Resources for Teaching Online, Hybrid, and Socially Distant Classes
By Heather Fedesco, CFT Assistant Director
Thinking about the fall semester and what our teaching will be like raises two very extreme responses. On the one hand, everything feels so uncertain. Will my class be entirely online? Where will my students be taking my course – on campus, in a different time zone, in a different country? No one has ever done hybrid teaching before with some students in class, others attending remotely, everyone masked and socially distant – how can I even begin to plan for such a challenging and unprecedented teaching scenario?
And yet there is also an overwhelming number of resources out there to help us navigate these unusual circumstances. But where do I start looking? What tools should I try to learn how to use for my particular teaching context? And how do I find the time to scour the Internet for these resources?
In an effort to help ease some of these dichotomous feelings, the CFT has compiled a set of resources for Teaching Online, Hybrid, and Socially Distant Classes. Many of these ideas were crowdsourced from the participants in the 2020 Vanderbilt CFT Online Course Design Institute (OCDI). Participants were asked to share a link or a resource they find useful, as well as some information as to why they find this resource useful. Some of their reflections on the resource they recommended are provided within the document. CFT graduate teaching fellow, Rachel Gould, reviewed the resources that were shared by participants in the May and June offerings of the OCDI and organized their contributions into this document. CFT assistant director, Joe Bandy added additional resources to assist the Vanderbilt community.
Within this set of resources, you will find the following topics:
- General teaching support from the Vanderbilt community
- Reflections on campus reopening within Vanderbilt and across the broader Higher Education community
- Inclusion, access, and equity
- Active learning tools
- Discipline specific resources
- Grading and feedback
- Final projects
- Orienting students to the course
- Digital social reading tools
- Student response programs
- Whiteboards
- Videos
It is our hope that these resources will provide ideas on how you can move forward as you continue to develop your fall courses. And this list is organized in such a way that will allow you to find the topic that is most urgent to you so that you can explore those relevant resources.
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