Teaching Developmental Math During COVID-19: A Reflection

The more and more I work in these times that we live in, I can’t have but think how apt and timely a term like “baptism by fire” truly is. I am currently in my third semester of teaching, the second at the community college I am employed at. The students I teach are either in the middle or end of the three-class remedial math sequence. I have come to greatly appreciate the variety of students that come through my classroom, whether they be recent high school graduates to returning students with numerous different life experiences.

Of course, then the Coronavirus happened. Welp.

So, I was faced with a problem. As part time faculty (on top of a full time national service gig at a local elementary school), time is incredibly limited. At the same time, however, my students signed up for an in-person class to get that in-person experience. On top of all of this, some of my students reached out to me voicing their concern about keeping the same time as our former in-person meetings due to uncertainties in their schedule caused by COVID-19.

An Asynchronous Solution

After a weekend of experimentation, I came up with a compromise between asynchronous lessons and flexible one-on-one help. Conceptually, this sounds good. My personal schedule is less routine, but the sum total of my hours spent working stays constant while students get the help they need. Some problems arise with how this information should be presented. While I love technology, students should not need to learn a whole new infrastructure on a class-by-class basis.

So, I turned to Youtube. I created lectures utilizing the free applications Open Broadcaster Software Studio (OBS) and Xournal++. These tools have been invaluable to recording lectures with minimal overhead. Again, efficiency while preserving student learning is a top priority for myself, and this has been vital to keeping myself on track and getting content distributed to my students quickly.

The strategy mentioned above has been moderately successful in conjuntion with the webapp Calendy. I set up one-on-one appointments where they navigate to a Zoom link in Canvas at a particular time. During these meetings, many of my students watched these lectures and referenced back to them as they worked through their homework, which was certainly encouraging!

Issues with this Design

The move to online learning was definitely far from smooth. Looking back, many of the issues in the course boiled down to the following:

• The lectures were way too long. I watched an excellent webinar later into the semester which focused on the importance of integrating microlectures (see here). I did not account for the effect of lowered attention spans in both an online environment on top of being in the midst of a global pandemic. Thankfully, my system in OBS can account for this given some planning beforehand. Recording and saving a screencast is just a click of a button, so my only modification needed would be to structure my lectures into smaller, thematic fragments.
• Youtube videos are not inherently accessible. While I found asynchronous lessons via Youtube to be a better option than keeping class the exact same, it is still not ideal. Students may not necessarily have the option to listen to a video with their learning environment, while others still aren’t able to Some options I have been debating involve transcripts of my lectures with $\LaTeX$ formatting and/or audio recordings. This is definitely still a work in progress. Again, time spent is a factor that I unfortunately have to consider as part-time faculty.
• Group communication was lacking. Prior to COVID-19, I implemented simple problem sets (group works) into my in-class time. After a brief introduction of the material, predetermined groups convene while I walk around and check their understanding. This was incredibly effective, in particular because the room I was in was filled to the brim with whiteboards. With the change to online came issues with anything requiring to be present at a certain time, and thus suddenly became unfeasible for many of my students. Attempts to create an asynchronous area via Canvas was not utilized. This issue is a particularly high priority to fix.
• Feedback was rarely viewed. To avoid the need for proctoring (which would lock out a significant portion of my students with unstable internet connections), I opted to give my students take-home exams. I gave out tutorials to utilize a phone or traditional scanner so that I can mark up their handwritten work. What I discovered during my later office hour sessions, however, is that my students didn’t usually check how they did after seeing their score! Not great.

During this unprecedented time, it has been widely accepted that online class implementations were going to be far from perfect. Overall, my students this semester have been engaged with the material even though some sacrifices were made. I was still able to provide feedback to their individual work that they can take into the following modules. There is still so much room for improvement.

Layout of Future Work

While I am lightening my teaching load for a semester due to beginning my graduate program in Computer Science, teaching online is something I want to continue in the future. For that, I want a more fully-formed structure in place.

1. Encourage the use of more handwritten assignments that require utilizing feedback for full points. The course I will be teaching utilizes online homework. This is great for my workload, but being unable to see student performance is a hindrance to measure how effectively my students are learning. To that end, I will be utilizing what I learned for my exams this semester to create quick, 1-3 question assignments in order to gauge their problem solving skills, ability to communicate their methods, and their interpretation of what they calculate. At the same time, I will have part of the points include student feedback either confirming that they have read my feedback, or ask a question that starts a conversation about their work. This runs a risk, however, of drastically increasing my workload. To assist with this…
2. Research alternative grading methods. By far the highest number of questions I got from students had to do with specific points that I took off of a problem. It’s understandable from the student side - uncertainty with their grade is stressful and sometimes does not appear to reflect reality. Conversations like these are not productive for either party, however, and I want to restructure my course in a way that makes it rare for these to happen. To accomplish this, I hope to switch to mastery-based grading. Of course, productivity is far from the best reason that I am making the switch. This could create a class structure that encourages students to not only look back at previous sections to connect mathematical ideas together in their minds, but to have a growth mindset as they progress through these ideas.
3. Open up communication for all students. I have been exploring options such as Canvas discussions and Campuswire that can allow for collaboration and communication between my students and myself. I have not made decisions as of yet, but a priority of mine is to not increase the cognitive load needed to complete my class. If my students can have one or two centralized places to do their work, that would be stellar.

We live in a strange time, but I hope that both myself and my students can get through better than we began.