Murph Kinney offers advice about teaching DE courses in each issue of The WORD. Contact Murph with feedback or questions!(photo courtesy of Murph Kinney)

So... another semester about to be in the books! And next semester promises a return to greater “normality,” whatever that may look like in these distinctly odd times. I hope your semester has gone as well as it could and that you’ll have time to spend with family and friends before returning to the classroom, whether that is online, on campus or both.

If you’re like me, winter break is a time for tweaking classes, not wholesale renovation, which I save for summer months. With that in mind, I’ve got a round up of resources that have been selected to potentially improve components of your online offerings—whether a fully asynchronous course or a web-enabled on-campus class.

In my asynchronous classes, the heart of the course has always been the discussion board. Over the years, my discussion boards have gotten much better—several open-ended questions for each board, which allows for student choice in answering, clear guidelines for initial posts and for students’ responses to their classmates and multiple curated sources for students to use as evidence when crafting their post. But yet, as the semester unfolds, I almost always see issues develop with my questions and expectations. And so, I’m continually on the lookout for new ideas on improving discussion in my asynchronous courses (and my on-campus classes, to be honest, but those are easier to change on the fly during the semester). As I was eying my bookshelf a few weeks ago, I was drawn to a work I’d read several years ago—Facilitating Seven Ways of Learning: A Resource for More Purposeful, Effective, and Enjoyable College Teaching by James R. Davis and Bridget D. Areno (Stylus Publishing, 2013).

Although the entire book is superb, the sixth chapter, “Developing Critical, Creative, and Dialogical Thinking: Learning Through Inquiry,” is most useful in framing what many of us try to do on our discussion boards, using question-driven inquiry. This chapter helped me think about the difference between critical thinking (focusing on judgment or evaluating reasons to support a conclusion), creative thinking (thinking guided by a desire to seek the original), and dialogical thinking (appreciating and being able to evaluate different points of view at the same time).

Most importantly, the chapter showed the constitutive elements of all three of these modes of thinking, allowing me to see how I could reframe some of my discussion board assignments to function more specifically on these particular modes of thought, and enhancing my students’ skills in each of these, with just a bit of tweaking in how the assignments are introduced. The chapter also offers useful methods of providing feedback to students. The chapter provides theoretical background for each of the forms of thinking, so there’s some scholarly heft to the reading, but it can be easily jettisoned if you’re most interested in practicalities of crafting solid and more diverse discussion board entries.

Focusing more on form than function, Ashlee Espinosa’s YouTube series, “Helping Educators Navigate Online Teaching,” is a terrific resource, particularly—though not exclusively—for those of us teaching combined online or real time online courses. Espinosa is a musical theater educator in the California higher education system, and she has released a number of useful videos about online teaching in the past two years. Each video of hers I’ve watched has been a masterclass on its own about engaging with your audience and providing a personable and approachable online presence.

Most useful to me in terms of my combined online courses was her video on “Ten Tips for Teaching Online and Using Zoom,” a fourteen-minute overview of the best ways to set up laptop and camera angles, maintaining good energy and mental preparation for engaging with students online in real time. And in terms of my asynchronous classes, in which I do sometimes record lectures, Espinosa’s “How to Record Video Lectures Without Feeling Nervous” is superb. In under ten minutes, she addresses what to include in videos, how to keep it short and personable and how to work with the technology to simplify the filming. And, I might add, in this world of uncertainty, each of her videos are calming and reassuring, which I’ve really appreciated. I’d suggest checking out more of her material as well—she has playlists titled Online Teaching: Set Up and Equipment; Online Teaching: Tips and Techniques; and Productivity Tips for Online Educators. Each playlist has at least a dozen videos.

We move from the sublime to the maddening to end this issue’s column. Like many of you, I’ve noticed a substantial increase in plagiarism since we pivoted in March 2020. It has become a plague—no matter how much I attempt to create “plagiarism-proof assignments,” some students turn in plagiarized work. Although there are a myriad of ways students plagiarize and cheat, there is one website in particular which makes it easy for students to find your old assignments online and to turn them in as their own: Course Hero. Course Hero uses a subscription-based model for students to upload and download “course-specific study guides.” Navigating to the website will bring up a search box for students (or you) to search for material for a specific course. For instance on the day I am writing this (December 8, 2021), there are 291 documents on that site for SCCC’s ENG101 classes, and 26 questions asked by students with answers by verified experts. Those documents are from dates that range from 2008 through Fall 2021. (For SCCC overall, there are 12,988 uploaded documents and 2,286 answered questions.)

While this situation is maddening—at least to me—there is action you can take. You can navigate to the site and see what, if any, resources have been uploaded from your courses. And if you find such resources there, you may be able to assert copyright privileges and ask that they be taken down. The Course Hero copyright page provides a way to assert those privileges. For instance, a few weeks ago, I looked at the site and found several of my HIS101 class preparation assignments uploaded. Those assignments had questions that I had prepared, so I owned the copyright to those questions. Within 48 hours of my filling out the form on Course Hero, those uploaded assignments had been pulled from the site. I am now making a practice of looking for material on that site at the start of each semester, and I’m increasingly mindful of changing my assignments, at least in part, more frequently to thwart these sorts of sites which enable cheating and plagiarism.

Looking forward to a fuller return to campus in the spring! In the meantime, I hope each of you has a good break. And I’d be grateful for feedback and suggestions at murphk@fascc.org.