Hi Candice. In my experience, most guidelines are made with large undergraduate courses in mind. Asynchronous makes a lot of sense in this context, especially if students are going to be in different time zones, have family care responsibilities, have slow connection speeds, etc. However, I agree that graduate seminars don't translate as well.
Nineteen is a lot. Would a hybrid approach be possible, such as splitting your scheduled time in half and meeting with 9-10 students per block? It's not ideal, but it might make a synchronous meeting more manageable (e.g., ability to view everyone on the screen).
One other consideration: How would you provide a comparable learning experience if a student could not join the meeting or had a bad connection? Can you ensure that there would not be disparities based on factors beyond the student's control?
If everyone is on board, you could certainly try it and just switch to asynchronous if it's not working. I would be more comfortable experimenting with a graduate seminar than with a big undergraduate class.
Good luck!
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Heather Kirkorian, Ph.D.
Laura M. Secord Chair in Early Childhood Development
Associate Professor | Human Development & Family Studies
School of Human Ecology | University of Wisconsin-Madison
4105 Nancy Nicholas Hall | 1300 Linden Drive
Madison, WI 53706
kirkorian@wisc.edu | 608-263-4020
https://sites.google.com/site/kirkorianlab/------------------------------
Original Message:
Sent: 03-19-2020 14:59
From: Candice Mills
Subject: Tips for moving graduate or other discussion-focused courses online
I am trying to figure out how best to move my graduate Cognitive Development course online. It's a discussion-heavy course with 19 students. Each week, a student or two serve as class leaders, briefly overviewing an article and facilitating discussion of the question posts for that article that their classmates have made on eLearning. Toward the end of each class, I give a brief lecture to prepare students for the next week's readings.
This is the first time I've taught this course at the graduate level, and I've loved it. The discussions have been lively and interesting, and I feel like we are all learning a lot from each other.
I have been receiving mixed messages about how to approach shifting to online learning. Some teaching experts strongly encouraging faculty members to go asynchronous with the content so that students can access the material whenever they want. But my intuition from talking to a few of my students is that they would prefer to keep meeting virtually during our class period instead of moving offline. What are your thoughts?
Thank you!
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Candice Mills
The University of Texas at Dallas
Email: candice.mills@utdallas.edu
Web: www.utdallas.edu/thinklab
Twitter: @CandiceMMills
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