Arkansas English Resource

When you are teaching synchronously on Zoom, you will need to record activities for students who may be unable to attend due to illness or who may need to access the materials again to watch at their own pace. You should always remind students that these synchronous activities are being recording.

To record, simple enable Cloud recording on Zoom. Once your recording is done, you'll get a link from Zoom with a passcode for viewers. You will then need to post this to your Blackboard course site in the correct lesson folder for future reference.

Teaching online, you need to purposefully interact with students and plan those interactions. While there is a rapport that can be built in face to face courses by virtue of simply spending time with students, that same rapport doesn't come naturally in online spaces.

Many times in a face to face course, you build a classroom culture and connections with students almost automatically, especially after you've been teaching for some time. The small daily activities that you create, the question and answer sections, the lectures, all of this combines into a shared experience and classroom culture. None of this, however, naturally happens in the online classroom.

The online classroom can be a site of a shared culture and connections, but you need to go about building those connections explicitly. With practice, this can be as natural as building community in your face to face courses, but it does take practice when you first start, just as lecturing and teaching in front of a group of strangers took time and patience on your part.

This section will provide you with some tips on how to do that and how to create a sense of community in your classroom that is now online.

1. Discussion Boards
2. Blogs
3. Email
4. Chats
5. Conferences
6. Phone Calls
7. Small Group Discussions

When you have an online course, one way to create a sense of community that has already been discussed is the Discussion Board. Having a place where students post and reply to each other can be a great help during this time. To encourage conversation, you can ask students to each make their own thread in the forum, and then ask them to respond to at least X number of peers’ posts the following week or whenever the deadline is passed. What may be useful as a guiding tool is to have the discussion due halfway through the week on Wednesday or Thursday, and then to ask them to post on these between that deadline and the final weekly deadline of Sunday.

As the instructor, think about when and where you can jump into conversations. You don’t have to respond to everyone, but you can chime in here and there to highlight great points or to ask students follow-up questions. Think about how you’d use questioning and comments in the face to face classroom, and then see how you can mimic that in your posts.

Blogs are a popular feature in online education, and they can be a great way to encourage students to share information and be active in the course. A Reading Blog can be a useful way to get students engaged, asking students to document their thoughts on readings and assignments as they go through the semester. This doesn’t have to be formal writing, just a space for students to share their ideas and thoughts on readings as they move through. To carry this out, you have two major options: 1) Use Blackboard Blogs, or 2) Use Wordpress Blogs. If you want to use Wordpress, students can use the University’s existing Wordpress platform. Information on that can be found here: https://sites.uark.edu/. If you want to use Blackboard blogs, you can find guidance on that here: https://tips.uark.edu/creating-a-blog-in-blackboard/

As you carry out this blogging, think about why you’re having students do this and how you want them to engage with each other. Blogging can be a bit more work for you to track, but it can open students up to more creative sharing. The Reading Blog idea I have found to be successful, but you can use the blog in any way you see fit.

Email is a classic tool in the classroom, and you can use email as a way to run your online classes too. In Blackboard, you can go to Send Email to send an email blast to all students in your course. I tend to use emails in my course to provide course-wide updates, to share timely information with students, and to remind students about important deadlines. Keep in mind that email as a tool can be ignored fairly quickly and sometimes accidently. Students and faculty get a lot of emails! You might want to create an email chain with all students on it with CC if you want to have email discussions, but I would recommend a discussion forum for that.

If you’re brave, you could try a listserv, but I don’t think it is worth the time and hassle. If you must look into this, the university information is here: https://its.uark.edu/communication-collaboration/email/about-listserv-mailing-lists.php

Chats can be a valuable way to talk with students and can take the place of conferences. I highly recommend using Collaborate Ultra in Blackboard. I have found it to be the most durable and user-friendly chat client that we have available. You can find information on how to use it here: https://tips.uark.edu/blackboard-collaborate-ultra-getting-started/

As far as how to use chats pedagogically, I find that they can be useful as virtual office hours. You can let students know when you will be online and then hop into Collaborate Ultra. They can then pop in and ask questions. You can later copy and paste the discussions in to a Word File and share it on your course page or email it to students to allow them to see what transpired.

If you’d like, you can have one on one conferences with students. I would recommend doing this via Collaborate or simply using the phone. You can use Skype for Business and log in with your university credentials to do VOIP calls as if you were on campus, and the normal Skype client and other voice chatting services works as well. You can even investigate Google Voice if you want a stand-alone number that will forward to your computer or cell phone to give you some measure of privacy: https://voice.google.com/about

I think we’ve all figured out the whole phone thing at this point, but I would just encourage you to use this as a tool. Being online can be distancing and being able to hear your voice can mean a lot for your students. Encourage them to schedule calls with you during office hours if they have questions. It can have a huge impact on students’ progress and satisfaction.

If you have a small course or seminar, you may well be able to replicate your course in a fairly transparent manner. What you can do is use breakout groups in Zoom to create new smaller groups from a larger class, but if you have a smaller course, you can simply keep everyone in one space. However, if you want to have groups break off into pairs, Zoom can do this as well.

Meetings may be shorter than your normal meetings, but they can be valuable as you go into teaching online. I would set an agenda for each of these chats, asking students to come in with a goal, and setting up a schedule for the chat. This can keep you on point.