I blogged recently about faculty transitioning courses online on short notice<\/a>. For some faculty this will be particularly challenging as they have never taught online before. The first time is always hardest, and so those colleagues need even more support than they normally would shifting to online teaching, which is even then usually a significant investment of time and input.<\/p>\n In talking about this, I think many may forget that there are also large number of students for whom this will be their first experience of taking a course delivered online. Here are a few thoughts on that topic that professors may want to share with their students:<\/p>\n This will not be the first time they are learning online, although they may not have thought of it in those terms<\/strong><\/p>\n We all learn online. Sometimes we learn useless trivia, or that YouTube comments are appalling. But we also learn useful information, at least if we ask the right questions and know how to find reliable information. I\u2019ve not only found the contents of a book I needed to consult online, nor only lectures by amazing experts on topics of interest, but I\u2019ve also learned how to make repairs to my home and equipment, how to play particular songs or styles of music on the piano or keyboard, and much else. I\u2019ve asked questions on Facebook and received help from fellow academics. Students have learned online too, even if they haven\u2019t taken a course online. We do so much online, that taking a course that way should be natural. If it doesn\u2019t seem natural, then we need to ask ourselves why that is so, and whether the ways that we are separating the technologically-assisted ways that we are productive and learn in the rest of life from our formal educational experiences, in ways that may be detrimental. But however one answers that question, we are all online learners already, and that should help reassure us as we move additional parts of our learning and teaching online.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n This is actually a hybrid course<\/strong><\/p>\n A fully online course is online from start to finish. The semester began face to face (except for my students, because I was in Australia, but it became face to face as of the second week of the semester). And so there are already some advantages that fully online courses do not have. Students are already aware of and have gotten to know their fellow students in the course. Things have been explained and clarified in person. Questions have been answered. Expectations have been expressed. These things are often harder to convey through digitally-mediated means of communication. Going hybrid is often the best stepping stone to trying a fully online course. This is, really and not merely technically, the former rather than the latter. If even a hybrid course seems daunting to a student or a professor, let me add that just about every course is at least slightly hybrid in our time. Unless nothing is communicated by email, through multimedia content such as videos, or through a syllabus and readings on an LMS such as Canvas or Moodle, then the course is hybrid. In the current emergency situation, you\u2019ll just be doing more of that, some of which you probably should have been doing before now. But beyond that, there is very little true learning when\u00a0everything<\/em> happens in the classroom. It is the reading and studying outside of class, the research, the practice, that is really crucial. Students who come to class having read nothing beforehand and leave to never give another thought to what happened in class will learn little if anything. All learning is hybrid, and we need to recognize this. This connects directly to my next point\u2026<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n They should have been taking responsibility for their own learning all along<\/strong><\/p>\n I think that in the process of messaging about the shift to online learning, we have the opportunity to say something crucially important for students in this situation, many of whom will be learning online for the first time, but it is something that applied beforehand to a greater extent than some of them realized or embraced. Learning is something that\u00a0they<\/i>\u00a0do as students. University requirements give them goals and hold them accountable, and professors facilitate, clarify, and participate in the process of holding them accountable. But anyone with the desire and access to information can learn, and no one else can learn for them. If learning online feels to students more like teaching themselves and taking the responsibility for their own learning than they are used to, it is in fact forcing them to do what they really needed to all along. Butler University has a requirement to attend professional performances and lectures, to take advantage of educational opportunities outside the classroom. We\u2019re discussing what to do about that under the circumstances. The goal there as well is to create a habit and expose students to resources. Ultimately they are the ones who will determine what they get out of it, and the only ones who can do so. That\u2019s true of the entire college experience, and indeed of life in general.<\/p>\n As Mark Grabe recently wrote<\/a>, \u201cIt is important to remember that learning is done by the learners. As an educator, you facilitate and support and for some practical reasons evaluate. Motivated learners with access to information (life experiences to analyze, books to read, videos to watch) and the willing to think about this information will learn. Educators can encourage thinking experiences in various ways to improve the odds, but to become overly concerned about what these experiences should or might be creates unnecessary anxiety. I am not saying what teachers do is irrelevant. Of course, we do important work. However, it is the work of the learner that is most important.\u201d<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n Learning should be fun<\/strong><\/p>\n Just because a subject we are studying is serious doesn\u2019t mean we have to rob it of all the fun in how we approach it. We learn better when we enjoy ourselves. Encourage students to be creative in keeping spirits up. Here\u2019s one possible way of doing that in an online course<\/a>:<\/p>\n A protip for my fellow professors plunging into online education: Zoom lets you select a \u201cvirtual background.\u201d I\u2019m looking forward to lecturing at Hogwarts this Spring: pic.twitter.com\/LQE93H9LLS<\/a><\/p>\n \u2014 William H. Grover (@wgrover) March 11, 2020<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n