How to Transition From In-Person to Online

This post is intended to act as a resource for both students and teachers. For students, I hope to provide some notes on how to perform well with an online course. For teachers, I hope to lay out a few different strategies for tackling the huge challenge of bringing your courses online in roughly a week.

I’ll start out with the teacher portion. The way I see it, there are three ways to bring your course online:

1. Utilize the new Zoom Integration into Canvas

• The University recently announced that Zoom has been integrated into Canvas. Using Zoom, you can host online real-time lectures. For more information, go to the Zoom -> Canvas Integration Announcement page.

2. Pre-record full or topic-focused mini lectures

• If you do not know how to record yourself or create a video of you talking over your slides, utilize the 1:Button Studio locations. These are professional recording spaces offered for free. You need little to no prior knowledge on production to use these spaces effectively. Watch the video and read the linked page for more information!

• To then post these videos to your course there are a few different options and it all depends on how you want to structure it. If you want to define the videos in specific modules, I recommend embedding the videos on pages. If you want all the videos stored together collectively, I recommend adding your videos to your course’s Kaltura Media Gallery.

3. Post additional (self-help / self-learning) resources to your Canvas courses

• This option focuses heavily on posting additional self-help and self-learning resources to your modules to allow students to “learn on their own.” While this is always recommended, I don’t recommend this for bringing your course online. However, I’m still listing it as an option because I recognize how difficult it can be to bring your course online in a week.

I recommend the options in the way they were presented. The Zoom integration will be your best bet to bring your courses online in the short term. Going forward, I believe all three recommendations combined will enhance your course to be more accessible and effective. Focus on getting your courses online in week chunks. It’s better to have one excellent quality week online than everything online but you can’t understand any of it.

For students, your approach to the online courses will depend on how your instructor sets up their course. My top recommendation regardless of how it is set up is to take notes. After you’ve taken your notes, re-read them and try to make sense of them. Are they highlighting the important points of the lecture / material? Do you understand what the professor was trying to teach?

It’s also okay to ask questions to your TAs and professors via email. If they have a discussion board open for the course, use that as well (others likely have similar questions). Send these emails early. Do not wait until the last minute.

Do not jack off and skip your coursework now that it is fully online. You have just as much work even if it does not seem like it. Keep up with your studies or you will fall behind quickly.

In the comments of this post I’ll be answering any questions you may have.