Loren Terveen

I'm teaching Online Communities this fall which is an easy class for me so brainstorming radical redesign is fun, but this is not scalable for folks teaching multiple classes, new preps, difficult classes to move online, etc. I hope we take a community-oriented approach to this.

I'd love to hear more ideas about this, because I haven't heard any good ideas about planning a class that can be delivered in multiple different ways, with the ability to switch on a dime, while (a) maintaining educational quality, and (b) not being crazy work for faculty.

My fall class will be 25-45 students, relatively small. I'm hoping the education/learning experts will guide us, but until then: I'm thinking do away with deadlines? Those seem incompatible with a pandemic. I would grade regularly and reach out to students who are far behind.

I go back-and-forth on this. I've wanted to switch CS 1 to have less (no?) deadlines for ages. One point from a colleague who pushed back that I think about a lot: deadlines provide important structure for students who are overwhelmed by college (often 1st gen, underrepresented)

It's a great point. My thought was periodic grading and identifying those who are falling behind might help catch that? But maybe there are other ways to support them without reinstating deadlines? Have you been able to think of any?

I don't know. Maybe light incentives? We've added checkpoint turn-ins to projects (5-8% of proj grade) that simply mean you completed up to a certain point by a certain date. We only grade functionality of part 1 at the full submission point, so they can go back and fix.

We'll stop marking down for being late, we'll just give some bonus points for being early. :)

Yeah. The flip side of every point incentive is that it's a penalty if you don't hit it. I wish I could just kill them, but I've heard from a lot of students this semester that they lost motivation with flexibility... and now have awful work clusters now