Guiding Principles for Academic Work in Unprecedented Times
By Robert Talbert Mar 15th 2020
Here is an excerpt from this article:
For faculty
When you’re in a situation with no precedent and you have to work anyway, what you need are guiding principles for making decisions, not a lot of details about how those decisions might be enacted. Here is what we decided in my department would guide our steps (in addition to “Rule 0” in our department which is “Put students first”):
- First and foremost: Keep it simple. In a situation like this, course work has to be stripped down to the bare minimum. As a professor, ask yourself: Are there topics in my syllabus that do not explicitly have to be taught according to the official syllabus of record? Are there assignments coming up that could be shortened, simplified, or removed altogether without losing any information about student proficiency on the subject? If so, start cutting. This is not the time or place to die on the hill of “I really like topic X” or “My students aren’t really mathematicians unless they’ve seen topic Y“. Cut, cut, cut until what you’re left with is a skeleton of the course. Yes, it’s painful. And nobody will remember that they saw or didn’t see those items in three years’ time. There’s more to “keep it simple” than just this; keep reading.
- Be present and communicate with students. It’s well known in the research and practice on online teaching that social presence is one of the most, if not the most important factors in student success. This is a discipline; practice it. Communicate daily with students; consider making a video instead of sending an email, so they can see your face and hear your voice. Look for ways to get students socially connected with each other. Far better to overcommunicate in this situation than undercommunicate.
- Establish and follow routines. Another established fact about effective online teaching is the value of structure and routine in the student experience. I wrote about this a while back in the context of students with learning disabilities taking online courses, but it’s true for everyone that structure improves success. As any mom or dad can tell you, establishing regular and predictable routines goes a long way to mitigating the very real feeling of unsettledness that many students are no doubt experiencing. A very important example is to hold synchronous meetings (using Zoom, Blackboard Collaborate, etc.) with your class at the same times that you ordinarily would meet in person; also holding video office hours at your normal times. This also is a good way to keep it simple since it minimizes change. If you already do a 50-minute lecture at 9am every MWF, you just keep doing that – the only thing that changes is the way it’s delivered.
- Trust your students and give them grace. This is not the time or place to insist on the highest levels of academic excellence, or even airtight mechanisms for ensuring academic honesty. Yes, it’s quite possible that students working at home in an online setting could cheat on assignments in ways they may not in a face-to-face setting. (Although research on the subject shows no statistically significant difference in cheating instances in those two settings.) And you might not be able to explore certain ideas at the same level of depth, given the small amount of time given to prepare assignments. There are two ways to respond: Being OK with this, or setting up a mini-surveillance state. The first option is the simpler of the two and so that’s what you should go with. Trust students more, and give them more grace and lenience, than you normally do – even more than you are comfortable with. You might be surprised how they respond.
- Perfectionism is the enemy. In our pop-up meeting, I gave the faculty two mottoes that I live by: “Don’t let the perfect get in the way of the perfectly adequate” (hat tip to Better Call Saul), and “Good enough is good enough“. We should still try to teach in these times as best we can; but think of it like a video game where “Adequacy” is the first level you reach and then you move on to “Excellence” once you’ve reached Adequacy. Far more than the online setting or even COVID-19 itself, perfectionism is what will sink us if we don’t actively fight against it. This goes for students too! See also point #4 above.
