Course Development

Local Archival Resources

As you frame your course, keep in mind that students will need to have access to local, or otherwise accessible, archival resources for their research. Consult with your home campus’ archivist to discuss the nature and location of sources needed to accomplish your goals for the course.

Topic Appeal

We have already addressed the importance of your course topic’s appeal to students, but also be mindful that the final product should be designed to appeal to the general public. We want to make sure that our students’ labors bear fruit and draw a large audience! Build time into the syllabus to discuss this issue with your students.

Creating Space & Letting Go

Create time and space for students to conduct research and build sites. We’ve discussed “letting go” above, but it bears repeating that it is important to carve out time and space in your syllabus to allow students to conduct research and build their websites. Both of these tasks are time-consuming. Frame your course so that you are dealing with most of the reading and discussion about theory, methodology, and content in the first third of the semester. Then, after the first 4-5 weeks, most of the class meetings should involve updates on work and other practical or housekeeping matters—and class meetings should be reduced to once a week, rather than twice.

This section of the COPLACDigital Handbook covers the syllabus and logistics of your course. A template for course policies is located in Appendix B. Examples of syllabi are located here: Century America syllabus; Voices of Industrial America syllabus.

Office Hours & Staying in Touch

Just as with any other class, you will need to set aside office hours for your COPLACDigital students and announce these office hours in your syllabus. How you do this is up to you:

1. You can schedule office hour sessions with Distance Learning Services, log in, and wait for students to log on for a talk (Ellen tried this and only one time did a student take advantage of these hours).
2. Or, you can give students your office hours and invite them to use the telephone, Skype, or Google Hangouts to contact you. In our experience, this method worked better.

In the past, office hour usage has been very light. However, in our experience, questions often come outside of office hours. Because your COPLACDigital students will not have the luxury of popping into your office or running into you on campus, it is important to pay attention to email messages or other channels of communication, and to respond to their questions as soon as you can.

Communication will also be important when there are problems with attendance or student performance. Again, you won’t be seeing these students around campus, and you can’t just catch them in the hallway after class to ask about a missing assignment. Because of the distance between you and your students, fast action will be crucial to troubleshooting student behavior. Emailing the students to let them know that you have noticed their absence or inaction, asking students to “stay after class” and having a private word with them, or setting up a phone conversation are all effective ways of dealing with students’ problems. Reaching out can be time consuming, but in the long run these conversations pay off.

Expectations for Student Projects

Co-teachers should also spend time discussing expectations and student outcomes for their course. These expectations should be clearly outlined in the course syllabus. Make sure to include the Student Learning Outcomes on your syllabus as well, along with any other information telling the students how they will be assessed in the course. Because this course is different from most of their courses, be as specific as possible about how you will assess their work in the class.

• Contracts: These are a central part of your evaluation of each student’s performance. Contracts should include a mission statement/description of the project; discussion of the digital tools that the students plan to use, including WordPress theme, and the rationale for using these tools; the division of labor between the team members; and a schedule of milestones/due dates when critical pieces will be ready to present to the rest of the class. Drafts of the contracts should be due 3-4 weeks into the semester, with the understanding that the co-teachers will closely read the drafts and ask for revisions/tweaks of the contract. Students are very often far too ambitious in their goals, and it is here that co-teachers can give them a reality check about what is possible in a short semester. On the other hand, some parts of the contract may need more details or more specifics before co-teachers are ready to approve them. The final, approved contracts should be posted on the course site, so that students and the co-teachers can refer to them easily. These contracts may be revised as the semester goes on, though only with good reasons and only after discussion with the co-teachers. At the end of the semester, students will craft a “defense” of their project, comparing the final product to the plan that they laid out in their contract.
  • Sample contracts: Century America contract; UMW Adventures in Digital History contract.

• Course standards/guidelines for evaluating quality of websites: In Appendix B we offer a set of general guidelines for quality websites. However, we had very good luck with allowing our students to collaborate on establishing certain standards as well. Take time during the first few weeks of class to look at some quality websites together. Discuss what you like and don’t like about the sites, in terms of accessibility, clarity, depth of research and analysis, logical flow, visual appeal, ease of navigation, etc. There may be certain common components or standards that the students will want to agree upon and incorporate into their contracts. [See http://dh2010.umwblogs.org/2010/04/08/assessment-criteria-for-digital-history-projects/ for one example of project criteria developed with students in a digital humanities course.]

• All sources (including images) that students use must be cited. Students must create source citations and bibliographies in the accepted citation style designated by the co-teachers. This requirement should be clearly stated in the course policies section of the syllabus.  If this standard is not met, we reserve the right to remove the project site from the COPLACDigital website.

• Intellectual property and copyright: Students must seek and receive permission to use any copyrighted sources, including photographs, printed materials, or artifacts/images of artifacts owned by others. If students use items without permission of the owner, they risk a “takedown” notice or other legal action. Co-teachers should discuss in class the perils of using items without permission. A Permissions Form is located in Appendix B.

• Oral histories/interviews and permissions: If students conduct interviews, they must also secure permission from the subject of the interview before they can use any portion of the interview in their website. A copy of an Oral History/Interview permission form is located in Appendix B.

• Oral histories and IRB: If your class will involve interviews/oral histories or other community work, you will need to check into IRB policies at each student’s institution. Every school/state system has its own set of IRB policies. On many campuses, students will need to get approval from their school’s IRB committee before they conduct interviews, and this process can take a while. Therefore, you should address this issue with students during your meeting the semester prior to your class. Jeff, Ellen, and the COPLAC staff can assist you with these inquiries, but ultimately it will be the instructors’ responsibility to make sure that all students have gone through the approval process. NOTE: Courses running in 2018 and 2019 do not need to have oral histories go through IRB approval. As of January 2018, the federal policy for the protection of human subjects exempts oral histories from IRB.

So, not only will you be co-teaching (maybe for the first time), but you will be co-teaching at a distance! How does that work? Well, as with any relationship, it takes considerable effort and a healthy amount of communication. As we have found, however, it is possible to teach an awesome distance learning class with a partner. We have helped to match you with a colleague who shares certain intellectual/teaching interests, pedagogical priorities, and personality characteristics, but the work doesn’t end there. We don’t need to tell you that the class moves much more smoothly, and the class develops a more positive chemistry, if the professors have a good relationship. Moreover, your students will also be working in teams—usually two students per campus, and depending on the nature of your project and assignments, perhaps they will also be working in small groups across campuses. Therefore, your partnership is a model for your students’ relationships with their colleagues.

Although there are a few good works on team teaching (see titles listed below), and some of that advice transfers well to distance mentoring, we are the ones creating the paths for team teaching at a distance. Here are a few things that we have learned along the way:

Plan everything. Talk a lot, by phone, by Skype/Hangout, by chat, by text.  Take advantage of Google Docs and other chat devices to lay out your plans for each course. (Jeff and Ellen kept a running “lesson plan” document in Google Docs, and we added to the doc for each class session.) Have frank discussions about the questions and problems that you can anticipate happening over the course of the semester. Take into consideration, for example, the following items:

• Class schedules and attendance expectations
• Expectations with regard to student behavior and participation during the class sessions
• Deadlines and what to do if students don’t meet them
• Consequences of students not meeting expectations (what will you tolerate, and how will you respond to unacceptable behavior?)
• Grading habits and standards
• Communicating with students between classes—expectations with regard to communication methods (email, Facebook, Twitter, Slack, forum/chat room, etc.) and response times.

Many of the items above will translate into policies for your syllabus, but others will be plans of action that you can pull out if you need them.

• After you have established rapport, you will need to work on a professional relationship. Get to know each other on a personal level, to see what you have in common—and what you don’t have in common—to see where you two will complement one another. Do you have commonalities in terms of marriage/partnership, children, hobbies, place of origin, education? The more you know about each other, the more comfortable you will be. And yes, the level of comfort/discomfort can show, even in a distance format. Cultivate a mutual respect for one another that will allow you to respectfully disagree, yet be willing to compromise on issues around which we usually have a high degree of autonomy—grading standards, course content, and classroom management, for example.
• Set your ego aside and be open to constructive commentary. Trust your co-teacher to tell you what they think about your ideas, make sure to seek out their advice, and although you may not always agree with one another, work to find solutions that are satisfactory to both of you.
• Work out a system for responding to students’ inquiries—students will intentionally and unintentionally try to play you two off one another. It is always best to try to meet with a student as a team, especially when you are trying to work through issues with unmet expectations or other problems.  However, even with routine exchanges, make sure that you copy your co-teacher on all correspondence. If you have a phone/teleconference conversation with a student, make sure to fill your colleague in on the details, so that they are aware of any issues and their resolutions.
• Reserve a few minutes AFTER class to talk with your co-teacher—ask your Distance Learning contact to add 15 minutes of time to the class period, so that you can debrief about the class.
• Reserve time to talk each week, in order to plan the next class(es) and touch base on how things are going.
• Use your teaching styles—the similarities and the differences—to create a cohesive classroom. If you are involved in this initiative, we already know that you enjoy experimenting with different teaching approaches. But, beyond that, make sure you understand, and are able to roll with, your co-teacher’s classroom management tactics. Your instructional and disciplinary styles will differ at times, but if communication channels are open (see above), you can find a balance. And, you can play to one another’s strengths. Assign yourselves tasks that best play to your strengths—as long as the workload remains equitable, of course.
• Support one another—remember that you are both taking risks by teaching this new kind of class. This is an opportunity for you to grow as a teacher and as a colleague.

To our knowledge, nothing has been published on team teaching in distance learning/online courses, but here is some further reading on “traditional” team teaching:

Bess, James L.  Teaching Alone, Teaching Together: Transforming the Structure of Teams for Teaching.  San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2000.

Davis, James R.  Interdisciplinary Courses and Team Teaching.  Phoenix: American Council on Education/Oryx Press Series on Higher Education, 1997.

A shout-out to Joshua Landy and Lanier Anderson’s “Ten Commandments of Team Teaching” and the Vanderbilt University’s Center for Teaching/Learning Team/Collaborative Teaching page for generating ideas for the above advice.