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.