Dear Colleagues,
I wanted to briefly follow up on Professor Holliday’s message (attached below) about reverting to teaching online between February 2-17th. This will include two sessions of CC Teaching, plus tutorial activity. Add/Drop has been extended to February 21, so this will add a small bit of unpredictability to the final class lists. Right now, we are planning on using Reading Week as an optional make-up period for activities and there is currently no plan to extend the semester into May. This all may change, of course, but fingers crossed.
Each of you knows your own teaching scenario far better than I do, but as we get started please be thinking with your teaching team about things like:
- Engaging with the students as thoroughly as possible as quickly as possible, given the circumstances. They are under unusual stress and need to feel like they are part of the class right off of the bat. (Is that a cricket or baseball term?);
- Clearly framing the expectations and conceptual-assessment contours of the course;
- Setting the tutorials in motion, again recognizing how difficult this can be in light of the lack of F2F contact;
- Perhaps a short initial assignment to get the students to immediately do some reading, viewing, writing? If so, please give them quick feedback (for the reasons stated above and for the fact that it’s good practice).
- As you think about the course of the semester, please give marked assessments on a regular basis from early to late. Last semester, some were caught up in the end of that experience without a sufficient number of grades to give the students a fair reading of the quality (and improvement) of their work over time.
- Remind them about the resources for plagiarism. I met with much larger number of students this time around and many of them, as first semester students, had never explicitly discussed plagiarism in their secondary schools and hadn’t yet had—or didn’t need to take—their CAES class. And, even now, a quick pointer toward resources wouldn’t hurt.
Take good notes and let’s see what we can learn from this. If you have creative and efficient suggestions for teaching and learning online, please send them my way and we will redistribute them. We are also planning to offer some workshops, in conjunction with CETL, as soon as we can do some predictable planning.
We are here to support you in any way that we can. Don’t forget the CC page for Teachers and Tutors at https://tl.hku.hk/staff/support-for-cc-teachers/ and the CC Tutor Net—coordinated by Nicol Pan—at https://ccohku.wixsite.com/cctutor. Please let me or the CC staff know if there is anything we can do to make things flow more smoothly for both you and the students.
All the best for a good start…
Cheers,
Gray
