Moving a large face-to-face life science course online
In March 2020, our face-to-face class of 170 students transitioned to
online teaching as our campus was shutdown. We were fortunate that we
had a fully developed online course already available to us. We cloned
the online course that we had developed in our Course Management System
(Canvas) and enrolled all face-to-face students in this new online
Canvas site. We recorded instructional videos for the students about how
to navigate the online course and held several Canvas Conference online
meetings for the students to ask the instructors questions. On this new
online platform the students continued to work on assignments both
individually and with their teams (team members remained the same as in
the face-to-face course). Instructors that were originally scheduled to
lecture in the face-to-face course held online question and answer
sessions twice a week to help students with content. Our discussion
sections were now asynchronous assignments, so our 7 graduate teaching
assistants and our 5 undergraduate teaching assistants were able to
offer nearly 40 hours a week of online office hours. Largely because we
had an online course already developed our students did much better than
we expected. We originally thought that many would drop the course or
fail. Only 2 students dropped after we transitioned online, all students
passed, and 2 students took incompletes.