Today was the first day of cancelled classes so we can prepare for going into remote learning.
In the morning I caught up on some of Zoom’s features using our ITDL training from earlier this month, and then I set up two groupme chat groups for two classes to ensure there is an informal space to ask questions, to goof around with photos – it didn’t take them long!
A lot of the afternoon was spent on campus brainstorming ideas for assignments, teaching with Zoom, asynchronous teaching etc. I hope many of you also have access to good resources like we do here.
I also wanted to set up a way to send a regular, even daily, little something to reach out to students, but I don’t want it to take up a lot of time for me to create, or create more clicks for my students to find. A brief video, a funny picture, a tip for time management,…
I had already set up “email alerts” on my three course websites with the “Subscribe2” plugin, and simply asked students to subscribe before they left campus. We have used the course websites instead of Canvas all semester, and while I will use some functions in Canvas, I don’t intend to switch suddenly to a different mode of delivery entirely: the course websites will remain the home and starting point of the courses, with links redirecting students to Canvas. There will be enough change already to digest, but the sites are familiar. They will also work if 2-factor authentication fails because a student broke their phone, for instance.
I asked @floatingtim from our phenomenal Digital Learning team how I can create one blog post, and have it pushed through to other sites. He pointed me in the direction of the Feedwordpress plugin for WordPress. I set up a category for daily briefings, and then grabbed the feed (http://tdh.bergbuilds.domains/category/dailybriefing/feed/) and put that in the plugin on each of my course websites.
On the course websites I had already installed List Category Posts, to have posts from a specific category show up on a specific page (e.g. announcements, in the news,…). All I needed to do was replace “announcements” in the short code with the new category name:
[catlist name=daily-briefings-for-courses date=yes excerpt=yes](Yes, that slug is a bit different from the slug here; it’s the name of the category on this website, not the slug. I don’t know why, but it showed up as category slug on the course websites, so that’s what I grabbed.)
I’m going to try it out tomorrow. You can follow along on the blog here with (hopefully) daily posts of little something to my students. One of the students remarked that it would be difficult for our course to make the switch because we rely so heavily on direct personal contact and small group work. I’m about to find out if my reassurances are true, that we can capture some of this in remote learning. I also hope I can blog my way through the covid19 crisis with what it looks like to transition to remote learning, when my class is strongly built on the group meeting in person, and above all, I hope some of you may find this useful: because you learn something new, because you realize you’re not alone, because you will see me make mistakes and know that it is ok not to be perfect.
And now for some self-care: my favourite Belgian beer (Orval), and some Beethoven from Berlin. (The Digital Concert Hall is free until the end of the month. What are you waiting for?)
