My Guidelines for a Remote Environment:
This is my document for tracking my slowly developing understanding of what I am doing in a remote learning/teaching environment. From time to time I will update this document. It is provided here as a way for you (the student) to have some sense of what my thinking is about these issues. It will undoubtedly evolve again as we return to some mix of face to face classes with a range of online resources.
3/30/2021 Delta version
I generally think of my classes as having 5 broad types of learning taking place. At the moment I would call them physics content, collateral content, problem solving development, physics (science) in practice (lab), and technical communication. In a traditional class all of these overlap in alarming and unclear ways in the different components of the class.
We've been at this remote for about a year at this point. It is now possible to look back at choices I made a year ago and wonder about my sanity. The place where things seem to have settled is that the layout of the class on a week by week level is captured on the LMS (currently Blackboard). The LMS hosts places to turn in scans of HW problems and lab notebooks as well as tests of various types. In the past I have linked from these webpages directly to the assignments and tests but that now seems less helpful.
Future possibilities: In some of my other classes where being able to display math content is more critical I have been moving towards hosting course materials on a public github repo. I'm not sure that I will do that for this physics course but it is possible.
The Breadcrumbs were originally my notes to myself to help make sure I had all the web resources linked for class discussion. On another level the Breadcrumbs function as a personalized textbook for this course (since I don't require one). In my experience students have realized that in a face to face class I tend to go over the high points of the Breadcrumbs in class and so it hasn't been critical to read them in advance. In this remote model time will be more limited during class meetings (zoom or whatever). I need to be identify where I intend to insert activities or example problems into the Breadcrumbs during class meetings. If we are meeting for a 60 - 90 minutes there should probably be no more than a couple of indicated activities. For these activities to be most helpful I shouldn't give answers to the activities in the Breadcrumbs but what to do about students who miss class for whatever reason? This is unclear to me.
For me, reading is a more efficient use of my time than video. I can easily skip back to verify an idea or check a value. It is my intention to only use video to demonstrate problem solving strategies or illustrate particular points that are easier to see than to describe. A challenge for me to be conscious of is that almost any video I have made so far to illustrate some point is 10 min long or longer. How much time do I expect students to spend reading ahead on the Breadcrumbs, watching the videos, and doing some pre-class problem? It feels like I'm creating an expectation of 90 min of prep for a 60-90 min class. That's in line with the idea of 60 min of reading a text before 120 min of class but the reality is students don't do that so how do I create an incentive to do so now? This continues to be the root of the conundrum for me.
In the context of my expressed learning goals for all my classes it seems prudent to indicate clearly in the Breadcrumbs what is physics content, what is collateral content (usually math), and what is problem solving development. These three feel like the primary learning modes for the class portion of a course.
Here is my current plan:
Define one calculational or descriptive problem based on the next class reading that must be completed in Bb before that class meeting. Define 2-3 HW style problems that must be completed before the next class meeting. IF I can pull it off my plan is to create a python notebook for each HW problem that randomly changes the relevant variables. When the students have practiced with the notebook until they are confident they understand how to do the problem they can take the Bb version of the problem once (pass/no pass). Perhaps this will close the HW feedback loop faster since the hope would be that everyone will pass the Bb quiz having practiced with the notebook.
In any fixed assessment where the answer can be known there is the possibility that students will merely share the answer and defeat the process. I am going to take the view that if students choose to undermine their learning in this way it's not my primary problem. Hopefully the assessment strategy will reveal any such learning defects.
The labs for PH212 have, in the past, been exploratory labs built around learning the thermal transport effects that take place in a refrigerator. I only had a couple examples of each component and executed the labs by having students work their way through multiple stations. None of that is really possible for remote labs so they will need to be redesigned with an eye to approaching the content in new ways.
Here is my lab plan:
I have asked students to purchase a basic Arduino starter kit (roughly $40) to help support the development of these new labs. This kit will typically have an Arduino (usually an Uno but sometimes an ATMega variety) board along with a protoboard, various LED's and resistors, a 9V battery power cord, USB cable for programming and powering, jumper wire, and a modest variety of sensors (3 or 4). I will provide additinoal sensors and items to support the use of the Arduino as needed. Part of my motivation is that basic electric circuits are a part of the content for PH212 and Arduino projects have the potential to provide hands on learning of basic circuit concepts in a natural way. The sequencing of the content in the class may need to be a little re-examination to support this.
First Step:
I feel like the first step is to get the Arduino up and running and taking data. Once students have some basic experience with coding the Arduino (we'll see if the python experience helps relative to previous classes) and acquiring data from a couple of sensors I then plan to guide them to turning their Arduino into a remote data logger powering the Arduino from a 9V battery while storing data gathered from sensor(s) on an SD card. I will provide the micro SD card reader and the micro SD card (<$10 total). Once they have a portable data logger they can then use this to make relevant measurements of water cooling in a container, the temperature profile of a refrigerator through a day, the brightness and distribution of light (radiation) from a source.
Next Steps:
Once the students can gather data with their personal logger then we can plot it and model it in python notebooks. At this time it seems hopeful that one might be able to apply this data to understanding various thermal properties and transport issues around their home. The temperature profile inside their car on a sunny day is a reasonable example. The labs would be constructed in parallel with python notebooks (available via a github repository) for the lab deliverables as was done in PH211.
Anticipated Challenges:
One challenge I anticipate is about students who join PH212 NOT having had PH211 with me. Because our independent sections are driven by the particular faculty and their methodology for meeting the common outcomes students coming from other institutions or classes may have significantly less skill (or none) with the python and coding tools the rest of the students developed. For the time being I will push those students to play rapid catch up for the first couple of weeks of the term.
Another challenge I am anticipating is the difficulty introduced by remote teaching tools and the need to troubleshoot circuits. This may be very irritating but at the same time it will create an object need for clear and effective circuit construction in ways that students have been able to avoid in the past. Unintended benefit?
Assessment:
...not clear...
Keeping Track:
For me a challenge for this remote structure is keeping track of all the interrelated bits. This is partly the sequencing to be sure the daily HW problems match the content we have already discussed collectively. I also need to look ahead and be sure I have framed a reading question or test that makes sense. In addition there is the core desire to build integration skills along the way. All of these materials exist on the public webpage and then must be implemented on Bb to provide a place to submit each problem or activity digitally (not an issue in a F2F class). I also need to make more explicit decisions about what activities I will do 'in class' along with which videos of process or demonstration I need create to have the necessary resources to keep(get?) students engaged in the thinking I want them to do. Normally I can do this pretty efficiently because I can adapt how much time I'm spending on an activity on the fly. I think what I need to do is build the Bb materials based on the 'Before Next Class' activities at the end of each Breadcrumb. That might minimize all the scraps of paper flying around here...
Self Reflection:
9/3/20
Well, it has certainly been an interesting term. All in all the best that can be said is we all made it through. The effort involved in porting my teaching style into a remote modality has been ridiculous. My sense of effectiveness has dropped and the challenge for most students to keep up has gone up. In an effort to be clearer about what needed to be turned in and to close the feedback loop quicky I ended up with a gradebook that had twice as many elements in it as in the past and the effort didn't balance well with the grade policy as articulated. On some scale I would give myself a grade of C+/B-. I will definitely need to step back and rethink which is not a bad thing but there is a lot of extra effort going into just getting materials available for the students that there isn't much time left to structurally redesign my courses.
3/30/21
It is interesting to look back at last summer's self reflection. It's now been 9 months since we started this experiment with remote teaching and learning. Due in large part to the adaptability of students we seem to be muddling through. The higher level of structure needed by the students to keep track of expectations has been a good thing overall even if it is an aggravating amount of work for me (mostly because I keep losing track and have to fix stuff). The 150 - 200 assignments that come in every week between my three classes is overwhelming and leads to pretty cursory grading. Hard to say if it is really different when we are face to face but it seems like it is. One lovely outcome of remote land is that students are doing really fabulous work in their independent labs. I had expected to have more things go wrong with the labs but the reality is that, by and large, students have done great work and presented it well.
I feel like the breadcrumbs are pretty complete and yet I still seem to spend a lot of time walking students through the logic of the document. Is this because they actually have difficulty with the breadcrumbs or is it just my anxiety about it? Can I go full Bruce McClelland and shut down the class if they don't have questions?
Notes to Self:
1: Use breakout rooms more and more effectively.
2: Standards based assessment still seems critical and continues to elude me.
3: Students clearly prefer video clips to illustrate various aspects of class while I am still a written word dinosaur. Not clear if I should be working on helping develop student skills for mining learning from written documents or moving to video.
4: Can I get ranking tasks back into the mix? Seems like they would be a good tool in this environment. At least for these I could create polls ahead of time.
5: Engagement in class is still driven by just a few students and it's hard to push the issue when I can't loom over folks at their desk.
