Digital Tools
"To be most successful, start small. Make sure you yourself are comfortable with the tech. If you cannot easily and confidently use the tool, it's not the right choice for you. Remember, too, that you can teach very effectively using only the basic set of tools in your LMS...Announcements, Discussion Forums, Assignments, and Quizzes." - Darby Flower, Small Teaching OnlineWhen designing assignments and assessments, we can think about the digital tools our students may encounter or have access to when they’re learning from a distance. One way to think about this is list traditional tools you may use in a face to face classroom, and think through how these can be adapted to the online environment.
Examples
- Asking students to print out their assignments or course packets may be prohibitive due to a lack of access to a printer, paper, or ink. In an online environment, you may think about asking students to build a blog or record their answers to discussion boards. Students can also to upload assignments to Canvas.
- To see evidence of student reading and engagement with course readings, they could annotate using highlighting and comments in a tool such as Hypothesis.
- Instead of offering a high stakes final exam, offer several lower stakes exams using quizzes to check for comprehension. Students could also complete reflection essays where they relate the course content to a social issue that you’ve discussed in class. For example, how does X engineering concept relate to a social justice issue you’ve focused on this semester?