Instruction Modes

In-Person courses, also known as immersion, on-ground, or by the name of a specific campus (Tempe, for example), refers to taking a course in a physical classroom.  This also includes Hybrid classes.  For the Fall 2020, In-Person courses will work in conjunction with ASU Sync, a system that allows students to participate via Zoom in accordance with their instructor’s directions and will be designated as ASU Sync/In-Person.  ASU Sync refers to attending and/or teaching classes via Zoom.

  • ASU Sync/In-Person (and Hybrid) involves the use of Zoom to allow a class to meet both in-person and via Zoom at the same time.  Instructors who have been approved to teach remotely will still have students in the classroom and therefore will still be using this mode.
     
  • ASU Sync Only allows an entire class to meet solely via Zoom.  Your course is not "ASU Sync Only" unless  "ASUSYNC" is part of the location listed for your class.  e.g. Tempe-ASUSYNCT.   Any course with an enrollment cap of more than 100 students is automatically designated as "ASU Sync Only".
     
  • Online courses are referred to as iCourses and oCourses. These courses are conducted completely through an online platform like Canvas. Courses must have already been approved as iCourses or oCourses.  In-Person and Hybrid courses cannot be changed to online courses unless appropriate approvals have been given.
     
  • In-Person Only courses, also known as Immersion Only, on-ground, or by the name of a specific campus (Tempe, for example), refers to taking a course in a physical classroom.

The ASU Sync/In-Person mode is for courses that are currently scheduled as in-person or hybrid courses. In general, the instructor will make a decision as to which half of the class will attend the physical classroom on which days and how often. This pattern of attendance will be made explicit via the syllabus, Canvas, and course announcements to students.  All learning activities and assignments will be developed in such a way that the physically attending students will be able to engage with those students attending remotely through Zoom.
 

Positive Aspects

  • Students will be able to see each other in-person, which could lead to bonding before and after courses.
  • For some courses, the ability to view body language might help foster the learning of certain concepts.
  • Instructors will be able to move around to observe learning and make real-time decisions based on knowledge gaps or misconceptions.
  • Can utilize in-person students (Zoom Ambassadors) to partner with remote students to foster engagement and manage learning challenges. 

 
Challenging Aspects

  • Instructors will need to help students maintain social distancing strategies by keeping at 6 ft distances and wearing masks or face shields. 
    • Language learning depends on communicative activities often using grouping techniques.
    • Depending on the room size, acoustics, and a number of laptops with microphones, the sound could get chaotic.
    • Face shields will make it easier for language learning students to practice conversations, but some may worry that face shields are not as safe as masks.
    • Note, that there may be face masks available for purchase with a clear section over the mouth, which may work better for language courses.
       
  • A certain number of students will choose to participate completely through Zoom, so instructors will have to determine a system for monitoring both the in-person students and remote students--which will take some planning.


Basic Model Assumptions and Strategies

All of your activities will be developed with the idea that you will have to simultaneously engage both students in the in-person classroom and students in the online Zoom space. With some basic classroom management procedures in place, this is completely doable.


Determine Your Schedule of Teaching

Provide students with an overview of how your course will be taught. Include that same ASU Sync language on your syllabus and on your Canvas Homepage. You have many options as to how this might work. ASU has mandated that our classrooms cannot have more than 50% capacity.  Here are some possible scenarios.

  • Alternating Days: Split your students in half (Group A Students A-M, Group B Students N-Z). Then assign Group A to attend in-person on Mondays and Group B to attend in-person on Wednesdays. [Note: You will have some students who plan to attend completely by Zoom, but that should become apparent when you contact them.] Have all students meet in Zoom on Fridays (or on Mondays depending on what type of learning activities you plan to include on those days).

  • Smaller Courses: If you know you are located in a larger classroom (a capacity of 60 for 28 students, for instance), you can choose to have the whole course attend in-person, but you will still have some students who choose to attend only via Zoom, so you will still have to engage with them. You could also choose to have one day a week for more traditional interaction with lecture, review, quizzes, large group discussion, etc. and the other days be for smaller group dialogue through Zoom.

  • Unsure of What Schedule to Use: Have a conversation with colleagues in your section to see what type of schedule they are planning to use.  Reach out to the SILC Instructional Support team (silcis@asu.edu) for suggestions.


Contact Students

Before classes begin, email your students. Consider attaching a Google Form.  What kind of information from your students might better help you prepare for courses and help students feel more comfortable about taking your course? This is your moment to take control of how your course will be conducted. We do NOT recommend that you ask students what their attendance preferences areas this allows them to take control of the course.


Take Regular Attendance

Because students will be participating in your course through a variety of modes, taking attendance is going to be more important than ever. The quickest method is to make the students accountable for their own attendance. Create a Google Form that grabs students’ email addresses, includes fields for the last and first names, and asks them how they participated in class on that day. Consider including an open-ended question that asks them to share any attendance concerns they may have, or a message to email you directly if they have any attendance concerns. Then on your Canvas Homepage include a section providing information on ASU Sync and a link to your attendance form.  Each day at the beginning of class have an introduction slide up asking students to access the Canvas Homepage and submit their attendance. Students can try to sign in for another student, but if the form is set to grab their email address, you will be able to see that the email and student name do not match.

Canvas has an attendance tool called Canvas Roll Call Attendance; Link1 and Link2.  Note, that you will need to enable the tool, in Settings, before using it. 

Sample Attendance Form (To make your own copy:  Go into the form, then find the three vertical dots in the upper right-hand corner, click on Make a Copy, and now you can make changes as needed).

There is a way to run a report from within Zoom to determine which students participated that day.  You would need to have all of your students (even the in-person students) log into Zoom in order for them to be embedded in the report and there are a few steps to follow to access the report (see the UTO Zoom Attendance Report video). However, we believe that the Canvas attendance tool or the Google Form will be a bit easier to track over time for attendance.


Set Clear Classroom Procedures

Plan to always arrive to class a bit early to ensure that all of your equipment is up and running. Create a list of students who have agreed to be Zoom Ambassadors.  Create a Zoom Ambassador Expectations document and email that document to each of the students.  Have them agree to abide by those expectations.  Alternatively, the expectations can be embedded as a Canvas quiz that has one question in which they can choose to abide by the expectations (agree or disagree).  This can be a zero point quiz that you later add a score to to give the students the extra credit for being an ambassador.  See the sample Ambassador Expectations document (go to File and click on Make a copy to create, revise, adapt to your own needs).

See the UTO Best Practices for Zoom Classroom Management document for a list of suggested ways to provide effective management when working with Zoom.

Note, that this instruction mode requires prior approval, except when the cap for a class is over 100 students.  In this case, the class will automatically be made ASU Sync Only.  For this mode, all students in the course, including the instructor, will participate only via Zoom.

If you will be teaching only through Zoom, you will need to be more thoughtful in making all of your assignments and expectations explicit through Canvas.  You will also want to consider a variety of Zoom strategies. Whatever approach you take, the learning outcomes should be the same.  Courses where communication and collaboration are key will need to continue to exhibit this in the online environment through break-out rooms, video messaging/discussion boards and the use of third-party software.  Consider reaching out to the SILC Instructional Support team (silcis@asu.edu) to set up a discussion to support your course needs.

Our first recommendation is to have a conversation with your colleagues who taught similar courses last spring and review the challenges that they experienced at that time. 

Positive Aspects

  • Students will not have to worry about masks or social distancing.
  • Instructors will not have to monitor and engage with two instructional spaces.
  • Small group discussions through breakout rooms are easy to activate.
  • Most instructors used this model in Spring 2020, so it is familiar and they may have already devised solutions for certain challenges. 

Challenging Aspects

  • Students will not be able to talk to each other before or after class, which limits class bonding and community building.
  • Body language is more difficult to interpret.
  • There may be technology challenges (e.g. Your mic is muted).
  • Students are more likely to be distracted (TV, other people, pets, music, internet).
  • Students like to find ways to sabotage Zoom.
  • Instructors can’t monitor discussions in breakout rooms unless they are in a specific breakout room.
  • Breakout room discussions can’t be recorded.
  • It is difficult to monitor student engagement in larger classes, without a helper.

Basic Model Assumptions and Strategies

All of your activities will be developed with the idea that you need to be thoughtful in your planning. You have to have planned out, set up, tested, and created backup plans for technical failure for every lesson and activity well before each class begins. 


Determine Your Schedule of Teaching

Consider developing a plan for what types of activities will be held on which days of your course. Though each day will be taught through Zoom, you still may want to think about which day of the week students will participate in certain activities compared to other activities. The more consistent the expectations, the more likely students will be to accomplish the tasks.


Contact Students

Before classes begin, email your students. Make it clear to them that the whole course will be taught via Zoom. Consider attaching a Google Form.  What kind of information from your students might better help you prepare for courses and help students feel more comfortable about taking your course? 

Take Regular Attendance

There is a way to run a report from within Zoom to determine which students participated in your course (see the UTO Zoom Attendance Report video).

An alternate method would be to include a Google Attendance form in your Canvas course. Consider including an open-ended question that asks students to share any attendance concerns they may have, or a message to email you directly if they have any attendance concerns. Then on your Canvas Homepage include a section providing information on ASU Sync and a link to your attendance form.  Each day at the beginning of your Zoom class have an introduction slide up asking students to access the Canvas Homepage and submit their attendance. Students can try to sign in for another student, but if the form is set to grab their email address, you will be able to see that the email and student name do not match.

Sample Attendance Form (To make a copy:  Go into the document, then find the three vertical dots in the upper right-hand corner, click on Make a Copy, and now you can make changes as needed).

Canvas also has an attendance tool called Canvas Roll Call Attendance; Link1 and Link2.  Note, that you will need to enable the tool, in Settings, before using it.

Set Clear Classroom Procedures

Ensure that you have added language to your syllabus that discusses classroom behavior in a virtual meeting space. See the UTO Best Practices for Zoom Classroom Management document for a list of suggested ways to provide effective management when working with Zoom.

The Online Only mode is used for on-campus iCourses and ASU Online oCourses, and it requires that the course has already gone through all of the necessary approvals and paperwork. Courses that have been designated as ASU Sync/In-Person (or hybrid) cannot suddenly be made into fully online courses. Primarily the reason for this is that online courses are typically asynchronous and self-paced meaning that all of the instructions and activities must be developed in such a way that will help scaffold student learning toward successful learning outcomes.  This type of development typically takes around six months to effectively complete. If you are interested in developing a proposal to designate your course as either an iCourse/oCourse, please contact Kristin Elwood (k.elwood@asu.edu), who can discuss the process with you.

Positive Aspects

  • Students will not have to worry about masks or social distancing.
  • Instructors will not have to monitor and engage with more than one instructional space.
  • Online courses can be developed to meet a wider variety of learning needs.
  • Learning outcomes in the online space can be as rich and rigorous as in the in-person space, if the course is developed thoughtfully.
  • Issues like COVID do not really affect how your course is run, except you may be asked to increase your enrollment caps.

Challenging Aspects

  • Students will come from a variety of timezones, making synchronous meetings difficult (not impossible, they would just require more planning and explicit built-in instruction).
  • There may be technology challenges (e.g. not all students are familiar with or confident using the applications developed for the course).
  • Instructor presence must be thoughtfully embedded throughout the course.
  • Student engagement through community building must be thoughtfully embedded throughout the course.
  • It takes time to effectively develop a fully online course (e.g. approximately 6 months).

Basic Model Assumptions and Strategies

As long as you have thoughtfully designed your course to include instructor presence, build student connections and engagement, and include strategies for large course enrollment, your course should be able to move forward with very little revision. 

Determine Your Schedule of Assignments

Even though you may not need to change much in your courses, you should still consider the global situation beyond your course. Many students are out of work or now have odd work schedules.  Many may have to work from home while simultaneously trying to care for children, elderly, or sick family members. Review your course schedule.  Is there any place that you might be able to embed some additional flexibility for due dates?  Look over your Canvas assignments.  Assignments always have three date fields, the due date, the available date, and the until date.  Think most specifically about the “until” date, which is the date when Canvas will no longer allow students to submit their assignments. Consider leaving this date blank or a week cushion.  Students will only see the official due date, and when they submit, Canvas will mark it late so you can still take off penalty points based on your “late assignments policy.” If however, a student is having technical difficulties and/or some kind of family crisis--Canvas will still allow them to turn in the assignment.  This will save you a lot of effort in the long run.

Contact Students

Before classes begin, email your students. Make it clear to them that you are a real person who is there to support their learning throughout this semester. Consider attaching a Google Form.  What kind of information from your students might better help you prepare for courses and help students feel more comfortable about taking your course? 

Attendance

An online course does not require attendance in the traditional sense because the class does not typically meet synchronously.  However, if your course does require synchronous meetings, then ensure that you track attendance for them.  Also, note that synchronous meetings can be difficult for students due to a variety of reasons. Make sure that you provide a way for students to self-select a meeting time.  Some ways of doing this would be to . . .

  • Embed a link to a Google Doc with a table listing a few different time slots that students can add their names to.  Include an instruction that if none of those time slots work the student should contact you directly so you can figure something out.

  • Create self-assigning Canvas groups that you name by different day/times.

  • Use a Google form or something like Doodle to determine which days of the week and time periods your students would prefer for a synchronous meeting.  Then group students with like preferences together. 

Once you have your synchronous meetings, for small groups you can probably just manually track their attendance, but for larger groups, there is a way to run a report from within Zoom to determine which students participated in your course (see the UTO Zoom Attendance Report video).

Set Clear Classroom Procedures

If your online course does have a synchronous meeting element, you will need to ensure that you have added language to your syllabus that discusses classroom behavior in a virtual meeting space. See the UTO Best Practices for Zoom Classroom Management document for a list of suggested ways to provide effective management when working with Zoom. You should also include a general description of netiquette as it pertains to discussion forums and peer review posts

In-Person Only courses, also known as Immersion Only, on-ground, or by the name of a specific campus (Tempe, for example), refer to taking a course in a physical classroom.  For Fall 2020, SILC will not have any officially designated "In-Person only" classes.   But, classes that have enrollment under 50% of their classroom capacity and that have all students choosing to participate in person, may be able to conduct their class as In-Person Only.  Note, that students will have the ability to choose to attend class via Zoom (ASU Sync), at any time during the semester.