I just wrapped my Fall 2020 Intro to Ecology class at Colby College.
That’s 24 synchronous zoom lectures, 10 problem sets, 9 modules, 3 open-book take-home exams, and 33 pre-recorded mini-lectures.
This was my first experience teaching remotely — when I was hired as a Visiting Assistant Professor in February, teaching remotely was not a part of the plan — but I had a relevant skillset honed from my experience as a remote postdoc. During my time “at” UMaine, I mentored students’ capstone projects through a combination of weekly remote meetings and occasional (2-4 times per semester) campus visits. I wrote a paper on best practices for remote postdocs and the process of developing and describing the rules for success with my postdoc advisor and coauthor Jacquelyn Gill was a metacognition trip. Parenting through Spring 2020 reinforced the importance of good remote culture as I accrued countless observation hours of remote instruction, story time, and art class with my kids. When the Intro Ecology teaching team started planning our remote semester over the summer, one of my first decisions was to create a course format that included pre-recorded mini-lectures.
My Mini Lecture Goals:
• Get the math out of our synchronous zoom sessions. I wanted to derive and explain models on a “blackboard” in short chunks, so that students could watch, pause, and rewind.
• Explicitly compliment the text with consistent vocabulary, parameter names, and equation formats. We used Nick Gotelli’s A Primer of Ecology and I wanted the mini lectures to be a guide to the text.
• Model how students should show their work on problem sets and exams.
• Leave space in the synchronous zoom sessions for community building, active learning activities, group problem set work, and paper discussions.
This is how mini lectures fit into the structure of my course:
Each week I posted four 3-10 minute mini lectures. Each mini lecture was followed by a two-question quiz. Students had unlimited attempts on the quiz (and each attempt pulled randomly from a question bank), but they needed to score 2/2 to open the next mini lecture and the next quiz.
The quizzes were an incentive to watch the mini lectures attentively, and they provided immediate feedback to the students (did they get the material?) and to me (did I mess up explaining the material?). The 33 mini-lectures that I wrote, recorded & produced were complimented by some existing videos, conference talks, and a couple mini-lectures from Allie Barner, who taught the other section of Intro to Ecology.
This is how I created the mini lectures:
For each module, I divided the course content into four chunks and wrote a script for each chunk. The script was vital for my goal of consistently using the vocabulary, parameter names, and equation formats in the book. It kept the mini lecture tight and the recording sessions short.
I created the mini lectures in Explain Everything on my iPad. Each mini lecture was 5-8 “blackboards” in Explain Everything, where a single blackboard would include multiple animations as I worked through a model derivation or a practice problem. I created line-drawing doodles of study organisms for my mini lectures by tracing photographs. I found this practice of sitting down to trace-doodle before designing each lecture blackboard super calming — kind of like an adult coloring book!
Once the blackboards were complete, I would record my scripted audio in Explain Everything. Recording one page at a time, or one animation chunk at a time, was great because if I messed up, it was super easy to fix that short clip. I never had the experience of recording an entire lecture only to realize that the mic was off. I particularly love how easy it will be to edit these mini lectures in the future — I have a whole library of great material that can be tweaked without requiring a complete re-recording!
After the mini lecture was recorded in Explain Everything, I exported it as a video file and uploaded to moodle (Colby’s course management software). Then I would fix the automatically generated captions, which gave me a chance to watch the mini lecture in moodle and get the student experience. Finally, I wrote 6-12 multiple choice quiz questions for each mini lecture and created the week’s progression of conditional releases: Watch mini lecture 1 and take quiz part i to open mini lecture 2 and quiz part ii, etc. The quizzes added up to 10 points each week (8 mini lecture quiz points, 2 additional points from a flipgrid question) and the lowest week was dropped from their quiz score. Quizzes were 5% of their grade. Each week, after the quizzes closed, I sent “nudge” emails to the students who didn’t complete all four quizzes to check in and remind them that they had one “freebie” week. I also opened all the videos so everyone could access them, though admittedly I was not always on top of this step and I was mortified when a student told me later that she studied for one exam by using her friend’s moodle account to watch the mini-lectures that she had failed to unlock. In the future, I need to improve on this or find a way to automate it!
Initially it took me about four days to put together a single mini lecture, and I panicked when I had only banked three weeks of material before the semester started. But by November I could create, produce, record, and post a mini lecture in a single afternoon. It also helped that I “practiced” by creating and recording three different talks for Botany 2020, NACBB, and ESA over the summer. My NACCB and ESA talks were my first experience in Explain Everything and it gave me a chance to explore the format with material that I already felt comfortable communicating (the ESA talk covered papers that were already published and the NACCB talk was a paper that was in press at the time).
These are the resources I leaned on while I was creating the mini lectures and the structure of the remote course:
• Small Teaching Online (I cannot recommend this book enough!)
• Dr. Stephen Heard’s blog posts Moving courses online isn’t easy – or cheap, What my online Entomology course look like, and Student responsibility for online learning, the prescriptive battles the descriptive. (Some of these were published after I had set the structure of the course, but they were all helpful as I moved through the semester.)
• Teaching Botany Online — resources from Botanical Society of America
These remote experiences really influenced how I created my Intro to Ecology course as a remote experience:
• Colby Bowdoin Bates May Institute 2020 “Learning from our Remote Past.” This was such an unexpectedly lovely way (3 days of zoom meetings, but all of them so well-run and even fun!) to jump into the Colby community and I got so many great tips from folks who had pivoted to remote instruction in Spring 2020. This is also where I heard about Explain Everything!
• Botany 2020: This virtual conference was amazing! Dr. Bryan Dewsbury’s plenary “What have we learned? - Lessons and strategies from the chaos” was phenomenal and the line “I don’t teach biology, I teach students” is seared into my brain. The Teaching Online Botany Laboratory for Non-majors Workshop and the Science of Meaningful Undergraduate Research Experiences Colloquium were both hugely important for shaping my approach to teaching online.
This is what I learned:
• High quality audio is so important — record when the kids are asleep, not when they are watching Frozen II!
• Provide even more structure on top of the conditional release of mini lectures — in my Mid-Semester Course Analysis (a facilitated feedback session) students reported that they found themselves putting off the videos until the last minute (all quizzes were due Friday evening). Often they felt lost in the synchronous sessions if they hadn’t watched the mini lectures yet or struggled to complete group work when everyone in their break out room was at a different point in the week’s mini lectures. In October, I started releasing two mini lectures on Sunday and asked students to watch them before our Tuesday morning zoom session. Then I would release the final two mini lectures Tuesday afternoon to be watched before the Thursday morning zoom session.
• The quizzes make the videos — During the week of the election, Allie Barner and I designed an intentionally light load in our classes. Tuesday there was no synchronous session, there was no weekly problem set, and instead of a quiz the students completed a low-stakes creative project on the week’s material: positive interactions. The not-a-quiz projects were so amazing (just lovely non-scientific writing and beautiful art) that I offered students the option of another round of not-a-quiz in the final week of class. They voted to keep the quizzes! As one student noted, the instant feedback of the quizzes helped them identify the important material in the mini lectures. Or, as Small Teaching Online puts it: “The most helpful and interesting videos are worthless if students do not actually watch them or watch them without full attention.”
• The mini lectures are not the class — Walking through a practice problem in a prerecorded mini lecture is not the same thing as walking through a practice problem in a live zoom session. Students need both — and more!
• I will take these videos with me forever — when I teach in person, these videos will continue to be an amazing resource for a flipped classroom. They capture the math of population and community models in perfect chunks that students can watch and re-watch at their own pace. And the bank of quiz questions I built this semester will be a great foundation for future versions of this course. In general, I feel like I created something truly useful — not unlike when I finish knitting a warm cardigan with deep pockets — and that’s such a nice feeling in such a weird, awful year.
I don’t have the energy or capacity to edit this post — Pascal would say “I would have written a shorter letter, but I did not have the time” — so I’m afraid it’s super long. But I hope it’s helpful to anyone working on their own prerecorded lectures. Good luck!