Teaching Labs Online
The last time I posted over here (almost a year ago!) I wrote about teaching GEO 121 (Intro Physical Geography) online that summer. I think it went pretty well, but the labs were the most challenging aspect of that class. I write my labs with fairly detailed instructions and encouraged students to email with questions, but I think some students still struggled. It was hard to tell how many of the problems they had resulted from frustration and just giving up, or thinking that they were on the right track, but being wrong about that. Another issue with the online labs is providing feedback to students on their work. I used Google Forms for student lab submissions- which was great. I split each lab into multiple parts instead of having one really long form. When students submit their answers, I get everything in a spreadsheet. I do the lab first to submit my answers for the key (first row in the spreadsheet) and it makes grading really easy. For my summer class last year, I wrote u