Frequent communication with students is a key aspect of online teaching under any circumstances. It’s doubly important with students who may not be very familiar with online learning. Clarify to students how the course will be conducted. Where can they find course content? How can they reach out to you? How will you have office hours?   

• Checking in with your students regularly—as often as once daily—is a good way to keep them on track. Make use of Canvas’s inbox function to email the whole class at once. Or, make a daily announcement that students can expect each morning. 

• Let students know whenever you post new content. Students may not be used to an online learning environment and you don’t want them to miss anything critical. Again, announcements are useful for this. Perhaps the best way to ensure that everyone stays on track is to create a module in Canvas for each unit of the course, and have students check each module for relevant content.

You can absolutely hold office hours while teaching online, and Zoom is a great tool for this. You can integrate Zoom into your Canvas course, set up a meeting in advance and share the link with students so they can join.

Teaching a large class online can be done effectively if you plan your semester carefully, with attention paid to how you will engage students, assess their work, and build community.

• If your online class is synchronous, it is helpful to assign a student (or a TA, if you have one) to manage the chat and the hand raising/polling features during class. In this way, you can focus on the work of teaching while still engaging the class in discussion and questioning. If you do not have someone to assist you, a good way to manage the chat and hand-raising function is to pause periodically to check in with student questions and comments. 

• Breakout rooms in Zoom are useful for dividing the class into smaller groups for problem-solving, discussion and brainstorming. You can pop into each breakout to check on progress and answer questions. Remember that clarity is important in assigning tasks for the breakout rooms with a defined time limit to get work done. Our EDvice Exchange blog contains articles on best practices for using breakout rooms and camera policies.

• You can sometimes build community in a large synchronous class more easily than in a large face-to-face class because students’ names show up under their pictures and in the chat when they participate so that you can address them by name.

• In all online classes, it will be important to learn about the tools in Canvas that can assist you in managing your larger class. For instance, Canvas quizzes will auto-correct certain types of assessments. You can also break students into groups for asynchronous discussion and other kinds of assignments on Canvas.

It’s important for you to have a plan for assessing student learning and to determine if students are meeting your learning goals. You will want to consider the following.

• If you normally include attendance and/or participation in your grading, think about how that manifests in the online version of your class. What evidence do you need to count a student as a participant in the online environment? Communication of these expectations is important.

• If you regularly use polling or similar tools for obtaining a snapshot of student learning, you can find virtual tools within both Zoom and Canvas that can serve your needs. Learn about Zoom's polling feature. In Canvas, a great way to poll students is to create an ungraded survey, within quizzes.

• The Canvas quiz feature allows for the creation and grading of both short quizzes and full-sized exams. For some types of questions, such as multiple choice, you can also automate the grading.

• Canvas’s Assignments feature provides a one-stop venue for sharing assignment instructions, receiving the assignment from the students, and grading assignments. 

• Students can use many of the same tools for online presentations that you’ll employ to deliver content online. You’ll want to think about whether to add the students’ ability to work in the online environment to your rubric. On the one hand, it rewards those students who master the technology. On the other hand, it isn’t necessarily one of your course goals that they do so.

• The SpeedGrader tool allows you to leave written or audio/video feedback, which can speed up turnaround time for drafts of papers. Canvas also allows the creation of easy-to-use rubrics. Grades from any quizzes, exams, and other assignments submitted to Canvas can automatically be fed to the Canvas gradebook, which can be configured to match the final grade breakdown in your syllabus. 

• Proctoring: The university is providing Proctorio, an auto-proctoring solution to be used if you need to give proctored exams while teaching in an online environment. Here's a handy guide that you can provide to students on how they will use Proctorio.

  • We urge you to consider alternative assessments that you can use in an online environment. For two great resources on alternatives to online proctoring, download the University of Wisconsin's two-page PDF on unproctored online assessments or visit Rutgers' page on remote exams and assessments.

  • Don't miss our new guide to using Proctorio for high-stakes exams.

In your online course you may have international students who couldn't return to the U.S. during the COVID crisis. For the special challenges posed by this situation and strategies to address them, see this EDvice Exchange article.