Resources by Max J. Lee

Anyone who has been teaching for a while knows that stress is normal for our vocation. When stress is prolonged over a long period of time, we experience exhaustion. Online instruction can compound the effects of mental, emotional, and even physical exhaustion because of course design that extends the time for planning, preparing, and implementing a course. Managing Your Online Instruction I don’t feel like an expert on self-care, but I have learned some healthy habits to keep teaching online not only manageable, but rewarding. Here is what I have learned so far. 1. Plan ahead and give yourself ample time for course design in online instruction. The largest and most long-term online project I have tackled is, by far, reinvigorating my institution’s distant learners Greek language program. From designing and creating a two-course sequence to implementing and teaching it online, it was a project that lasted a full year. When I started, I had already taught beginning Greek in a traditional F2F on-campus classroom setting for over 10 years. Converting my existing F2F class into a new asynchronous course on the Canvas learning management system (LMS) was a challenge. I had a head start since I had already laid out the course content in my traditional F2F class. This spared me the extra stress and work of trying to plan the course from scratch. Instead, I focused on understanding best online instruction pedagogical practices and implementing new technology. I had to create and produce over 80+ instructional videos, learn how to use the video-conferencing technology for Greek tutoring, and design assignments that made use of Canvas’ full features which included online quizzes. The course design took the entire summer. 3 intense months. It would have taken longer if I had not the experience and past resources of having taught the class beforehand. Whatever you do, plan ahead. You need at least a month to plan out a course and another three to create it on your institution’s LMS. If you don’t give yourself ample time for course design, you will exhaust yourself from creating the course and not have much reserve to teach it. 2. Set aside a no-work day for yourself while implementing the course. Pick one day a week and let students know that on that day, you will be offline not answering any correspondence. We all need a Sabbath space in our weekly schedule to pull away from our work and rest. I have found Saturdays to be the best day off. It affords me time to spend with family and friends. Sundays never worked for me. They tend be days when students scramble to finish their assignments online prior to deadlines on Monday. Know what days work and don’t work for your schedule. Pick a Sabbath day and make it sacred. If you let students know ahead of time, they will honor your day off and expect a response to their queries later. 3. Recharge your motivation for teaching. What makes online instruction a rewarding experience for you? Some of my colleagues enjoy the research and reading that comes with preparing a class. Others, like myself, need a personal connection with students to stay motivated. Whatever the source of inspiration, turn back to it periodically to recharge your enthusiasm for the course. Take the opportunities to stay inspired as they arise. When I was attending an annual denominational event during the Winter break, I learned that a number of my online students would be attending the conference. We met at a local Starbucks simply to connect. We talked about all things Greek and New Testament. But I also learned about their stories and ministries. I heard what they loved about the course and why they wanted to learn the biblical languages. What they shared that day renewed my desire and motivation to teach. Mental exhaustion gave way to rekindled inspiration. I was ready to tackle the rest of semester. 4. Practice the spiritual disciplines faithfully. Here I’m writing to theological educators. We all have our favorite spiritual disciplines: a daily devotional, times of prayer, morning or mid-day offices, or walks for reflection and meditation. I have found walks an important way to reflect on my vocation and pray for students. Whatever your spiritual tradition, observe it faithfully and experience the grace to persevere through even the toughest of semesters.

As an online instructor who understands the rigors of course design and management, I often wonder if it would be easier to livestream a class through video conferencing, rather than prepare an asynchronous course module by module. In a Hamlet-esque way, I ask: “whether ‘tis nobler in the mind to suffer the outrage of course design, or to storm through a sea of troubles by streaming?” In this post, I talk about the perils and advantages of video conferencing a class each week.  First, the challenges and in conclusion, the draw. One, I’m terrible at multi-tasking and with video conferencing, the instructor has to teach the course content and manage the live stream. On my debut day of teaching a live-streamed course for 25 seminarians, several could not log in . Some had audio, but no video. Others had video, but no audio. I spent the first 30 minutes of class trying to get everyone functional. I called IT for help. It was rough. My recommendation is to meet with students a week before class starts to work out technical problems. Help students log in correctly and explain the essentials of video conferencing, such as how to mute the microphone or share their video screen. Make it fun! Prepare ice-breaker questions, ask students to take turns muting and unmuting their microphones, hear everyone’s stories, and share family photos from your desktop. Getting the kinks out of video conferencing in a pre-class session is far less stressful than managing tech hiccups on the first day. Two, how do you manage discussion among 25 people or more in a live-stream setting? If your video conferencing platform does not have a ‘breakout’ feature, then establishing an etiquette for dialogue is crucial. Everyone should have a headset-with-microphone set up to prevent hearing each other’s feedback when speaking. The more people in a session, the more likely one will hear static feedback and background noise. Ask students to keep their microphone on mute and only when someone is speaking should one enable the mic. If your video conferencing session has a ‘breakout’ feature, use it! When I was teaching at another institution last fall, the school paid for the full features of Zoom, a popular business conferencing platform. Zoom had a nifty feature: with a click of a button, it would divide the class into small groups. Zoom sent the students out of the main session and into their own private video-conferences. The instructor can set the number of groups and for how long they meet. When their breakout session ends, students are sent back into the main class. Then I had each group share briefly what they discussed and we continued our time together. Finally, with above two challenges alone, even the casual observer can understand that livestreaming a class is hard work. There is no flexibility in the delivery of the course content. Most of the course is delivered during the three hours the class meets each week. If the technology fails, that day’s session is lost. So are there any advantages? A few. With streaming, less work is done on course design. Some instructors might prefer to spend most of their time teaching the class during the term than designing the course module by module before the term begins. Most important, I do think that video conferencing provides a more immediate relational connection between the instructor and students. It helps me to see the students, talk with them face-to-face, interact with them each week, and watch them enjoy what they learn. I experience the same with an asynchronous class, but the process is slower. To stream or not to stream? I’m still deciding which is better. For now, it might be a tie.

I titled this post after Trevor Noah’s introduction to the Black Panther film at the 2019 Oscars when he cited the Xhosa proverb, “Abelungu abazi uba ndiyaxoka.” Trevor translated it to mean: “'In times like these, we are stronger when we fight together than when we try to fight apart.” It turns out the proverb was an inside joke among South Africans who knew that he really said was, “White people don’t know I’m lying.” Ha! He got me, even though I’m of Korean descent. Nevertheless I still like the mock translation and the concept behind it. It is better to fight together. Some courses are a real challenge, and study groups are a strategic way for students to succeed. Here are some ways I think they make a difference in online education and some suggested practices. 1. Set up open virtual study hall hours online Many learning management systems (LMS) like Canvas integrate Zoom, Big Blue Button, or other video conferencing tools that allow instructors to create virtual rooms which are open 24/7. At any given hour during the day, a student can log into a room online and meet fellow classmates in a virtual study hall to collaborate on homework, prepare for quizzes, exchange notes, and discuss any aspect of the course. Even if one’s LMS does not include video conferencing as part of its platform, instructors can have students form their own Facebook or Google groups. The first step is to provide the virtual space for study groups to meet. Second is to help students organize. The easiest way is to coordinate groups based in the same time zones. It takes a bit of work, but using scheduling tools like Doodle can help manage competing calendars so everyone eventually finds common times to work together. 2. Assign group presentations where students collaborate and teach one another There is no faster way to have students learn from one another than to assign a presentation by small groups. In my New Testament courses, I often schedule student presentations on diverse topics on a weekly or bi-weekly basis. I put a sign-up sheet online using the discussion forums and lay out guidelines for the presentation in the syllabus. A week or two before a group presents, I meet with them through video conferencing, coach them on the topic, suggest readings, and ask them to meet on their own using the virtual study hall rooms. The presentations usually last about 8-10 minutes. Students use PowerPoint or Google Slides to video record their presentations using the tools provided by their LMS or with third-party programs like Screencast-O-Matic, and upload their video presentation onto the discussion forum for the class to watch. The rest of the class comments on the presentation by posting replies. Alternatively, if the course is synchronous, the group live-streams their presentation when we meet online. 3. Scaffold research projects and have students review one another’s work Especially with final research papers, I often “scaffold” the assignment by breaking up the paper into different parts and spread the due dates across the semester. I ask students to choose a paper topic, submit an initial bibliography, read the secondary literature and outline key points of debate, and step-by-step work on major sections of their paper until these sections are ready to be compiled together into a cohesive whole. Along the way, in small groups, students are asked to review one another’s work and receive suggestions for improvement. Peer suggestions cannot replace the feedback given by the instructor of the course, but I often find they offer a friendlier and easier way to receive critique. 4. Leave room for the random lone ranger and alternative assignments On occasion, a student might have such an unusual schedule that meeting together to do student-to-student collaborations is simply not possible. Such situations do not happen often, but when they do, I try to provide a fair alternative. I might, for example, ask a student to submit a short paper instead of working with other classmates on a video presentation. Whatever the substitute assignment, it’s important to be flexible. Successful student-to-student interaction requires that I take on a role other than “teacher.” The students teach themselves and one another. I plan, coordinate, and set up ideal virtual spaces for students to meet. Along the way, I learn from my students as well.

George Bernard Shaw, recipient of the 1925 Noble Prize in Literature and award-winning Irish playwright, famously said: “The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place.” As I reflect back on my years of online instruction, I confess: I’ve made this mistake. I often assumed that students understood a post, an email, or a video I’ve made when they did not. Harder still is letting students know that the instructor is “on their side” and wishes their every success. Born from trial and error, here are my top 5 suggestions on the most effective ways for teachers to communicate with students online. 1. Make first contact and do it early The worst mistake I think I ever made was sending my greetings to students on the first day of class. It’s too late. Students need a few days to get a sense of the course, read the syllabus, ask questions, and carve sacred space in their busy schedules for the hours they need to study. Trying to do all these things and start on the first module when the term begins never works out well. Instead, I contact students weeks before the beginning of classes. I make a video introduction so they can see and hear that I’m a “live” person. In the video (a short 2-3 minutes), I give my greetings, say something about myself, share a vision of the course and why it’s important, and keep “business matters” to a minimum. Strategically, I set up a pre-class orientation module for the students to work through prior to the start of class. There they see the assignments at a glance and get a walk-through of the course shell. When the term officially begins, they are ready to jump into the first module. 2. Have office hours every week and make them consistent In an age when using Zoom, Big Blue Button, Skype, or other video conferencing tools is not only convenient but free, I recommend setting up regular office hours when a student can count on a specific day and time each week that you are online to “meet.” I send out a Doodle poll early so students can indicate their free hours in a given week. I try to pick two 1-hour time slots when most students can join. Then every week, I’m online in Zoom or Big Blue Button waiting for students to drop into the video conferencing session. While I wait, I can grade, write emails, and get tasks done. But as soon a person enters the session, I drop everything and we talk. Someone almost always shows up. Office hours assure the student that the instructor is available and present. It lets students know you want to help. It also gives me a pulse of how students are doing. Are they drowning in, or sailing through, each module? Meeting them through office hours is a quick reality check 3. Receive advice and implement suggestions when you can At times, students have great suggestions. It may be the case that the suggestion cannot be implemented right away, but if it can be done, I try to do it. It could be as simple as extending a deadline on a particularly tough assignment or providing samples of good bibliographies. Whatever the suggestion, implementing it gives a needed sense of ownership to my students 4. If you make a mistake, don’t be afraid to admit it and offer a fair resolution I remember one time when I was not informed that more than half my class would be taking a week off in the semester to attend a conference sponsored by my seminary’s denomination. There was no way these students could attend the conference and complete the next module. I saw no way forward but to contact each student and apologize for not incorporating the conference in the class schedule. I talked with academic services and with their help adjusted the course to accommodate the conference week. I dropped one major assessment. It was messy but the students were graciously cooperative. Whew! 5. Keep it positive Students get discouraged easily. If they are feeling the course is too hard, we work out a plan to move forward, whether it’s extra tutoring or adjusting study habits. The most important thing is to keep it positive. Hope inspires perseverance. Perseverance is what we all need to succeed.

We live in exciting times. Even just 10 years ago, the technology to teach the kind of online course that I would dream about was simply unavailable. But not anymore. Today the technical tools needed to teach a course can scale the heights of one’s imagination. They are not only available, but affordable for instructors. In this post, I want to geek out over tech tools, especially as they relate to the online Beginning Greek class I am teaching this academic year. Unicode language keyboards If students are going to learn a language online, they need a no-hassle way of easily typing its alphabet. I am currently teaching on Canvas but what I say here would apply to Sakai, Blackboard, Moodle, or any other learning management system (LMS). The best keyboard available for most languages is Keyman (latest version 10.0; for Greek, pick the Greek Classical keyboard). It uses unicode (or ‘universal encoding’), which means that the keyboardist no longer has to worry about what fonts are installed on a given computer. In any font, when you type in Greek or another selected language, the output is consistent. The Greek classical keyboard is especially well-designed, complete with a tutorial and keyboard layout visual. It is available for Windows, macOS, the iPhone, iPad, and Android interfaces, and best yet, it is free. There is even a nice selection of ancient Hebrew keyboard options. Video production and encoding As I suggested in my previous blog, the language instructor ultimately needs to create personal instructional videos. I produced over 80 of them (7-10 minutes each) to cover the content of Greek 1 and 2 (two semesters). I quickly discovered that a microphone is more important than a video camera. Audio quality is more important than video quality. Since many universities now require captions with videos, the better the sound, the more accurate are the automated subtitle scripts produced by YouTube and other caption services. I find that I did far less editing of the subtitle scripts when my microphone and sound quality improved. Here’s my advice: invest in a high quality microphone, save on cheaper video cameras. I particularly like the Yeti USB Microphone ($128.73) for my laptop, but if one is recording off a tablet or phone, the Boya 3.5mm Microphone ($19.95) is excellent for shutting out background noise. But built-in microphones on your computer and phones are the worst. To avoid echoes and the way-off-in-the-distance muffled sound these produce, get a good microphone. Some decent video cam’s include: the Logitech 930 series ($68.00), or simply use your tablet or smartphone camera.   Once the video is produced, the course designer will need a good editor and encoder. I always want something simple and easy-to-use. Screencast-o-matic is excellent for cutting out video I don’t like. I can insert slides, text, photos, and even external video if I wish. It is a subscription service ($36 for 3 years or $1/month) and well worth it to save much grief for the less technically savvy person (myself included). It also encodes the video for easy upload onto YouTube, Vimeo, or other video channel sites. Headset for video conferencing and synchronous teaching It just takes one. Just one computer with bad feedback on its sound system and the entire video conferencing session is a disaster. Whether using Zoom, Big Blue Button, Skype, or other conferencing tools, getting a headset with microphone and asking your students to buy it are crucial to eliminate screeching distractions. Especially if one meets with a small group tutorial session online, or even a large synchronous classroom setting, having everyone log into the session with a headset will allow all to be heard without nasty feedback or echoes. My recommendation (and it’s cheap) is the Mpow USB headset/microphone ($22.99). I would add the headset as part of the textbook order.  Recommended OER’s Lastly, there are many free open educational resources (OERs, pronounced “oars”). I was surprised to find many good Greek tools online. The United Bible Society, for example, has the entire UBS5 Greek New Testament available for public use. Greek professors often post their own videos and other resources to help students (here’s a fantastic one called Daily Dose of Greek). The Perseus project has a parsing engine online for New Testament and other Greco-Roman texts. There is an exciting world of free OERs ready to be employed by the innovative course designer. The tough part is choosing which ones to use, but that is a welcome problem to tackle.

I have a confession to make. For the longest time I have approached distance learning as the second best way to teach. I thought of it as a necessary evil in order to deliver theological education to those who could not receive instruction through the traditional face-to-face (hence F2F) classroom. Consequently, I approached teaching online as an effort to approximate the F2F experience but feeling that no matter what I do, I’ll always fall short of the “real thing.” I have since changed my mind. In my experience designing and implementing an online course to teach Biblical Greek for seminary students, I have discovered that there are principles and practices which do more than simply approximate the F2F experience—they surpass it. So what practices in the F2F setting can and should be approximated online? Here are two quick suggestions: 1) Create instructional videos as a means for students to receive course content. There are no short cuts to teaching the vocabulary, grammar, and syntax of any language. Over the course of one summer, I developed over 80 instructional videos of approximately 7-10 minutes each to cover the entire scope of beginning Greek grammar. Across two semesters, students will watch me on YouTube explain the pronunciation scheme of the Greek alphabet, read the biblical text out loud, and then address nouns, verbs, and other parts of speech. The instructional videos are the backbone to the content of the course. 2) Have students write out their homework assignments in a “messy” way. The textbook I use for the course is William Mounce’s The Basics of Biblical Greek. I ask students to work through the homework exercises by hand since no electronic version of the Greek workbook is currently available by the publisher. Students do the work in a “messy” way: they scribble notes, circle words, draw arrows, cross out and self-correct their assignments. Then they scan their work and upload it as a PDF onto the course management system (hence CMS) for grading. The “messy” way of completing the homework adds a tactile, motor-memory component to learning that many find helpful. It is worth trying to approximate this online as much as possible. When, or if, an electronic version of the workbook exercises becomes available from publishers, students can easily use an iPad or other tablet device plus stylus to approximate the “messy” by-hand learning experience. Now here are two methods of online instruction that I think supersede the F2F experience: 1) Assign audio and video recording exercises to students to upload for instructor review. Currently I am teaching Greek online and on campus. To my surprise, I have found that, overall, my online students read biblical Greek out loud better than the on-campus students. In the on-campus classroom, we practice pronouncing Greek during the first weeks of the course by reading 1 John 1 out loud. Students take turns reading a verse and we make the rounds until we corporately finish the whole text. For the online course, students don’t take turns reading just a few verses of 1 John 1. They have to read large sections of it on their own, record their reading, and upload it onto the CMS for me to grade. It takes time, but I listen to their recordings and write out my comments, or make my own recording, to send back to them so they can adjust their pronunciation. Every week, online students complete an A/V recording assignment but the on-campus class does not. As a result, the former read Greek better. 2) Form student-to-student cohorts. I cannot take credit for what follows. On their own, my online students formed a Facebook group where they exchange best study techniques, commiserate about the difficulties of the language, answer questions for one another, and share resources. While on-campus students also form study groups, these are typically much smaller in size, meet less frequently, and do not involve the entire class. The Facebook group invites the entire class to participate and they do. The level of collaboration is much more intense. I may even suggest to the on-campus students that they form online cohorts. Sometimes commuters don’t have access to study groups. Forming a Facebook cohort would allow them to join. These are just a few suggestions I offer as I stumble my way through teaching Greek online. I have been just as much a learner as an instructor in this journey. The pedagogical discoveries have been exhilarating!