LibGuides: Online Teaching and Learning: De La Salle Institute

General Resources for Shifting Online

La Salle University Training Hub: The Instructional Design team has compiled La Salle-specific guides and resources for moving your course online. The materials on the Training Hub are designed to be a how-to once you’ve decided what methods and measures make the most sense for your courses. The resources below can help you figure out how to make those decisions.
Going Online in A Hurry: What to Do and Where to Start: Michelle D. Miller offers a six-part checklist of what you’ll need to think about in adapting your courses.
Tips and Tools for Teaching Online in Pinch: Another handy checklist of what to think about when shifting to an Instructional Continuity approach to your courses.
Please Do a Bad Job of Putting Your Courses Online: We’re not wild about the title (we’d prefer to think of it as akin to “good enough parenting.”) But the fundamental point here is critical: you are cobbling together a good-faith but hasty replacement for what you already planned to do in person.
How to Be a Better Online Teacher: This Chronicle Interactive Advice Guide provides guidance for developing courses that are intended to be online; still, this interactive offers plenty of useful advice and recommendations for the current situation.
Teaching Effectively During Times of Disruption: Stanford has assembled a comprehensive list of suggestions for shifting a course online. There are some Stanford-specific elements to the guide, but since they also use Canvas and Zoom, many of their recommendations and how-to guides will also work for us.
If feasible, consider shifting your course to address the impact of COVID-19 on your discipline. For some suggestions on how to do that, see this thread by Arizona State University’s Katie Hinde.
The University of Central Florida maintains the Teaching Online Pedagogical Repository. Most of their resources are intended for fully-online courses that were designed to be that way, but you might find additional resources there to be useful.

Course Content

Create Modules to Organize and Present Content: Modules are just a fancy way of thinking about course units. If your in-person syllabus already chunks material by week or by theme, try to replicate that chunking structure in the online material you set up. This site includes a few examples of what that chunking might look like (though the examples are from other Learning Management Systems, Canvas can do the same things).
Micro-lectures: Intros to Key Concepts in Five Minutes or Less
- This resource proposes brief micro-lectures that give students a quick overview of key concepts before directing them to readings / external videos / discussions. Micro-lectures can be a good middle ground for giving students a bit of additional context or talking through a particularly challenging idea..
- You can offer Micro-Lectures using a free tool called Screen-Cast-o-Matic or by recording yourself sharing your screen in an empty Zoom room.
Multimedia Educational Resource for Learning and Online Teaching [MERLOT]: Part of the California State University system, MERLOT is a clearinghouse for online lessons, modules, labs, simulations, and more, with materials for most disciplines. MERLOT can link directly to Canvas, which can make it easier to pull content and lesson plans directly into your course.
Discipline-Specific Options:
- Chemistry / Biochemistry

Assessment

Canvas can facilitate testing. You can review the ID Team’s guide on Canvas quizzes here.
Do Online Students Cheat More on Tests?: Spoiler alert: The answer is no.
Using Discussion Rubrics: This resource offers several examples of rubrics to help guide grading of discussion posts.
Using Low-Stakes Quizzes to Encourage Mastery: If you already use quizzes in your course, this one is a no-brainer. Adapt those quizzes to Canvas’s quiz functionality, and the quizzes will self-grade, including giving students feedback on both right and wrong answers. If you don’t typically use quizzes, you might consider adding a few as supplemental option.
Provide Models of What to Do (and What Not to Do): Exemplars are especially important when you’re asking students to produce a deliverable that they’ve never done before. If you haven’t done discussion boards with them before, try giving them models of effective and ineffective posts and replies. If you’re going to require an online test, do a low-stakes online quiz first so students can see how the platform works. If you’re going to shift your in-person presentations to online presentations, try Joshua Drew’s crowdsourced strategy for creating a terrible presentation yourself to show them what not to do.