Transitioning Your Pedagogy

If you would like to explore some options on your own, take a look at these common teaching techniques. You will likely find that you use several of these items in your current teaching practice. For each item, we make some recommendations that you might consider in the event your normal teaching practice is not possible.

Lecturing

An engaging lecture is one way to deliver content to your students. If you feel this remains the most viable path for you, consider recording your lecture with a smartphone. If you have a phone made in the past five years, you can get remarkable picture quality, and reasonable audio quality to capture your lecture. If you have a camera in your PC or laptop, you could also record your lecture sitting at your desk. UNLV offers Lecture Capture (Panopto), a video service that lets you post your video in WebCampus - just so your students can see the video. Evidence suggests that most students benefit from having these videos to view when studying for exams.

Presentations (Google Slides, PowerPoint, etc.)

If you tend to deliver your talks with PowerPoint slides (or other presentation software), you can record your slides with audio narration in PowerPoint or use Lecture Capture (Panopto). Whatever you record, you can host it on Lecture Capture (Panopto). There are options to limit the distribution of materials to students in your class. If you want to deliver the content live (say, from your office at home to your students in their individual homes), you can do that with Zoom.

Facilitated Discussion

Many faculty enjoy the Socratic method of facilitated discussions within their discipline. WebCampus has a powerful and easy-to-use discussion board where you and your students can engage in deep and thoughtful conversations about whatever topic you like. WebCampus makes it easy to grade these discussions too (though you do not have to do that).

Group Activities

Many faculty like to have various group projects where groups of three or more students collaboratively work on a project to solve a problem, create an artifact, or prepare a presentation. Chances are your students already have their own technology for doing this. If they do not, they can utilize Google Hangouts, Google Drive, and Google Docs to collaborate, meet, and complete assignments.

Roleplays

Roleplays can be an engaging and powerful way to simulate an experience, reenact an event, or practice a technique or task. You can host role plays using Zoom or Google Hangouts. There are some unique pedagogical techniques in this practice that actually work better online than in person. Talk to us to see what might work for you.

Quizzes and Exams

WebCampus has a powerful suite of testing tools. It is true that you cannot prevent cheating when your students are taking tests in various locations (without a monitor). You can, however, design your tests and assessments in a way that discourages this behavior. Or you can consider alternative assessment practices that not only assess your students, but improve their learning outcomes.

Assignments

Your students can email the assignments to you, or they can submit assignments (Google Doc, Word, PDF, Powerpoint, Excel, HTML, etc.) through WebCampus. You just create the assignment and give them a deadline.

This is just a sample of some typical teaching techniques deployed at UNLV. Do not struggle alone to make a plan. Let one of our consultants collaborate with you, and help you design a path that will work for you and your students regardless of the circumstances.