Someone asked to write down how I teach online. Because of corona, I have moved all my courses at the university online, and as a consequence I had to clean up my act and get things in order.
The first thing I did was record all my lectures in advance. This was a hugely time-consuming enterprise. I bought a licence for screencast-o-matic, which is something like 15 Euros a year, and a Blue Yeti microphone (144 Euros, including express shipping). I already have a Logitech HD 1080p camera. I also bought a Windows (Dell) tablet computer through the university, so I could write freehand with an electronic pen. Somehow, writing freehand during a lecture solidifies understanding in the student's mind in a way that a mere slide presentation does not. I don't know why this is the case but I firmly believe one should show derivations in real time.
The way I do my recordings is that I start screencast-o-matic (the new Mac OS X makes this incredibly hard, you have to repeatedly open the settings and give the software permission to record--thanks, Apple). Then, I record the lecture in one shot, no editing at all. If I make a mistake during the lecture, I just live with it (and sometimes the mistakes are horrendous). Sometimes my cat Molly video-bombs my lectures, I just let it all happen. All this makes my video recordings less than professional looking, but I think it's good enough. Nobody has complained about this so far. I use Google Chrome's Remote Desktop feature to link my Macbook Pro with the Windows machine, and switch between RStudio on the Mac and the Windows tablet for writing. On Windows, I use the infinite writing space provided by OneNote. For writing on pdfs, I use the PDF reader by Xodo.
Here are my videos from my frequentist course:
https://vasishth.github.io/IntroductionStatistics/
The way students are expected to work is to watch the videos, and then do exercises that I give out. My lecture notes provide a written record of the material, plus the exercises:
https://vasishth.github.io/Freq_CogSci/
The solutions are given out after the submission deadline. In my courses, I stipulate that you can only take the class if you commit to doing at least 80% of the homework. I force people to quit the class if they don't do the HW; many people try to audit the classes without doing the HW. In my experience, they don't get anything out of the class, so I don't allow audits without doing the HW. This is a very effective strategy, because it forces the students to engage. One rule I have is that if you submit the HW and make an honest attempt to solve the problems you will get 100% on the HW no matter what. This decouples learning from grades and reduces student stress considerably, and allows them to actually learn the material. Some students complain that the HW is hard; but it's supposed to make them think, and there is no shame in not being able to do it. Some students are unable to adjust to the fact that not everything will be easy to do.
Two other components of the class are (a) weekly meetings over zoom, where students can ask me anything, and (b) an online discussion forum where people can post questions. Students used these options really intelligently, and although I had to spend a lot of time answering questions on the forum, I think on balance it was worth the effort. I think the students got a lot out of my courses, judging from the teaching evaluations (here and here).
The main takeaway for me was that the online component of these stats courses that I teach is crucial for student learning, and in future editions of my courses, there will always be an online component. One day we will have face to face classes, and I think those are very valuable for establishing human contact. But the online component really adds value, especially the pre-recorded lectures and the discussion forum.
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