2 Organizing a Week

A word on ordering this work in a given week

If you’re using anything that looks like the outline from the previous chapter, a possible structure might be:

• Read/Watch
• Quiz
• Live session/Lecture
• Student group discussion
• Reflection

This organization was recommended by a faculty member we were working with through our “Introduction to Teaching Online” course. The reasoning here is that if you give learners (particularly new learners) a reading without some form of accountability (e.g., a quiz, discussion post, minute paper), they are much less likely to do it. For many of us, it’s more likely we will attend class if we have done the readings ahead of time. Putting the student group discussion after the lecture gives students who can’t attend a synchronous session a chance to review the recording.

You could also choose not to lecture at all. Many

could we incorporate any of this stuff from the “Don’t Cover the Content” stuff?

Listen: You do not need to “cover the content” of your course. Not when you’re teaching online, and not even when you’re teaching face-to-face. Most of the time, it’s just not something you need to do as an instructor. Teaching from cover-to-cover of a textbook (for example) is going to 1) put more pressure on yourself to “cover” too much content via slides, lectures, etc., 2) put more pressure on your students to cram a bunch of information into their heads, and 3) result in more surface-level recall of basic concepts than an actual understanding and ability to demonstrate that understanding or be able to apply deeper concepts. So, 

Start by going back to your objectives and learning outcomes for the course. What is it that you want to happen? What do you want students to get out of it? Sometimes these are mandated by accreditation standards. Oftentimes these are created by you or your colleagues. That means, most of the time, you can choose what to teach, how to teach it, and what the students should be able to do at the end of it all.

There is a time and a place for rote learning. For example, memorizing the multiplication time table up to 10 or 12 is very useful for quickly doing simple head math that makes more complicated math easier to handle. But this isn’t often the case for the complicated and complex concepts often taught in higher education.

Changing the question from “do you know?” to “how do you know?” challenges the learner to consider the validity and reliability of their information and also invites them to examine their logic.

Do you really want your students to temporarily be able to regurgitate a bunch of facts from the book, or do you want them to be able to ask the right questions and have the right discussions? To participate in a professional community as a member of that community. Do you want them to turn to you and the textbook as the sole (and best?) sources of information, or do you want them to be able to search for and find answers for themselves? In the real world, we have an abundance of resources at our fingertips to find the information we have not adequately remembered for ourselves. The trick is knowing a) knowing what information we need and what we already have; b) where to find the correct information; and c) what to do with the information once we have it.