6. a slew of remote teaching resources

thinking about small wins & teaching online in the new year

Aug 17, 2020

Hi there! 👋I’m Ida, and this is tiny driver, a newsletter about research, pedagogy, culture and their intersections. Thank you for being here. Reply anytime, I love hearing from you.

Happy Monday! Last week was filled with finishing up the revisions for my R&R journal article. I am so happy to say that I was able to submit it over the weekend! I celebrated this small win by playing Animal Crossing with my partner. We were even able to hang out with two of our friends on their islands. Our character’s name is Higgins (after one of his dogs), and he is very adorable:

Many thanks to all those who reached out to me after I wrote about my struggle with certain reviewer comments. Hannah M. (who was my roommate in college 🥰) shared an idea with me about working through difficult reviewer comments. She suggested writing two versions of the resubmit cover letter: the one you're going to submit (i.e. "thank you for the interesting comments"), and the version that you wish you could submit (i.e. "that was a very mean comment! 😡). Just make sure to delete the latter file before submitting the paper so there's no chance that you're uploading the wrong one! 😳 I think this idea is extremely helpful. I even think it would be a good activity to sort through my initial emotions about the comments when I first receive them.

She also told me that there is such thing as the "Reviewer #2 Meme" in the science community. Is this also a thing in the humanities? I looked it up and it sure seems like it should be! 😆

Please always feel free to (privately) comment by replying directly to the newsletter emails or leave a (public) comment by clicking the button below. I’d love to hear your thoughts on the items that I write about, or if you'd like to share advice and resources with myself and the "tiny driver" community!

What I teach.

Aside from finishing up the revisions for my journal article, I also dedicated some quality time to learning best practices for remote teaching. I wasn't teaching last Spring, so I definitely have a lot to learn in terms of how to convert a syllabus from an in-person model to an online, or even hybrid, model. I'm also not teaching in the fall, which will give me time to do my due diligence in creating a course that is engaging. I'm not sure whether or not classes at Northwestern will be entirely or partially online during the winter & spring quarters, but I want to get a head-start on the process nonetheless.

Luckily for me, I was able to glean many online teaching guides (thank you to my friends & colleagues at Brown, UChicago, and Northwestern for sending me stuff!!) and put together a curated Remote Teaching Resources Guide page.* On this page, you can also write comments, so feel free to let me know what you think about certain ideas & links, or even leave some of your own resources that have worked well for you!

Here are just a few ideas and resources that I thought were particularly interesting for lesson plan & syllabus development:

Hyperdocs: This activity is primarily used for asynchronous teaching and is supposed to be very helpful in explicitly meeting learning goals. As the blogs say, this document is so much more than merely a GoogleDocs with links. Students are able to engage not only with the document, but also with other databases, videos links, websites, etc. that you link out. In addition, they are also able to write their reflections or paper within the document itself, which you have access to through your GoogleDrive. I'm thinking about using it for reinforcing particular methodologies (i.e. thinking like a historian, a cultural studies scholar, or an interdisciplinary scholar) and having them learn more about certain theoretical frameworks.
Trauma-Informed Teaching and Learning Online: We are all still working through the implications that have come with being in a global pandemic. This PDF gives some good ideas on how to show up for your students while also making sure you have space to take care of yourself.
Examples of Digital Syllabi: A very practical link that shows how different instructors design online syllabi. It’s helpful to see the amount of diversity in creating these courses because felt more confident in my own design and the ways that it diverges from others I’ve seen.
Instructor Checklist: Another practical link. Basically, it consists of many checklists that encompass all the teaching minutae that I haven't thought about yet but are still important (i.e. "managerial" and "technical" lists).

*I made the page on Notion, a note-taking app that I decided to get after watching many, many videos on digital note-taking apps in order to figure out what would best meet my needs.

Item(s) of note.

MoMA is on Coursera! Learn about modern & contemporary art through these free classes that are engaging and delightful.
The twitter account Ruth Wilson Gilmore Girls.