I'm not going to say that one of my resolutions is to post more consistently or more often - I'd like to do both (or either) but I know that what always happens is that I get too busy and then I just feel guilty. But what I do resolve to do is at least to try to remember that the whole reason I started this blog was simply as an outlet for me to "think aloud" about my teaching. I think one thing that has stopped me from posting more often is that I've felt a need to 'craft' my posts, to flush out my thoughts into something coherent before sharing them here. The very process of writing often helps me with that flushing out, but there are a lot of times when I don't post stuff because it seems 'incomplete' - the number of unfinished posts I have is really pretty lame. So I've decided that I need to get over that and just use this blog as I originally wanted, as a sort of 'online journal' of thoughts about teaching. I certainly hope those thoughts are interesting to other people, and I love to hear what other people are thinking, but I guess I just wanted to warn everyone that my posts this year may be shorter and/or more disjointed than in the past but hopefully, more plentiful...
As someone who has worked hard to build a lot of interactivity into my courses, I have never been interested in teaching fully online courses, in part because I have felt that the level of engaged interaction could never match that of a face-to-face class (not that there aren't some exceptional online courses out there; I just have a strong preference for the in-person connection). But the current situation is not really about building online courses that are 'just as good' as our face-to-face courses; it is about getting through this particular moment without compromising our students' learning too much. So if you are used to a lot of interaction in your F2F class, here are some options for adapting that interaction for a virtual environment: [NOTE: SDSU is a Zoom/mostly Blackboard campus so that's how I've written this but I am pretty sure that other systems have similar functionality] If you use clickers in class to break up what is otherwise mostly lect...
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