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What I'm Reading This Week #12

I just turned in my final grades for Fall 2020 and I feel like I'm coming up for air for the first time since COVID changed everything in March 2020. As a record for myself as much as anything else, I'm going to begin this post by recapping what's happened since then. 

Students left Allegheny for Spring Break, which began on March 14, and didn't return to campus so, like everyone, I unexpectedly taught the last five or so weeks remotely after working through Spring Break to get ready. I chose to teach asynchronously during that time, creating a lot of videos and materials that I posted on Canvas for my students. It made sense to do this at the time because I felt that my students were in different places in terms of their understanding of the material that we had covered up to that point and I wanted to create different pathways that they could choose from to finish out the semester. I wonder now if working asynchronously was the best choice since we lost any connection we had as a class but, on the other hand, as an introvert who wasn't very comfortable with video meetings at the time, I'm not sure that I could have coped emotionally with pulling together synchronous meetings for my class. 

We switched to universal Credit/No Credit at Allegheny, with an option to opt out and take a letter grade, which meant that many of my students decided just to aim for a D in the course. One benefit of a mastery grading is that is provides clear pathways to each letter grade, so my students knew exactly what they needed to complete in order to pass the course. The downside was that this meant that many students didn't get as far into the material as I think they would have under normal circumstances. Perhaps this was necessary though, under the circumstances, since we were all pretty exhausted and overwhelmed. 

In the first half of the summer, I worked with a group of amazing IBL women (Rebecca Glover, Gulden Karakok, Elizabeth Thoren, and Nina White) to convert the traditional four day IBL workshop to a virtual three week minicourse, which we ran from June 16 to July 2, 2020. I then converted my Getting Started with Mastery Grading workshop into a virtual workshop for Project NExT and ran that on July 30 and 31, 2020. 

I was also finishing up my first year (of four) as chair of the Mathematics department at Allegheny College and at the start of July I began a one year term as chair of Allegheny College's Faculty Council. Both of these roles meant that I was involved with a lot of planning discussions as we prepared to bring students back in the fall. We restarted classes on August 31 and continued in-person through to November 20. The students then left campus and we closed out the semester with one week of remote classes, as planned, and remote finals last week. 

In the fall, I taught my courses synchronously. For one course, we met in person almost every time since it was a small class and we could fit in the room even with social distancing. In my other course, only half the course could fit in the room at any time so I taught hybrid classes, with some students in person and others on Zoom. We also had quite a few meetings with everyone on Zoom so that I could have my students work collaboratively in breakout rooms. 

Over the last nine months, I've been collecting various articles for my blog, but I haven't had time, until today, to pull out a collection of them for a post. I've been using a GTD (Getting Things Done) approach for about a year now and have been filing the articles in my Blog to-do list, which now contains 97 items. The list feels a little overwhelming right now, but I'm going to try to chip away at it by focusing on some themes. Here's the first one:

Building Community Online









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