“This is where it’s going.” We all hear the rumblings of some sweeping changes in higher education, and it sounds like they are poised to happen soon. Classes, degree programs, and even entire colleges are being taken online at a rapid pace. For professors who’ve been at it a long time, it can seem like an unbelievable burden to have to learn so much new technology in order to stay current in the classroom. This is separate from their own pursuits in scholarship, or their teaching loads, and often has to be treated as just one more thing to do. A truly effective teaching tool might be overlooked, because the professor simply doesn’t have the time to learn how to use it effectively.

Make no mistake, online teaching is a different animal than a face to face class. It requires a lot of careful thought and planning to teach an effective online class. It also raises questions for a lot of faculty new to the medium. Some are uncomfortable with the loss of some or all of the “face time” and worry about its effect on the classroom community; others are skeptical about the value and security of online exams. Still others worry about the amount of time they will have to spend just on technology and its possible effects on the class as a whole. But fear not. You don’t have to make the jump all at once, unless you want to (and we at FITS can help with that).

With that in mind, here are some (relatively) low-tech ways you can begin to experience the online-learning medium, without having to spend a lot of time creating new material. These are baby steps to online teaching, just incorporating one facet into your class at a time. Most importantly, they can all be done to accompany your face-to-face class. Of course, the more of these things you do online, the more that you will actually be moving in the direction of teaching a hybrid class. Surprise! Bet you didn’t think it was that easy, did you?

The Spark

Let’s say you have a seminar-style class that has regular in-class discussions. How often do you feel that things are just really warming up when it’s time to stop? Sometimes it takes a while to get to the heart of an issue, and you might not even get to discuss it much. In this case, try using an online discussion board as a springboard for what will happen in the next class. Ask them to respond on a tough question or issue by some point early in the week; perhaps encourage them to respond to one or more posts from their classmates by a point later on in the week (but before class). Step in and post something to it occasionally to let them know you’re listening too, and to help steer them in the right direction or moderate the discussion. By the time you begin in-class discussion, they all will have written a response, engaged in discussion with their peers, and formed an opinion on the topic. This means that you can start by summarizing the points made already, and proceed to talk about the things you really wanted to get to but class time previously wouldn’t allow for. This assignment allows you to focus the discussion and extends the amount of time you can have for a particular issue without increasing the face-to-face time.

The Attendance Taker

Taking attendance can be a chore in and of itself, especially for a large class. On top of that, you don’t necessarily know if the students are actually engaged in the material, or are just filling seats. Many people have a former teacher who would challenge them with a daily problem or question on the chalkboard, to be answered by the end of class. It’s a great way to know who understands and who doesn’t, but it also lets you take attendance, because anyone who doesn’t turn in an answer isn’t in class. Here’s an online twist to this one: you can use a quiz or an online assignment submission tool to collect and grade their answers online. Give them a question in class that they will only be able to answer if they were there, and then use a quiz tool to collect their answers online. This could be providing data to answer a question online, or asking an entire question and then asking them to pick the right answer (i.e., “The correct answer for the March 7th question is:”). In either case, you have a clear record of who participated and who didn’t. In some cases, this could be automatically graded, and you could very easily calculate attendance points. Do you need a longer answer such as an essay or a word problem, or something not text based? Another alternative is to use an assignment submission online to allow students to turn in a paper, spreadsheet, presentation, or even an audio or video file. It’s true, this option could add some grading to your class, depending on what kinds of questions you ask. But you’ll be easily able to tell not just whether or not a student is coming to your class but how they’re doing with the material.

The Flip

Sometimes we spend a lot of time getting through the material before we can have a discussion about it, but that might be the point of the class. Flipped learning is a new trend in education that essentially reverses the way we think of a classroom: students complete the studying of material, including reading and often lecture portions, and then come to class for the homework portion. In this way the instructor can be there face to face to support their application of the knowledge they got at home. You can accomplish this effect in several ways:

• Create links to readings online in your course site. Most university libraries subscribe to databases that can get you the URL of an article that students can read online. They can print off or download a copy in most cases as well, so you can save paper, avoid copyright issues and give them up to date reading material from all kinds of sources.
• Make commentary on things you might show like images, or comment on the readings they will do or what they will accomplish.
• Include video material from sources around the Web for them to watch.
• Give them self-assessments to make sure they understand everything before they get to class and do the real assignment.
• Extra credit: Create video lectures for them to watch, so you can get that portion out of the way and have more time for discussion in your class meeting.

The One-Stop Shop

Some classes can be a blur of handouts going out, or of papers coming in to you. This uses a lot of paper on both fronts and means you will spend a lot of time at the photocopier. Consider using a page in your online course site to present the essential information to students in one place. You could present many things to them:

• Simple text that will summarize the essential learning objectives, discussion points and concepts they will be dealing with in the next class/week/unit.
• Links to downloadable documents that they will be working on, or to other areas of your course site such as discussion boards, assignments submissions, surveys or quizzes.
• Images, audio or video sources from around the Web, complete with your own commentary. Bonus points: Embed those sources in the pages rather than linking to them, so they can be viewed directly inline with your text!
• Links to articles in your institution’s library databases or other Web sources.
• Extra credit: Create video lectures for them to view online, so they will have repeated access to your lecture materials along with relevant text commentary on those topics.

The Self-Check

Even if your primary means of content delivery to your students is through in-class lecture and discussions, students usually have things to read and write between classes. In this format, it can occasionally derail your class if you realize that not enough students have prepared adequately, or that they don’t fully comprehend the material you’re covering that day. It can be difficult to simultaneously clear up student confusion, cover new material, have an engaged discussion and be confident in assigning homework knowing they might not understand. Consider using self-assessments in your course site, either through your learning management system or through an external Web tool, to provide them with an opportunity to test their knowledge of what they have read and written before they come to class. This way, if anything still isn’t clear to them, those will be the first questions asked, and it will focus those questions in such a way that you won’t have to answer basic comprehension questions, but can skip directly to higher-order questions requiring analysis or evaluation. You could:

• Give ungraded quizzes that will cover the basic topics you will want to talk about.
• Survey students on the assigned materials to assess what they do and do not understand, so you know what to cover in the next class.
• Ask for a discussion board post or a short written assignment requiring them to summarize what they learned, and ask at least one question about something they are still unclear on.

The previous examples are just the tip of the iceberg in terms of what is available to you as a faculty member, and all of these are time-tested and proven methods to begin the transition from face-to-face classes, through hybrid models of teaching, and ultimately to fully online classes, if you choose to go in that direction. Even if you’ve taught a class the same way for many years, you might find by implementing just one of these ideas that your class takes on exciting new dimensions in instruction, that it increases student engagement, comprehension, and satisfaction with the course, or that you find new enjoyment in old materials. Ideally, all these things can happen at once! Best of all, these methods don’t require you to change what you’re already doing much if at all; they just add something new to something that already works. I suggest baby steps like these to every faculty member I work with who is unsure of the online-education medium. Try one new thing every time you teach the class, and you’ll find that a little facelift will not only re-energize your course every time, but you will be a pro at online education without feeling like you’ve had to read a manual. Good luck, and keep us posted!