Mary C. Henry

That title is really overstating what I'm going to write about, but obviously that is what everyone, everywhere is thinking about a lot of the time! I'm lucky that my university has decided to keep classes remote the first five weeks (at least). We started classes this week (August 17th), which was a week earlier than originally planned. Initially they wanted us to start in-person so the logic was that the early start would allow us to finish before Thanksgiving, do remote exams, and reduce some COVID spread by not having students travel and then return after that holiday. We kept the early start date, but for now are also remote. I'm hoping that we stay remote, because the idea of returning to in-person classes- even with masks and social distancing- is just not going to work. We've just had (at least) two schools switch back to online classes after just one week of face-to-face classes. It seems much more disruptive to have students move back here (or here for the fir...

I think most of us in academia complain about teaching evaluations in one way or another and many articles have been written on the problems with student evaluation of instruction. Since we made the switch to online evaluations another problem is low response rates. Some faculty have "tricks" that they claim work: offering extra credit if a certain response rate is reached, threatening not to grade exams if a certain response rate is NOT reached, giving in-class time to fill them out. I've tried some of these but the rates are still quite low. For online classes it's even worse. So on top of the other issues with student evaluation of teaching, there may not be enough data either. At my university, they encourage us to use "multiple measures of teaching effectiveness" in the form of midterm evaluations of some kind. I have used Small Group Instructional Diagnosis several times to get feedback on what is and isn't working in classes. This semester I...

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 l...