A sample email* that can be edited to your preferences:

 “Our class will meet online through the Zoom. We will adopt the same rules and norms as in a physical classroom (take notes; participate by asking and answering questions; wear classroom-ready clothing). For everyone’s benefit, join the course in a quiet place. Turn on your video. Mute your microphone unless you are speaking. You may want to test your microphone and web camera prior to class and make sure that your video background is appropriate. Consider closing browser tabs not required for the course to minimize distractions. This form of learning will be somewhat new to all of us, and success will depend on the same commitment we all bring to the physical classroom.”

*Adapted from Harvard University’s Best Practices for Online Pedagogy

Creating a class outline that signals to your instructional team and to your students what technology, tools, or platforms they will be expected to use as part of class is also a good practice. This helps signpost to students what is coming up, and transparency about technology use gives them an opportunity to prepare so that they are ready to engage once the activities begin. 

If you have an instructional team (e.g. co-instructors or TAs), determine the roles that you will play during class. Two such roles include the instructor who leads the class (providing the main voice and being the person on camera throughout the learning experience) and the instructor who supports the lead instructor (helping to answer questions on chat, to set up any online tools (e.g., breakout rooms, polls), and to assist with troubleshooting if students have any problems). 

If you use breakout rooms, the supporting instructor or TAs can also help facilitate small group discussion. Making these roles clear to students is helpful so that they can engage the appropriate person if they need help.

Students can set up their headsets, camera and microphones and to ensure that they are working properly.

Let students know who is allowed to and/or responsible for the shared content.

Consider requiring students to turn on video as part of their participation in the online course to encourage enhanced presence and engagement in the class. Students may also feel more attentive knowing they are visible on Zoom.

Remind students to be sure that their background is appropriate while sharing video, along with how their image is displayed to the rest of the class.

Explain how you want students to request an opportunity to speak. For example, raise hands or submit a question via chat box.

It may be more difficult to read students’ body language over Zoom and students may inadvertently speak at the same. Students less inclined to participate in class may also have more difficulty speaking in online discussions. Consider diligently pausing and asking if anyone else has more thoughts before jumping to the next topic.

Set ground rules for use of text chat. Discourage "side conversations" that will distract students from the ongoing conversation. Explain what is and isn't appropriate for them to post.

Schedule meetings with students that you would normally meet face-to-face with by using a Zoom meeting.

Open a Zoom session for student led discussion or instructor led review, and allow students to enter as necessary.

IMATS's website has updated information on zoom tutorials and information on online learning. 

An active learning strategy is any task that encourages students (1) to do something with the concepts, tools, and ideas that make up the content of a course and (2) to reflect on that process of doing. Rather than suppose that students are simply recipients of knowledge that the teacher holds and shares, active learning emphasizes the processes of discovery, collaboration, application, and reflection. In an in-person or HyFlex classroom, these strategies can prove particularly helpful not only in keeping students engaged and feeling like part of a community, but also in providing instructors with important information about how students are learning.

General Suggestions

• Incorporate strategies that align with your learning objectives.
• Split students into small groups to encourage collaboration and build community.
• Allow for multiple forms of interaction with course material.
• Prepare simple, clear instructions for both in-person and HyFlex students. 
• Determine whether activities can be completed in one class or stretched over several.
• Provide time and space for students to reflect on the activity.
• Develop feedback mechanisms that students can use to share what they learned.

Having students periodically collaborate in an application like Google Docs to brainstorm or take notes on a presentation can be an excellent way of increasing the accessibility of your class and encouraging students to critically reflect on how they are organizing and representing information. It also can be used as a community-building strategy in HyFlex formats.

In HyFlex formats, Zoom’s chat feature can be used in a number of ways to encourage students to engage differently with the course content and each other. For example, you may use the chat to have one group of students pose a question and another group answer it. Or, you may ask students to use the chat to share important, compelling, or confusing quotes that they want to discuss in more detail. Professors should still consider offering accessible text based communication methods within an in-person class to encourage various forms of participation, such as a Canvas discussion board, Slack channel, or email.

At the end of class, asking your students to fill out an “exit ticket” before they leave the classroom can be a way of gathering information about what your students have learned and what they are still trying to understand. For the instructor, the information collected in these tickets can help direct your course prep by helping you identify the topics your students are still trying to grasp (or alternatively, have apparently grasped quite well, thus allowing you to move forward with other parts of the class). It also gives students the opportunity to concretely identify the important takeaways and to name in detail the questions they are still facing. Google Forms and Canvas Quizzes provide an easy way to make and distribute Exit Tickets to both in-person and HyFlex students.

Give students keyword(s) and prompt them to jot down related terms for 2-3 mins. Then, ask students to share and explain their lists and to draw connections between lists or to revise and expand their own based on the conversation.

Develop a prompt that students can reasonably respond to in written form within a short span of time. For example, you may ask students to spend three minutes writing about the most important, surprising, or challenging thing they feel they learned in class that day. Or, you may ask students to use five minutes to identify a claim in a course text that they find intriguing and to meditate on how they might transport that claim to a new context. While this activity can be incorporated into class meetings, it also can be combined with a periodic journaling assignment that encourages students to track what and how they are learning over time (see below).

Give students a prompt, a series of statements, or other material that contains errors or misinterpretations of the material you have been covering in your class. Students then can work individually or in small groups to find and correct these errors. This strategy might be incorporated with a think-pair-share or small group activity (in which case, you may want to give your students time to present their findings to the class) or it might constitute an assignment of its own.

In a jigsaw discussion, students participate in two rounds of small group activities. Divide students into an even number of small groups, with one student appointed as a leader of their group. In the first round (“focus groups”), each group of students is given a different “piece” of a larger topic to study or discuss, with the task of producing notes or a brief presentation on what they have learned. All of the group members take time to study their own segment before being placed into a new round. In the second round (“task groups”), in which each new group has a representative from each of the first round groups, the students present to each other the work that they completed in the first round of discussion. Jigsaw discussions help show students the variety of ways that knowledge is constructed and can facilitate interaction between in-person and HyFlex students.

Inviting students to reflect on the course content or a particularly complex question over the course of an extended period of time can be an effective way of encouraging students to reflect not just on what but how they are learning. A consistent, low stakes journaling project that is periodically turned in for feedback or combined with think-pair-share activities allows students to develop and accumulate analytical skills at a pace the students set for themselves.

Ask students to write down one word that they feel they would have to use in order to explain what you are covering in class to someone who has not engaged with that topic. After they’ve written down their word, have them post that word to a board or other surface and invite them to look over the list as a group. (In a classroom, you may have students write these on post-it notes, but you can adapt this exercise for HyFlex classes by using an application like Jamboard.) Then, invite one student to explain why they wrote down the word that they did and to move that word to a new area of the surface. From that point, other students volunteer to place their word in relation to the first one (perhaps extending from it or developing a new branch), until a visual and textual representation of the topic in question has been produced.

Assign a small group of students to a panel-style discussion about a reading or course relevant topic that will take place on a particular day in class or by a particular time on a discussion board. Circulate a couple brief questions in advance to just these students and ask them to prepare their own answers and to be ready to engage in conversation with their co-panelists. Observers of the panel should listen carefully, take notes on what they feel made an effective answer in the panel, and answer the question themselves as the panel transitions into a broader discussion.

Polls are a quick, simple strategy that can be carried out in real time in order to get a sense of what your students are understanding or thinking about as they engage with the course content. From the student’s perspective, anonymous polls can also lower the pressure they may feel when asked a question or asked to provide an interpretation. Zoom allows you to set up polls in advance of meetings and deliver polls during class, which may be helpful in HyFlex formats. Google Forms is also a useful option for both in-person and HyFlex classes. Before developing poll questions, consider what kinds of information you want from your students, how you can best get that information, and how you will incorporate that information into the class.

Prompt students to find material that relates to the readings or discussions for a week and to reflect with each other on the connections between what they are learning and what they have found. For example, students might be put in groups, each of which is assigned to find and draw connections between course content and the following items: a news article; a podcast; a meme; a reading from another class; and a movie scene. Any items collected in this scavenger hunt might be reflected back to the students in a shareable document or section of the course site.

Whether you are teaching a seminar or a mid- to large-size lecture, putting students in small groups where they will work through a problem, consider a case study, do a close reading of a text, connect ideas to personal experiences, identify tensions in an argument, or any other number of activities, can be a valuable way of building community and introducing opportunities for students to apply the key practices and concepts of your course. In HyFlex formats, you can utilize Zoom’s breakout room feature in order to put students in small groups. Make sure you leave time for groups to share their findings with each other.

Provide the students with a jumbled list of items and ask them to put them in order. (In a classroom, you might do this with strips of paper, but in a HyFlex classroom you may use an application like Jamboard to carry out this exercise.) These items might be historical events or steps in a physical, environmental, or chemical process.

Students often report that some of the most valuable insights come from their peers. Short presentations can be an effective way of encouraging students to gather, produce, and communicate knowledge, and also gives the instructor an opportunity to assess how students are engaging with central concepts and arguments from the course. Students may be asked to guide discussion of a course text or may be invited to develop and deliver original research on a key topic. Tools like Google Slides and Screen Sharing can make both collaborations on presentations and the presentations themselves easy to include in class time, especially in HyFlex formats.

If your class incorporates a significant amount of discussion, a think-pair-share activity can be an effective way of giving students time to engage with a complex topic and can encourage participation from students who may feel that the pace of a class discussion moves faster than they would prefer. In this format, the instructor poses a question, problem, or scenario that the students engage with over the course of three steps: (1) thinking through what has been posed individually; (2) pairing with a colleague to discuss their ideas; and (3) sharing their key findings with the class as a whole. When incorporating this strategy into in-person class meetings, it is important to include time to explain the activity and leave students with adequate time to move through the steps. For HyFlex students, consider modifying this strategy for a discussion board (i.e., students may be assigned to small groups to share and respond to one another by a certain date).

• State your expectations and/or evaluation criteria beforehand. You might choose to communicate these expectations by developing a rubric for each assignment.
• Grade student work according to the assignment goals and set standards.

• Giving students feedback earlier rather than later in the term allows them to identify areas of improvement and make use of feedback as the course progresses. Receiving feedback early on can also be motivating for students and help them understand the learning objectives of the course.
• Implementing low-stakes assessments can be useful for gauging student understanding and providing opportunities for feedback before a substantial assignment. 

• When providing feedback, prioritize from first to lower order concerns, as you may not be able to address all aspects of student work.
• Consider which aspects of the assignment are most important and weigh your time and feedback accordingly. For example, when grading an essay, you might choose to spend more time on the argument or analysis in the paper and less on grammar or typos.

• In your feedback, provide concrete specifics that help students understand what they should change or improve for future work. Consider how students will be able to apply your feedback as they progress in the course.

• Refresh your memory if you are responding to student work over several days. Review your comments from previous grading each time you start.
• Set a rough time limit for reading and responding to student work and stick to it. Don’t attempt to grade multiple assignments in one sitting without scheduled breaks. Take a break if you start to feel cranky, tired, or restless.

• Highlight strengths in addition to addressing weaknesses in student work
• Evaluate the work instead of the student as a person. Help students separate a critique of their work from a critique of their person. 
• Avoid connecting praise with criticism: “good idea, but…”