Resources

When we engage our teaching world online, let me encourage you to start where you are.  It is not about the tech, gear and gadgets.  It is about vision, imagination and design. In this vlog I show you my setup, my online classroom and how I think about this space. This is not a “how to video” but rather it is a glimpse into my inner world.  I want to invite you to dream about your space, your vision for online teaching and how this might look for you.  My goal is to inspire you to think deliberately about your presence and vision for your online classroom. [su_vimeo url="https://vimeo.com/403354389" title="My Online Classroom"]

When we first move into online classroom spaces, we often miss the dynamic energy of gathered bodies in a familiar location. We lose the immediate gratification of watching in real time as new knowledge “clicks” for students in discussions and class activities. Online classrooms may initially feel sterile, artificial, and indistinguishable from one another in our learning management system. With time and experience in teaching in online classrooms, we may begin to reconsider how a traditional residential classroom is also an artificial space. Residential education occurs on the educational institution’s “turf,” asking students to put their relational connections, participation in the economy, and other vocational expressions on hold to enter into these four walls to be formed and informed. Traditional schooling is an attempt to engage life wisdom from across generations and cultures in a simulated environment that speeds knowledge acquisition and re-organizes it more efficiently from how we might naturally encounter it in life. There is nothing “natural” about a classroom with 12-200 students in it all trying to learn the same things at the same time, regardless of their existing experience or knowledge. What feels “traditional” about this education is actually a factory model of education largely adopted during the industrial revolution for the sake of increasing access to and efficiency of education for the masses. To be certain, online classrooms have many of the same constructed elements. However, they are also more porous than synchronous residential learning experiences. You may experience this in the plethora of Zoom meetings that are happening right now in the midst of staying-at-home as a part of Covid 19 mitigation. Suddenly, you see your students in their home contexts, sometimes with roommates, children, spouses, or pets wandering into the picture. The students’ home contexts become a part of the teaching and learning milieu in more pressing ways when they stay embedded in them. While they are still engaging with a community seeking knowledge, they are also embedded in other relationships and contexts where that knowledge can be tested and integrated on a daily basis. Another of the unique features of online spaces is the capacity for immediate linkage to communities and resources far beyond those of the “walled-in” residential classroom. Opportunities to have students video-conference with scholars or practitioners around the world, curate their own examples or applications of course content drawn from internet resources and their local context, or interact with external media or images related to the course are easy to arrange in online classrooms. This allows course content and the contexts in which knowledge is situated to expand in ways sometimes even beyond faculty expectations and expertise. By asking students to take the insights they are gaining into other settings or to make connections with external resources, faculty may find ways to make online interactions more analytical, more relevant to students’ final vocational destinations, and more engaging for both students and faculty. Additionally, porosity means that students can share learnings from the course through online forums from Twitter feeds to YouTube videos by linking to these in the online classroom. This practice serves as a way to test out ideas in other publics and to help students understand that ultimately this knowledge is not for regurgitation in a classroom setting for their instructor to judge but rather for integration and application in other settings. The longer I have taught online, the more I have become reluctant to serve as the primary audience for student written work. While I always read student work and provide the best feedback my own expertise and experiences with the material can provide, I find that they are better and more committed scholars when they know that what they are creating will find its way into a group who can benefit from what they are creating, whether their class colleagues or some other part of their community. Student papers are remarkably stronger when they know they will share them with their classroom colleagues or other external audiences in comparison to the ones that they will just dash off at the last minute to submit to me in order to complete an assignment. This strategy improves student formation by positioning them more regularly as persons whose knowledge impacts not only their experience but serves other communities as well.  The space for collaborative exchange between students is so much easier to engage in porous online settings where students can share resources and insights easily through links and public postings. There are times when the porosity of online classrooms can be concerning. It is helpful to protect some spaces where mistakes can be made and opinions shared that are within relationships of mutual accountability rather than in the general public. And in theological education where I teach, students are often accountable to ordination boards and hiring committees who may not yet need to witness their growth and development as they encounter new ideas. Some of those boundaries can be maintained in online classrooms to the extent that they can in the public space of a residential classroom. But the possibility of regularly opening up the classroom to the world outside the four walls is an engaging gift of online education.

One of the major advantages of the online learning environment is the capacity to help students develop critical thinking in more effective and efficient ways than the classroom environment allows. Emphasizing student engagement through online discussion forums is a powerful way to cultivate critical thinking. By having students engage more intentionally with texts and media, and respond to well-crafted prompts and questions, instructors can immediately assess the level of a student's understanding and concepts acquisition. Reading student responses to well-crafted prompts and questions is akin to a form of mind reading. The instructor gains immediate feedback on what the student thinks, how a student is thinking, the level of understanding achieved, and can identify misunderstandings. Assessing online student responses allows the teacher to provide correctives, follow up with clarifying questions, challenge fuzzy thinking, and push for specificity. In this way the teacher can cultivate critical thinking and assess evidence about how well students achieve it throughout the course. Critical thinking is one of the universally desired goals in teaching. The current ATS M.Div. program goals includes “. . . development of capacities—intellectual and affective . . . ” as one of its ministerial formation outcomes (Degree Program Standards A.3.1.3.). The online discussion experience is one of the most useful methods for developing and assessing critical thinking. What is Critical Thinking? Critical thinking is a particular cognitive activity evidenced by specific components. Attached is a handout, "Assessing and Cultivating Critical Thinking Online" with nine of those components. Other components of critical thinking not included are credibility, sufficiency, reliability, and practicality. You can use the handout to assess student responses for critical thinking. Sharing the chart with your students, or, converting it into an assessment rubric for online academic discussion can help your students cultivate critical thinking and help you assess how well they achieve it.

We are in the midst of unprecedented social upheaval. Many colleagues are being asked to migrate their teaching formats to online learning and curtail their interactions with learners to the digital spaces. Even so, I believe our roles as teachers can assist our students as we move through this crisis, together.  Teaching during crisis can seem as if we are taxed beyond our capabilities, pushed beyond our job descriptions, and stretched beyond our capacities. According to the scientists and medical professionals, this particular crisis will last longer than a few days. The pandemic which grips our nation, and the world, will likely have a duration of months.  We do not know how many months.  We are likely participating in a paradigm shift in higher education. Before our very eyes, this crisis is likely causing long-term societal shifting. The abrupt behavioral shifts of the society are and will continue to affect the patterns and habits in our schools and classrooms. Practices of social distancing will likely linger in our society after the threat of the pandemic has been eliminated. The advantages of online learning will become more utilized as the threat of human proximity lingers in our shared memory. In the midst of so much abrupt and radical change - still yourself. Ask yourself not to panic, but to find balance and calm.   The health, healing and wholeness of our schools and communities will require all of us to be attentive to this situation. Resist the impulse for “business as usual.” In these emotionally charged times, teachers are looked to as role models, as responsible people who set the tone and tenor in our classrooms of students as well as in our own families and communities. We are called to be a non-anxious presence even when we are struggling in anxious times and with our own personal anxieties. Faculties are being asked to immediately shift from a face-to-face format of course design to online learning. Teachers are having to quickly redesign 1,2,3, and in some cases, 4 courses to an online format in a matter of days. Migrating courses from face-to-face formats to online is not impossible, but it takes thought and preparation. Returning to the basics of your course seems key in this unusual/unprecedented situation. Format affects teaching, but it does not have to diminish or weaken your standards. Resist surrendering to your own frustration. Relax your typical standards for what “has to be taught.” A key is to keep your students engaged and keep your learning aim and goals as your guide – there are many, many ways to get to any one of those goals. What do you do? Do enough and do it well enough – it will not be how you planned, but it will be good enough. Do new and needed activities with your students. Remember the learning activities maybe new to you, but likely not new to your students.  Do differently than you planned. Migrating from one format to another is no small task.  Lean into the difference and know that teaching differently does not mean that your teaching will become inferior or bad.  Change does not have to compromise quality. Remind yourself of the metaphor you employ when you think of yourself as a good teacher – in the best of times. Typical metaphors or similes for the good teacher are: gardener, light bearer, guide, architect, chef, builder, dancer. The list could go on. Each of these metaphors has in its wider narrative and iconographic knowledge the role of teacher in a crisis. For example, the gardener knows ways to combat drought or flood; the light bearer knows ways to keep the wicks trimmed and burning; the guide knows alternative routes should one path be blocked or destroyed; the chef knows how to save a ruined dish; the builder knows how to correct architectural errors; the dancer knows how not to get caught unaware when the tempo of the music suddenly changes. In this moment of unimaginable circumstance, use your imagination to encourage yourself for the ways you need to adapt your teaching and teaching persona.  Refrain from allowing your classroom time (online or face-to-face) to dissolve into conversation exclusively about the health crisis. Continue to teach your course, even in its modified and adapted forms.  Students are still enrolled in degree programs and still seeking graduation. Stay focused upon your course topics. It is likely that concentrating upon something other than the crisis will be refreshing to you and your students.  Consider that this is also a time of opportunity, adventure, and new learning. The foil to crisis is creativity. Creativity is the tool of innovation and invention. Let go of that which would have you stay mired in established ways and current semester plans. Allow yourself to think new thoughts about your own old, rehearsed modes of teaching. Let the tropes go! Suspend judgement about the fictitious standard of teaching which no longer applies in this peculiar moment and let yourself be creative. Finish the semester strong by finding ways of engaging with your students on the course themes – it could be that straight forward! In this moment of social distancing, hand washing, quarantine, suspicion, and fear continue to take notice of your students. Inherently, teaching is a communal act. Even in online classrooms, pedagogical intimacy can encourage, strengthen, and hearten students. Students depend upon our words of assurance, our gestures of care, our attitudes of warmth and belonging. Be empathic with your students, remembering that they too are in crisis. The Wabash Center has provided a dedicated page for online teaching - https://www.wabashcenter.wabash.edu/resources/teaching-online/.  We have also published podcasts of many interviews with colleagues who are well versed in online learning https://www.wabashcenter.wabash.edu/resources/videos/.  

When I met with our first-year students during on-campus orientation five weeks into their program, a student complained to me about an assignment in my online class. I didn’t recognize what the student was describing, and after a few minutes I realized that it wasn’t from our class at all. He had been working from the to-do list on the main page of our learning management system (LMS), receiving assignments from all of his classes in an undifferentiated list, ordered only by due date. He found it difficult to mentally sort which assignments went with which class, and he felt frustrated and ready to quit. On the one hand, this student was an extreme example. With online orientation, most students understand how to “move” into individual courses to see assignments in context of the full site for the class. On the other hand, because distinct classrooms, different classmates, meeting times, and the visual presence of the instructor are often muted in online learning, this scenario of being adrift in a sea of deadlines and assignments is not all that unusual for online students. Whenever they “go” to different classes they do so sitting alone looking at the same screen, which can blend experiences from multiple classes in their mind. Increasingly students are using smaller phone screens and the combined to-do list of all courses as their guide through their education. Learning becomes a never-ending stream of calendrical tasks to squeeze in between work hours and caring for family members and the many other demands of working adult students. They are doggedly getting what they need to get done finished, but the bigger story of each class gets lost in the shuffle, making the scaffolding necessary for learning and retention more difficult to build. Since that conversation, I have been more aware of how students engage the LMS. I try to imagine what it is like to encounter the individual assignments and tasks of my class in isolation from one another as they pop up in a mixed to-do list generated by the system. Do they come across as a communal learning space or just another damn thing to get done? Can they even figure out which class the task has come from? I now work harder to communicate the connective tissue that holds together the task-oriented skeleton of the class in what appears on the to-do list. What often gets lost are the transitions between topics, where we have been and where we are going, the overall narrative arc of the class. Of course, this also easily happens in a residential class that meets once or twice a week, interrupted by six other days of busy life and other interactions. Without careful design and communication by instructors, the story of the class can be obscure to novices encountering it for the first time, whatever the setting. In my last blog, I talked about the importance of using short faculty videos to help create a sense of the social presence of the instructor in an online class. These videos are also a great way to create connective tissue from assignment to assignment, marking the developments in learning that the instructor has seen in the class, and naming where the class has been and where they are heading. If they are placed on the same page as the task, they help the student associate which instructor and which class the assignment comes from. This connective tissue can also be generated in textual narrative. Where I once would have an assignment that simply listed the readings and the discussion prompt for the day, now I will have several paragraphs reminding students of where we are in the course, why this topic for this day, and introducing the readings. A written mini-lecture might contextualize the moment in history that we are engaging, or why I think that this material is important, or what I hope they will learn from engaging it, or how it builds on what we have learned so far. One of the difficulties of providing this connective tissue in asynchronous classes is that often I am creating these pieces two weeks ahead of where the majority of the class is working. I can’t always draw on what happened in the last class session, like I would in a residential class. But I do my best to keep the whole story arc of the class in mind, and to clue students into our current moment, not unlike the recap of a season of television that happens before the first episode of the next series. This practice also keeps me honest about knowing the “why” for each task I set in the class so I can help students stay oriented in the midst of the continuous flow of tasks set for their learning.

Recently, I worked with a colleague to conduct student surveys with currently enrolled students and alumni from the first decade of our distance MDiv program. We asked students what they would like our faculty to know about their teaching strategies for the online portions of classes. About two-thirds of respondents mentioned a desire for increased faculty presence and investment in the course. In some cases, these were very strongly worded: “Faculty participation and engagement online is a make or break factor for the class.” “Beyond a reasonably well-designed course, the instructor(s) showing they are present and attentive is the most important aspect.” “And seriously folks, just because the coursework is online is no excuse for the instructor to not be present in the class . . . . Be present with us. Respond to our posts as if you were responding to our embodied voice breathing the same air at the same time. Don't make us self-teach ourselves with your materials and not with your experience/presence.” Now, faculty responses to this data were mixed. Rightfully so, they felt that in the structuring of the class, the selection of materials to engage, the formation of discussion questions, responding to student posts, providing instructions for written assignments, and numerous other ways, they were regularly “in” their classes. But all of this work that the faculty member put into designing and implementing the course did not always equate to the student’s sense that faculty were present in real time, invested in student learning, and cared for them as people. And for most of our students, this social presence was the most critical factor for good online teaching. Faculty simply weren’t perceived by students as “being there” when they were present in textual form. And, here I am stretching a bit beyond my data, but I believe students often experience textual communication from faculty as evaluative, directive, and disembodied. In creative nonfiction and memoir genres many writers can make themselves socially present through the written word. But, this feat takes a different kind of writing than most faculty are trained to do. The ways we are trained to write as academics tend to communicate a distant expert, a not-so-humanizing aspect of our teaching selves. One nearly effortless way for faculty to make themselves more socially present in an online course is by creating a kind of connective tissue throughout the class in the use of short, informal videos. As a teaching coach to online faculty, I was initially pretty anti-video. I worried that talking head videos were just a non-dialogical information dump, either through reading written lectures to present content or worse, recording lectures in a residential class and using them later for an online section. These were not the kinds of videos our students desired. The videos that the students felt created social presence often involved faculty just hitting record on their laptop and chatting in real time. Faculty were using these videos to share weekly updates about how the class was going, to give brief lecturettes to help students navigate difficult material, to provide a frame for the topic of the week and identify its importance, to offer introductions to readings or other course materials, and to coach for success on writing assignments. While it feels awkward to stare meaningfully into the top of your computer screen and speak directly to students, these videos presenced faculty in a very different way than either voice recording or textual communication. Students felt more connected to those faculty who used these short, informal videos. Most of the time, these videos contained the kind of offhanded explanatory speaking that you might do in the first and last five minutes of class, when you present an assignment, or in response to student questions. Our students marked the importance of these video appearances in their sense of having access to and benefitting from the expertise of the professor, establishing a relationship and sense of trust in the professor, helping with course integration, and believing that the professor was actively guiding the course. Of course, their power to invoke the presence and care of the faculty diminished when the videos were obviously designed for an earlier class, which makes me regret my choice to ever change my hair length and style. Professionally staged or highly polished videos also reduce the communication of a caring human presence. Sitting in the office speaking into a phone camera may feel like a ridiculous way to connect with students, but it turns out that the vulnerability of offering your regular teacher-self helps you be present to your students in powerful ways.

Recently I was working with my IT colleague, Dr. Justin Barber, on a project to use machine learning to gather data about student experience in our hybrid classes from our LMS (Learning Management System). Big data comes to theological education! Our curriculum committee was testing a common perception that our distance students felt better about their experience in the classes after they had been together on campus. To test this assumption, we asked Justin to do something called “sentiment analysis” on the discussion forums to see how the emotional tenor of their interactions changed once they had been together in space and time. Full disclosure: Justin is brilliant, and I often have no idea what AI (Artificial Intelligence) magic he has rendered. So, we always have to sit down for him to explain the results to me. Before performing the sentiment analysis, we summarized the aggregate posts of each discussion with three keywords to get a sense of the content of each discussion (excluding the common words that occur in almost every post like "the", "a", etc.). Then these three words would be analyzed before and after the campus visits to see if they were, on the whole, more positive after the students had been together. The three word combinations were often just the topic for the week and two key related terms. Hilariously, a colleague’s class in “Ancient and Emerging Practices” came up with the trio: church, tickle, sexuality. I had to explain to Justin who Phyllis Tickle was when he became concerned about what on earth was going on in that class. But as we scrolled through data from hundreds of forums over five years of data, week by week, the main word that showed up again and again was “thanks.” Thanks. As we scrolled, I was reminded of so many student posts that began with that word. “Thanks for sharing that story.” “Thanks for bringing up that topic, because I was wondering about it, too.” “Thanks for making that clearer, because when I read it I was totally confused.” While the results of the sentiment analysis were largely insignificant, this moment of realization of the function of gratitude in our online classrooms has stuck with me. It drew together something in my lived experience, but it was still surprising how often that it made the top three. Thanks. Not only in classes where emotional intelligence and personal sharing is expected, such as pastoral care courses, but in history classes, Bible classes, comparative religion classes. Many faculty fear a loss of relationality in online classes. They worry that peer-to-peer learning is diminished, that learning becomes a form of correspondence course between students and faculty. In my doctoral pedagogy class, students worry that conversations in online forums will mimic the trolling vitriol of Twitter comments. But here was dispassionate evidence that an attitude of respectful engagement was the overwhelming norm in all of our classes. In simple list form, we discovered over and over again the simple acknowledgement of indebtedness to another student: Thanks. As Justin and I processed this surprising result, we talked about how some of this polite deference might be a reflection of the somewhat tenuous nature of online community. Perhaps in situations where relationships aren’t reinforced by regular embodied interaction, a level of additional respect becomes a habitual marker of conversation in order to maintain connection and compensate for the way text doesn’t communicate body language, tone, or attentiveness. More cynically, this profusion of thanks might be a signal of perfunctory niceness, something that both our majority white female student population and church-related vocation students are socialized to perform. I like to think of this habit of gratitude as a way that students hold one another’s stories and learnings as gift. The esteemed religious educator Dr. Anne Streaty Wimberly once led a retreat in a church that I later served as youth minister. Even years later, the young people in that community remembered her as the “thank you for sharing lady” because she had taught them to receive every word spoken into the circle as gift, which required verbalized gratitude. Opening up a laptop in a faraway city to re-enter a challenging class alone can be a difficult discipline, particularly for students who already have very busy lives. Finding colleagues there who hold your contributions with respect and gratitude makes that space more gracious and inviting. And so our students, without our prompting, learned together to say thanks.

The greatest potential of the online learning environment is its capacity to foster high levels of interactive learning that lead to “deep understanding.” The instructor’s role is critical to making this happen. The manner and frequency of the instructor’s response to students in the discussion forums is what tends to determine the quality of the learning experience. Instructional Responses Your ability to provide effective instructional feedback on your courses discussion forums will be the key to successful student learning. For effectiveness, instructors should minimize non-instructional responses and maximize instructional prompts. While your instructional prompts will be in response to an individual student’s post, it should serve the purpose of moving the discussion along for the class as a whole. Pay close attention to your student’s posts. If a student’s response is correct, give a short, overt affirmation. If a student’s FORMAT in responding is incorrect, say so and allow the student to correct the post. If a student’s CONTENT response is incorrect (factually wrong, reflects a misunderstanding), provide corrective feedback. When reviewing your students’ responses, judge critically. Look for correct responses and expected incorrect response and use them as opportunities for instructional prompts. Allow time for students to think about and compose responses to complex questions. Use student responses as opportunities to refer the class members to readings or instructional content. INSTRUCTIONAL PROMPTS Instructional prompts are those instructor responses that help the students move toward “deep understanding” of the course concepts. Here are eight types of instructional prompts you can use when responding to student posts online. These prompts are directly correlated to facets of critical thinking. Critical Thinking Prompts Why do you say so? Where else might that idea apply? Is that your opinion, or did you overhear that? What might be the consequences of that action? What might someone else say about that? What would that take? How did you arrive at that opinion? Elaboration Prompts Could you go into that in more detail? I would expand that idea by saying . . . . Who can expand on that idea from your own context/experience? I’m not sure now that applies. Can you build on that idea more? Clarification Prompts What exactly do you mean? Do I understand you to mean . . . ? Please provide an example to help us understand your point of view. Can you provide a short definition for how you are using that term? Comparison Prompts That’s an interesting statement. How does that compare with what was previously said? With what the author of the text claimed? I might compare that with . . . . Do you think that’s a fair comparison? I see the following similarities in the ideas presented so far . . . . What others do you see? Contrasting Prompts How would you contrast your idea to the one that (name of other) gave previously? In contrast to your statement, I think . . . . I see that idea as different from his/her’s in these ways . . . . How does your interpretation contrast with the author’s (with another student)? Can you offer a contrasting view of opinion? Justification Prompts How would you defend that statement against . . . ? What assumptions are you basing that on? Tell me why you think that idea/solution would work. Evaluation Prompts What is your reaction to that idea? My reaction to that/your idea is . . . . What do you think of that idea? Tell me why you think your idea/solution is better. While these prompts also work in the classroom environment, the immediacy of the classroom discussion and the limitations of time constraints make it a challenge for a teacher to engage in deep learning dialogue. The online environment provides the instructor with the luxury of analyzing student responses, identifying the best feedback-prompt to use, and formulating the response to help the student, and the class, move toward deeper learning. Using a hybrid format, an instruction can determine which course components may be best to move to the online discussion forum to allow for more process and discussion so the instructor can be more effective in the use of instructional prompts for deeper learning.

If communication were easy, all marriages would be made in heaven, differing perspectives would be valued, all students would be well rested and at ease, and we would get the sauce we asked for with our McNuggets. So much for the Better Universe. Here in this one, we instructors spend a lot of time trying to get across ideas that are perfectly clear in our heads to generally smart and willing learners. Often, it can feel like threading a needle with a climbing rope in a hailstorm. Sometimes, it is harder than that. Why Am I Communicating? Merlin Mann once said, “Never hit ‘Send’ on an email unless you know what you want to happen as a result.” Whenever communicating with students, it's worth asking, "Why am I doing this? What do I want to happen as a result?" ("Ah!" you say, being an academic and therefore the kind of person who can't wait to say this sort of thing, "Locution, illocution, and perlocution." That's fine.) Often, we are simply conveying information. What is the schedule, the readings, the assignments, the rubrics; where is the feedback; when is the review, the exam, the due date for the paper; how does one reach the instructor, how does one cite sources. Learners need the info. Hopefully, another purpose is motivating learners. Think of geese honking one another along in their V-formation on a chilly morning. "Hey, everyone got their reflection papers in on deadline: great professionalism, can't wait to read them. On to the next unit!" "Last push before final papers are due: get your sleep, eat well, try to remember why you cared about your paper topic in the first place, and let's run through the finish line!" Sometimes, we mean to model a behavior or an activity for learners. If my learners are engaged in a collaborative activity in an unfamiliar mode--a Twitter game, a group poem in a Google doc, a discussion-forum weeklong debate--then I may want to find a way to join as a participant, "showing the way" for learners who might hesitate to get themselves out onto the dance floor. An aspect of communication that happens to be much on my mind these days is disciplinary formation. In my case, the ongoing effort to help learners wrap their heads around what I mean by "biblical studies," its materials, and particularly its methods and principles. Biblical studies is not Bible Study. Biblical studies relies on publicly available evidence and explicit lines of reasoning, and does not grant methodological place to private revelation or sectarian doctrine. The subject matter of biblical studies is texts, not God. You don't get all of this over in a syllabus, or an introductory lecture. It's an ongoing communicative process. "What are we doing here, and how do we do it, and why this way and not another?" Any number of reasons to communicate could be added. Some of these are course correction ("Whoa y'all, remember that your responses to classmates have to substantively engage their own content, not just springboard off on your own thing"); self correction ("Sorry gang, I wrote two different due dates in the course documents; let's go with the later one, found in such-and-so doc on our Moodle site”); gathering information instead of disseminating it (a survey, a diagnostic quiz). There is no shortage of good reasons to communicate with learners, and it will do everyone good if I know what the purpose of each one is. How Should I Communicate This? A big part of the answer to this question derives from a prior question: "Who Should Hear This?" Deciding among your available channels (syllabus, email, blog post, Zoom meeting, dedicated course Twitter hash tag, YouTube video lecture, MP3 audio lecture, mumbling passive-aggressively in the hallways) mainly involves deciding on your audience. Sure, you know who you're talking to, but also, who do you want to be sure overhears it, and why? ("Ah!" you say, "Locution, illo..." except now nobody is listening.) Private communication is the norm for feedback ("You got a B-plus, and here's why"). But, what about that wonderful form of feedback, "Catching the learner doing something right"? Alexis showed exemplary leadership moderating her small group this week. I can tell her so via email, and she may find that motivating, but what I really need is for her small-group colleagues Brad, Charlise, and Darius to overhear this since they will be moderating in future weeks. So, I will praise Alexis in whichever venue this work is happening (discussion forum, Google Doc, Twitter thread). Heads up, Brad and company! As for that disciplinary formation I'm working on. I know from experience how much back-and-forth this can involve. My explanations are prone to misunderstanding; learners have substantive pre-formation to unpack and unlearn; I'm still discovering what kinds of questions my efforts will elicit. If anything calls for synchronic discourse (Zoom meeting, Chat session, webinar), this does. Still, no reason not to supplement with asynchronous tools: an Ask-Me-Anything (About Biblical Studies) discussion forum, for example, or a Glossary built by learners over the course of the semester (on the Learning Management System? as a Google Doc with a shareable link?). Also, disciplinary formation lends itself to a bit of "public theology" if possible. My learners aren't the only ones confused about what goes on in my field, and it's not like "Bible" doesn't have a prominent place in public discourse and policy. How about a webinar or social-media event open to the public? ("Students, prepare your pseudonyms, we have incoming!") What is a syllabus for? Twenty years of teaching and I still can't quite say. I tend to tick-tock over time between the 3-page bare-bones syllabus (with other course docs picking up the slack: schedule, rubrics, policies, weekly instructions) and the 39-page behemoth that serves as The Complete and Final Revelation of Your Instructor to Her Flock (it never is). If I am going with multiple course docs all living in an LMS, then learners will need these to refer to one another: the course docs cross-reference each other, and the syllabus cross-references everything. It's not a scavenger hunt. (But you could include a real Scavenger Hunt through the course docs as a first-week activity!) Of course, you can't use a tool you've never heard of (and I warn against using one in the field you've not tried first privately). Twitter, Google Docs, Slack, Discord, Zoom, YouTube, WordPress . . . pick one when you're in the mood and get some friends to take it out with you for a spin: gossip, play a game, exchange recipes. If nothing else, you'll have something to say at parties besides "Ah! Locution . . . ." Brooke Lester Assistant Professor Garrett-Evangelical Theological Seminary

Selecting reading and viewing material for any course can be challenging. Institutional policies may limit instructor’s options to titles adopted by a department or to a program’s contracted curricular materials. Some schools require use of a rental system and/or impose cost parameters. For the online instructor, additional complications arise. The obstacles might be logistical. When students live at a distance from a campus, they may not have the foresight to order books or course-paks in a timely manner or may lack access to library reserves. If a class requires video content, a student might not subscribe to a particular streaming service. But more common concerns relate to format and learning purpose. I want to consider these items and explore the relationship between what we opt to assign and our pedagogical practice. In courses taught fully online, the instructor must decide whether to make all of the class materials available electronically. I find that my students increasingly prefer reading on their devices and appreciate the opportunity to click directly through to an assignment. That reality is getting easier to make happen. Appropriate translations of religious texts are readily available. The ability to download articles and chapters in a pdf from library holdings also offers options. When requiring movies or documentaries, an institutional subscription to a streaming service like Swank permits a single-click viewing experience. Additionally, some publishers, like Point of View ) specialize in 1500-word pieces on specific topics that can be purchased inexpensively in Kindle-ready form. And scholars in the field are producing free content such as The Religious Studies Project’s podcasts  (https://www.religiousstudiesproject.com/podcast/), Andrew Henry’s Religion for Breakfast videos (https://www.youtube.com/user/ReligionForBreakfast/featured), Bible Odyssey (the Society of Biblical Literature’s site for short articles, videos, and other materials focused on critical examination of various subjects related to the Bible and its study; https://www.bibleodyssey.org/) that are usable in a classroom setting But research has demonstrated that students resist clicking on too many different assignment links and frequently lose energy before working through them all. They know that a significant number of short readings or videos can be just as time consuming, and feel just as burdensome, as one longer assignment. Thus, strategizing about what resources to employ and how to get students reading or viewing must always be grounded in what information we want mastered in a class. For example, many of us–online or not–no longer emphasize testing on dates, names, places, and similar specifics once typical of lecture and textbook-based learning, even if the study of a subject may demand familiarity with such details. When one can access factual information with a few, swift keystrokes, asking students to devote significant out-of-class time to reading or viewing, taking notes, assessing what is valuable, memorizing, and then reproducing it all on a quiz feels antiquated. We instead seek to reduce the onerous qualities of learning foundational material and target, in brief, acquiring knowledge of key topics or concepts. In the online environment, how to achieve this requires going beyond simply providing links to assignments. For example, we can construct reading and viewing with embedded “check-ins” that ensure student contact with basic terminology and concepts. Indeed, this practice can be formulated to provide immediate feedback and personalized suggestions of linked resources for a term or an idea a student does not grasp. This practice thereby expands learning (while reading or viewing) by teaching both content and how to identify and seek further clarifications regarding important material. Good design can also move beyond students answering simple feedback questions and toward demonstrating understanding, interpretation, and application. This approach is particularly important with longer readings or viewings (such as novels or movies), as well as with assignments that may be difficult going (reading theory, for instance). Again, technology permits querying students as they work, thus promoting not only completion of reading and viewing assignments in full, but also comprehension via critical immersion in the material that can then be integrated into class discussions, paper writing, or research activities. Without doubt, building these resources requires additional time for the instructor (and can involve the need for some technical expertise depending on the learning management system utilized). Links for more in-depth study also require regular updating. The investment at the front-end, however, can formulate assignments that are a better fit for the online environment given students often work asynchronously in diverse locations and may benefit from guidance not available through regular contact with other students or the instructor in the classroom or on campus. Moving away from familiar learning practices might feel strange to instructors who come to the online world from face-to-face classrooms and may not be digital natives. But there are two important points to ponder. First, we are more and more teaching students who have grown up attached to devices that have shaped their learning habits. We want to capitalize on the potential of what is already in their hands. In fact, figuring out how to maximize the strengths of the available technologies in service of our goals is what every generation of instructors does, even if not quite at the same rapid pace required of us today. Second, we need to be more intentional about cultivating our own pedagogical awareness. Graduate schools focus on producing scholars rather than classroom teachers. As new instructors, we thus often replicate teaching that worked for us until we figure out our own styles along the way. But in navigating today’s changing landscape of higher education, we should seek deliberate matching between where we want to see our students end up and how we develop assignments (reading, viewing, and assessment activities) that get us there. That work starts with the pedagogical choices we make about the content for a course, how students access it, and what we do to help them navigate it.