Building Our Virtual Classroom Resources & Suggestions to Support Your Build

Hybrid Learning Checklist

Here are some suggestions and resources that align with the Hybrid Learning Checklist and might be helpful as you draft your weekly plans and build your course in Canvas. As always, remember to “rule of 2s” as you go through these resources: keep it simple and identify 2 ideas, strategies, or resources that will help you complete the design & build process.

Make Learning Active

As educator Jennifer Gonzalez reminds us in one of her blog posts (Links to an external site.), “To Learn, Students Need to DO Something.” As Riggs & Linder explain (Links to an external site.), "active learning places the student at the center of the learning experience" and requires both "meaningful action by the student on behalf of their learning" and "reflection by the student regarding their learning experience" (p. 1). How can the activities you plan leverage active learning to deepen student engagement and learning? The experts at Vanderbilt's Center for Teaching share this active teaching guide as well as a list of instructional strategies that can work in-person and online.

Here are additional some ideas and resources that might help you leverage online and in-person modalities for active learning:

Active Learning Techniques
Best Practices for Online Labs
Build-in Choice: See ideas from PSU's Open CoLab
Carefully structure group work (it’s even harder to do online)
Case Studies (Vanderbilt)
Explore CK12’s (Free!) Science Simulations
Online Instructional Activities Index

Use Voicethread (ask Heather!), Flipgrid (ask Brian L.), or other interactive tools like Quizlet, Poll Everywhere, or Kahoot to build-in interactivity. Or, better yet, ask your students to use these apps to practice, reflect, or to self- or peer-assess.

Make Learning Social

St. Markers missed learning with their peers this spring! And . . . our students need structure and guidance to "do" social learning well, especially when we are remote. Keep this advice from GOA in mind as you plan your weeks: “Online learners need time, space, and support to develop their independent learning skills”

Click the infographic to expand the image and check out the instructions GOA uses to coach students through this.

How will you guide social learning to help students gain independence and develop their collaboration skills? How can you design-in ways to take the mystery and stress out of connecting with peers so no one feels left out or disconnected? How will you take your variable learners into consideration when building-in weekly activities (e.g. by taking the introversion-extroversion spectrum into consideration and including a variety of ways students can successfully engage and contribute)?

Online Learning Habits

Online Learning Habits.png

Here are some ideas:

Purposefully pair “study buddies” or create small groups & empower them to connect with each other on their own time to support asynchronous learning, activities, and assignments
Assign rotating roles or jobs during synchronous sessions to build connection & confidence, especially during periods of distance learning
Carefully structure whole-class discussions & activities and consider relying more on small groups when using Zoom (since many students found it challenging to engage with peers in bigger groups)
Adopt some of the protocols & strategies in the “Belonging” section of Lesson 1.3 of Module 1

Integrate some of the “icebreaker” activities from Lesson 1.1 of Module 1, or try this or other inclusive practice from the U. of Michigan: Name Story.

Build-In Rituals & Routines

Just like when we are on campus, rituals and routines help to ground students in the culture and expectations of our virtual classrooms. They maximize productivity and create smooth transitions for students by creating familiar patterns and procedures. How will you translate existing rituals & routines (or identify new ones) to help your students get to know you and each other, and to establish a sense of intellectual community in a hybrid context? How will rituals & routines help you establish the “cadence” or flow of learning across each week? Here are some quick suggestions and resources:

Stories foster empathy and connection: build rotating storytelling time or share-outs into each week
Consider opening each Zoom session with the same ritual (a quick game, icebreaker, or 1-word check-in) so students know what’s expected in this relatively new (and often awkward) social context
Adopt or create set protocols for activities, assignments, or assessments that will be repeated in the class. See an example from GOA in the video below:

Quick Tip: You all have great rituals & routines in your face-to-face classes. Consider adapting those to your hybrid course plan to develop consistency and a familiar rhythm of learning for your students.

Have tips to share? Jump into our Crowdsourcing Ideas & Resources Doc to tell us about the practices you plan to incorporate into your hybrid courses!

Expand Your Zoom “Moves”

In the spring, students had a hard time adjusting to the distance, gaps, and glitches that often came with discussions and activities in Zoom. Penn State Comparative Literature professor Magalí Armillas-Tiseyra describe the challenges of the "Zoom classroom" well in a recent tweet: "a zoom room is *much* harder to read; it is harder to remain engaged and as with all forms of distance learning it requires a lot more effort from all involved."

To take the awkwardness out of Zoom and maximize the effectiveness of learning through video conferencing, we need to structure and communicate a clear plan and share our expectations for students ahead of each and every Zoom session.

St. Markers found whole-class discussions particularly challenging, which suggests we need to rethink and expand our Zoom repertoires. This image from ExploElevate provides some visual options that might help you imagine ways to add new “moves” to your Zoom game (click on the image to download the PDF).

Consider these tips as you deliberately plan your synchronous sessions:

Communicate the 4 Ps for Zoom every time you meet with students: Purpose (of the session/class + how it connects to learning goals/asynchronous work), Plan (how time & activities will be structured), Protocols (student roles & expectations), and Product (what they will create or do as a result of this session)
Consider following GOA’s model (showcased in these videos) to “empower students through conversations in real time” and for structuring synchronous sessions to build connection
Adapt these recommendations for online discussions to Zoom sessions
Build-in 1:1 meetings with students or leverage small groups and breakout activities instead of whole-class discussions, which limit the number of students who are able to participate and engage in extended dialogue (and can make students feel even more isolated during distance learning)
Limit lectures and direct instruction time to under 10 minutes during Zoom (or pre-record a "micro lecture" for them to watch ahead of the session instead) since this cuts into the precious little time we have for active, engaged student learning (read this short post on how the 8-minute lecture keeps students engaged).
Step back so students step up: Learn from educator Clyde Cole's recent experience in Zoom sessions where kids were not talking, shared it this blog post: "Interrupting for Good." Here's his takeaway:
"If we have created the right conditions for students, maybe we shouldn’t be interrupting them.

Maybe we should be interrupting ourselves—for good."

See 25 Strategies to Engage Your Students on Zoom and 7 Strategies Designed to Increase Student Engagement in Synchronous Online Discussions Using Video Conferencing for more ideas.

Image Credit: ExploElevate

Leverage a Variety of Resources

During remote learning this spring, we realized we had to strike a balance between the rich resources we can access in the digital realm (including free ebooks) and the desire to help students step away from screens and devices (see, e.g. Bard's "Reflective Walking" activity). As you design your courses and plan your weeks, aim to include a range of resources, activities, and modalities (which also helps to meet the needs of our variable learners) to get students up and away from screens.

Where possible, incorporate print and/or tactile resources since some research suggests that students learn and retain material more effectively when engaging with printed materials (Nilson & Goodson, p.94). Note that one important exception may be students with learning plans so check with Sarah Eslick on that!

Make and distribute printed course packets/readers if you use a lot of digital PDFs in your course
Encourage students to use paper copies of books/resources where possible and explain the “why” behind this to help your students make choices about what works best for them
Use paper journals and ask students to use a scanning app to submit them to you in Canvas
Incorporate resources from a variety of modalities (video, audio, print, simulations, websites, interactives, "live" people/experts) and, where possible, give students a choice in what they’ll use or access for their learning
Leverage Open Educational Resources (OER)! There are so many high-quality open educational resources out there for us to use in our courses. Here are tips from PSU's Open CoLab on OER adoption. There are also plenty of open courses available on the web (see CK-12 & discipline-specific examples on this Google Doc for additional examples).
- TIP: Ask Colleen W. if you’d like some help with “curating” OER or finding open courses. She loves doing this:).
Create your own videos -- but aim to keep to under 5 minutes! Students are more likely to watch them and return to them again for independent, asynchronous “extra help” if you keep them short and specific. See these resources for why & how to create “microlectures”:
Create your own content using Pages in Canvas (similar to the content in this course). Make sure you "chunk" out information and use some of the design features (bold headings, numbered lists, bullet points, images, etc.) to organize your pages so you don't overwhelm students with too much dense content (...and yes, I 110% realize that I could have done a better job "modeling" this in the course you're in right now;).

Action Step

Continue drafting the first 2 weeks of your course and return to this lesson if you need ideas or resources as you review your progress against the Hybrid Learning Checklist.