As the semester is upon us, being prepared to teach on Zoom is essential. The synchronous time you spend in Zoom with your students should be reconsidered to provide the best learning experience possible. We encourage you to do so! This week we hosted our first Teach Talk webinar for the Fall 2020 semester, presented by School of Life Sciences Instructional Designers, Lenora Ott and Sarah Prosory .  We discussed the process of teaching using Zoom, by focusing more specifically on using Google Slides and its features, live captioning, as well as creating activities for students to do during the synchronous session within breakout rooms in Zoom. The key take-away is to plan for what the students need to do before , during , and after the synchronous sessions, and that will guide you in the preparation for your class meetings too.  The Process Before Class: Share on Canvas any links that students will need for the sync session. Pre-assign breakout rooms if needed, otherwise ro...

Today more than ever we are competing for our students' attention within the world of unfolding events. We are instructing across a variety of platforms both asynchronous fully online, and synchronous, hybrid, virtual face-to-face. It can be difficult to establish our course as paramount in our students minds. However, with a little planning we can help students see the intersection of their studies within the world around them, rather than just in an academic silo disconnected from their daily life. We’ve all heard students whisper that the first day of school in any course is “syllabus day”, a day in which an instructor reads over their syllabus document and points out any pertinent information and answers students questions about the workload for the term. It’s no secret that some students admit to skipping what they believe will be a “syllabus day”, because after all, they can read the syllabus at home. Although fully online students will not have this synchronous meeting to di...

As we move to remote instruction for in-person classes, there have been a lot of resources shared for what to do, how best to do it, and ways to make things easier for all during this transition. We've pulled the most frequently accessed resources below, as well as ones that you may not have seen yet. Hopefully this will help you feel better prepared for the upcoming weeks. School of Life Sciences faculty and teaching assistants: please feel free to reach out to us by email or Slack in The College workspace, channel #sols-teaching-support . Faculty and Student Remote Websites The main website to visit for all things remote instruction is hosted by the Provost , and is a collaboration from the University Technology Office (UTO) and instructional designers and professionals from around campus. Be sure to visit it often, as it gets updated to reflect the best information to support you teaching remotely. Also, there is a website you can share with students that will help them with...