Welcome to the wild and woolly world of learning things exclusively via online resources! At this point we’ve had some time to gird ourselves for the experience, but now we will be in this mode for much longer and new challenges may emerge because of that.
Let’s not forget that we are in this situation due to larger and greater concerns happening outside, so certainly attend to those as they arise and coordinate with me as needed if they affect your course work. LMU also has many health and wellness resources available to support you, collated here: https://studentaffairs.lmu.edu/lionwellness.
LMU has set up a Student Online Learning Hub so be sure to check that out in case there’s something there for you. There is also a site with resources to Keep Learning.
The lack of physical presence means that your online presence equates to your presence overall. As such, at any given time please make sure that you have multiple mechanisms for making your presence known. For myself personally, there are ways to reach me via:
- Slack
- Discord
- Brightspace discussion forum
- Microsoft Teams
Feel free to leave a note on any of them at any time. I am most likely to be active on them during “office hours,” a term we now use in an online rather than physical sense, but please don’t let that stop you from chiming in whenever it works for you, especially since many of us will be on different time zones as well.
Please consult the Brightspace Content > Overview page for your course to get more specific links/information on these venues. Course syllabi will have my office hours.
It’s my obligation to be on all of them—you don’t have to be on all of them yourself, but the expectation is that you are available (and responsive) on at least one of these channels. I try to be in all the places where students might be (online), but students need to be somewhere in the first place in order for this to work.
Some perspective: learning how to learn in this manner will serve you well way beyond the immediate moment. You’ll find that learning in this way will be quite useful, as new knowledge areas and technologies emerge and the only resources about them may be available solely online at first. Thus, if you get the hang of it now, you are picking up a skill that you will find handy for a long time to come.
In addition to maintaining multiple lines of communication (essentially the online rule to rule them all), here are a few more factors to consider when fully online.
I will hold classes at our scheduled times via Zoom. But again, see the what was said earlier about taking care of yourself first. I will record all Zoom sessions and post them to Brightspace. I won’t have much time to clean up or refine these videos so they’ll be quite raw (and thus best kept private 😂)—hope that will be OK. As mentioned, please visit the Content > Overview section of our Brightspace course page for Zoom links and content.
See the last section of this document for some tips on getting the most out of this medium.
If one thing really changes in an online format, it is our interpersonal interactions. Listening to a professor talk at you or show you stuff on a screen isn’t too different, and neither is putting your nose to the grindstone to get 💩 done on your own.
What shifts significantly—and in many ways what we (including professors) miss the most in this new normal—is how we interact with others in our class. As such, perhaps the biggest change in my course(s) with you will be intentionally increased opportunities to work with your classmates, live but online. To maximize success with these encounters, please keep the following in mind:
- Maintain reliable communication with your current (or past) collaborators—the multi-channel approach I mentioned above will help among your classmates as well
- Try to be as flexible as possible with each other when scheduling things—there may be some give one way or the other, and although that might take some work, the hope is that the resulting interactions will be worth it (this is particularly relevant for working with folks in different time zones, as addressed in the next section)
- Don’t hesitate to approach me if you encounter any challenges or issues with working in a group
For students who live in different time zones, connecting to the synchronous sessions and pre-scheduled office hours may become infeasible (unless you are truly a night denizen and can now live by your true body clock 🌒🌔🌕🌖🌘).
If you are in this situation, note that the live sessions will be recorded and posted to Brightspace, so feel free to view those whenever the time is right for you. For office hours and other direct interactions, start with the following:
- Slack
- Discord
- Brightspace discussion forum
- Microsoft Teams
As mentioned, specific links for those can be found in the Content > Overview area for your course on Brightspace.
As also mentioned, these are all “available” 24/7 although my response time may vary. But the key is this: these channels are ultimately stepping stones to setting up sessions for synchronous interaction, whether via Zoom, Slack, Discord, or Teams. Don’t hesitate to ask, and we’ll see what we can work out.
I’ll seek to stay cognizant of time zone differences but I may tend to still speak in Pacific time by default, so please bear that in mind if I state a date and time without being specific about time zone.
This really can’t be stated enough: Monitor and be responsive to multiple communication channels. We will adjust as needed as long as we can communicate.
OK, so now we come to some slightly more general tips regarding life online. Some are practical, some are philosophical—all are based on things I’ve seen and experienced personally, so although they won’t all be absolutely true for everyone, they are indeed based on my own lived online reality (is that an oxymoron?) so far.
We’ll need to be flexible and go with the flow—and always keep tabs on alternate communications channels
Stuff will glitch. Stuff will cut off. Stuff might crash. It’s all OK. When we’re online, it is understood that these things can happen. What helps us manage this?
- Keep tabs on multiple means of communication whenever possible: (there it is again!) If video stops working, there can still be audio. If audio breaks, there’s possibly chat. If the entire video app crashes, you can look at Slack, Discord, Teams, or email (as applicable to you). If all else fails, you can leave voicemail (fortunately, I can check that from home). Redundancy fosters resilience in this scenario.
- Watch your email more closely than you usually do: Speaking of multiple means of communication, email is perhaps the bedrock of all online means of communication. It’s mature; it’s ubiquitous. Make sure that you have easy access to university email as much as possible.
- Your ultimate backup is a mobile phone with Internet: In the event of a huge glitch (ISP cuts you off, power goes down, etc.), chances are that a mobile phone will still work. Don’t try to get back on Zoom (unless your phone is super-amazing with a ⚡️ fast connection)—but leave a message on one of the venues listed multiple times already so that I know not to worry.
(and if we encounter a glitch that’s so catastrophic that even mobile phones can’t communicate…well…we probably have bigger problems than staying connected in class)
If any glitches happen to me, I will seek to resolve the issue as quickly as possible, so the first thing to do is hang tight. If I experience protracted issues, I’ll seek to follow the same flow above in order to keep you posted. If this happens during a synchronous class session and I somehow can’t recover quickly enough, we’ll find ways to make up for it.
All computing resources are finite. Bandwidth is perhaps the prime resource that we’ll be consuming online. There are times when there won’t be enough of it or we will lose it outright.
Class and office hour video sessions consume a lot of resources and may get glitchy or go down. You can try again as needed but don’t worry if you can’t reconnect; we’ll figure it out (again see: multiple means of communication).
We want to approximate that in-person feeling as much as possible, but we also know (as already stated) that there are resource and medium limitations to this. Overall, the approach I recommend is this:
Max everything out first, then “degrade gracefully” depending on available resources.
In a more structured way, I recommend this flow:
- Keep video active
- Keep audio active—unless you have notable ambient noise
- If bandwidth/resources can’t maintain #1 and #2, start by deactivating video, then audio…
- …and try to make use of other features—reactions, hand raising, chat—to maintain a presence during a synchronous class session.
- If things are just overly shaky or janky, just disconnect and leave me a note so we can catch you up
A few other notions:
- Practice doing quick toggles of your video and audio—this will minimize disruption during synchronous sessions
- But of course, don’t forget to unmute yourself when you want to talk
- Audio will have a slight delay (as those of you who have tried to do live singalongs over Zoom may attest)—give people time to respond, perhaps speak a little more slowly, and pause a little more between sentences
- If two or more people accidentally start talking at the same time, volunteer to give the other people “first dibs” at speaking right after
- Be ready to help arbitrate who spoke first in case people keep speaking on top of each other
- I may also pause for potentially awkward lengths of time, to accommodate delays when people try to talk…this will be normal, so don’t worry if I do this (unless it turns out that I actually lost my connection—in which case, follow the earlier protocol)
- And here’s something we can’t do in person as easily: You can share your screen when permitted! With permission from me, you can take over or annotate the screen so you can demonstrate where you’re stuck firsthand. Get to know how to use the sharing and annotation tools in order to avail of this capability.
OK, I think that’s everything (so far). Do keep the link to this document handy in case I add or change something. Even with this document, we’ll practice what we preached above about being flexible and going with the flow.