participants are muted by default when the meeting/class begins.)
Zoom has an annotate feature, which allows one to draw, type, highlight, etc. in an existing document, including PowerPoint slides.
Zoom also has a chat feature, which provides another option for interaction with students. If you have a teaching assistant, the TA can be asked to moderate the chat room, either fielding questions directly or just bringing them to your attention at appropriate times. There is also a “raise hand” feature which can also be moderated by a TA to selectively unmute students who wish to be heard.
Asynchronous lectures
An asynchronous lecture is a lecture that is recorded at the instructor's convenience and later made available for students to view at a time of their choosing. Many online courses use asynchronous, pre-recorded lectures. Asynchronous lectures offer more flexibility at the cost of student interaction. Faculty members may record the lectures at any time, take breaks during recording, break up course material into smaller chunks, etc. However, there is no opportunity for students to ask questions during the lectures themselves.
If you would like to offer asynchronous lectures, you should use Kaltura, a tool available through Canvas. Kaltura offers automatic captioning of recordings, which improves accessibility of content.
If you choose to offer asynchronous lectures, you may wish to consider holding virtual office hours via Zoom during your class's regularly scheduled meeting time so that students can ask questions about course material. Also, consider using the Q&A forums in Canvas for asynchronous questions, instead of email, so students can see the questions and answers and you don’t need to answer the same question a dozen times in email.
Capturing handwriting
Many biostatistics lectures involve writing mathematics on a whiteboard. If you would like to replicate this in an online lecture (live or pre-recorded), here are some options:
If your laptop has a touchscreen and digital writing device (stylus), you can write on your laptop screen. PowerPoint and Adobe Acrobat both support this, and if you are capturing your screen then your writing will be visible.
If you have an iPad or other tablet with a digital writing device (e.g., Apple Pencil), you can "cast" your tablet screen to a laptop so that what you write on your tablet is captured.
Zoom has the option to share your iPad screen directly. It also has a white board.
If using Kaltura, you may need a third-party program such as AirServer to cast your tablet to your laptop.
Another useful tool is the echo smartpen. You can read more about it here.
If you do not have access to a digital writing device, here are some options which involve writing on a pad of paper.
If you have a standalone webcam, you can point it at a pad of paper and write on there.
If you have a webcam built into your laptop, you can write on a pad of paper and at regular intervals hold it up to your webcam so that students can see what you've written.
As an alternative, you may want to consider writing or typing up key results in advance of your lecture. This will allow you to scroll through and highlight a digital version of the results (e.g., photo of paper, or PDF of TeX output) instead of trying to generate everything "live".
Assignments and Exams
The content and delivery of typical problem-based individual assignments can mostly remain the same.
If assignments involve mathematical derivations, encourage students to type them in LaTeX or take photos of their solutions using their phone. You may want to suggest that students use an app such as GeniusScan to scan assignments onto their phone, as the quality of the capture is usually better (and the file size smaller) than a typical photo.
Exams should probably be modified so that they are "open book". Exams can be "timed" by setting the exam to be released on Canvas at a particular time and due at another, later time. Remember to allow extra time for students to prepare their solutions for upload onto Canvas.
In addition, you might want to think about whether to do the exams in the "quiz" tool in Canvas, or using the "assignments" tool in Canvas. Both can have release dates and due dates, but the assignment approach would be more like a take-home exam: students would work on a document and then upload it.
Communication/Announcements
A best practice for teaching online is to have a noticeable instructor presence, whether by responding promptly to emails or Q&A forums, by holding virtual office hours, and/or by sending announcements to the students: once a week, at the minimum, or twice a week, maximum. For more information about tips for creating instructor presence, see this blog post.
The best mode of communication I (Laura) have found on Canvas is to use the Announcements task (in the sidebar), instead of Canvas’s Inbox. Using the Announcements allows me to
create rich text messages about the current week, upcoming assignments, and important notes about the course (and HTML code can be modified to make it look “pretty”),
send to all members in the Canvas site, and
keep the messages on the site for future review.
You can also create weekly intro videos (recorded with your phone, for example) to add to the week's content to increase the instructor’s social presence.
Active Learning Classrooms
If you currently have student-student interaction in your in-person class (e.g. active learning, group discussions, group projects, etc.), this can be replicated in the online environment using the Breakout Rooms feature of Zoom. You can set up the breakout rooms in advance, to match the existing in-person groups (table groups, project groups, etc.). Once in the online meeting/class in Zoom, you can send students to breakout rooms, and then you as the instructor can circulate around from room to room and talk with each group, to see how they are doing, ask them questions, and address their questions. Students can push the “Ask for help” button to in effect raise their hand and request you to join their group and help them. You can call the groups back to the main group as needed for wrap-up or to continue the lecture.
Other Resources for Online Teaching
The last few posts in the Statistics Teaching and Learning Corner (StatTLC) blog at https://stattlc.com/:
March 20: Adapting Statistics Instruction for an Online Environment in the Wake of COVID-19
March 25: Online Strategies due to COVID-19, Part 1
March 27: Online Strategies due to COVID-19, Part 2
Many of the recent posts from Faculty Focus at https://www.facultyfocus.com/:
March 20: Eight Steps for a Smoother Transition to Online Learning
March 27: Five Tips for Switching to Online Instruction
March 30: When the Tide Goes Out: Identifying and Supporting Struggling Students in Online Courses
The new ASA community, “Online Teaching Resources and Discussion Group”
*These suggestions were originally compiled by Julian Wolfson, Marta Shore, Laura Le and Ann Brearley (Division of Biostatistics, University of Minnesota). They were expanded by members of the TSHS Section executive committee: Heather Hoffman (George Washington University), John Doucette (Mount Sinai School of Medicine) and Ann Brearley.