Teaching Continuity Tools

• Communicating with students,
• Delivering lectures,
• Providing handouts,
• Assigning, collecting, and grading student work,
• Administering tests/exams/quizzes,
• Encouraging student participation and managing group work,
• Checking Attendance,
• Advising.

 

Communicating with Students

There are a number of online tools available you may use to communicate with your students. Choose a method that works best for you.

• Announcement forum
  • Moodle has an Announcement forum in every course that allows you to post a message in your course and the message is also sent as an email to your students. The Faculty FAQ in Moodle provides instruction for using the Announcements forum.
• Quickmail
  • Moodle has Quickmail that allows you to send emails to some or all of the students in your class. The Faculty FAQ in Moodle provides instruction on using Quickmail
• Messaging
  • Moodle has a message interface (different than email) that will allow you to send messages to some or all students.
• Outlook
  • Outlook has class groups to allow you to send an email directly to your students by using the sequence number of the course. For example, if you have a class with sequence number 1164 you could send an email to seq1164@obu.edu and all the students in that class would receive your message. If your sequence number is less than 4 numbers, precede the number with zeros (seq0072@obu.edu) You can send the messages from the Outlook program installed on your office computer or through Outlook web mail.
• Virtual office hours
  • Zoom waiting rooms for managing office hours
  • Managing Office Hours - Ideas and Suggestions
• Discussion in real-time
  • Discussion in real-time can take place by using Zoom.
  • Use Zoom Breakout Rooms if you need to divide your students into groups
• Live text chat
  • Live text chat with students can be accomplished using Moodle Chat.
• Asynchronous discussions
  • For asynchronous discussions use Moodle Open Forums. 

 

Delivering lectures

For synchronous lectures use Zoom. 

• Zoom meeting controls
• Zoom Screen Share & Annotation

For asynchronous options

• Use Zoom to pre-record, and then share a lecture with students.
• Record a narrated presentation (narrated PowerPoint) and include it in your course.
• Other things you can upload or link in your Moodle courses are-
  • Podcasts or audio files
  • Case studies
  • Images
  • Charts and graphs 

 

Providing handouts

• Upload files such as PDF, Word documents, Excel spreadsheets, PowerPoint presentations, etc. to Moodle. (Moodle has a 100 MB size limit per file so if your file is larger than that, upload it to OneDrive then share the file and provide a link in Moodle to the shared file.)
• Provide links to websites, videos, case studies, etc. 

 

Assigning, collecting, and grading student work

• Use Assignments in Moodle to provide direction, accept submissions, grade and return assignments electronically.
  • Rubrics can be used within Moodle to grade assignments
• Record student grades within the Moodle assignment or in the Moodle gradebook.
  • Also refer to the Faculty FAQ in Moodle for common questions on the gradebook.
• Use a Turnitin assignment where appropriate in Moodle.
• Consider incorporating alternative course materials and adapt assignments for online delivery if it becomes necessary to continue online instruction for an extended time.  

 

Administering tests/exams/quizzes

• Create your first quiz
• Demonstration of creating a multiple choice quiz and uploading questions to the question bank
• It is possible to format different types of test questions in Word so that you can import questions to the question bank in Moodle rather than entering them one by one.
• Zoom 101: Polling (In-meeting)
• Consider feedback, choice and questionnaire activities for formative assessments in Moodle

 

Encouraging student participation and managing group work

• Be “present” in your course by “checking in” to your course frequently.
• Grade assignments in a timely manner.
• Provide timely and meaningful feedback.
• Use Announcements to keep the class current and personal.
• Provide individual and collective messages of encouragement.
• Use the groups feature in Moodle to encourage student collaboration.
  • Zoom 101: Breakout Rooms for group discussions
• OneDrive can also be used for collaboration. See the video on Getting Started with OneDrive. When prompted log in with your OBU email and password. Look for the See more link to reveal topic timestamps.

 

Checking Attendance

• Zoom 101: Manage Participants

If you are using Zoom there are two ways to track attendance by asking each student to “sign in” using the Chat function. One is to record the session and the chat will be included. The second is to save a file of the Chat by finding File at the bottom right of the chat window, clicking on the three dots (…) and choosing Save Chat.

If you are conducting the class asynchronously (i.e., not within a specified time period) monitor student responses to online quizzes, written responses, or other assignments as a way to track participation. Monitoring asynchronous participation can be facilitated by using Moodle. 

 

Advising

Tips for Remote Advising and Preregistration