Teaching Resources from the Remote 2.0 Committee: High-Touch Practices for Teaching

Personalized attention to students (“Students, I see you are there and care about you.”)

• learn names and use them
• ask students generally at the start/end of a class how things are going in the course (or life)
• be amenable to adjusting the syllabus midstream if students are having trouble with the material or the timing is going wonky; don’t just “set it and forget it.”
• follow up with students who are not showing up or who are not thriving
• if teaching synchronously, answer individual questions during and especially after class
• hold open office hours, not just “by appointment only”
• respond to student emails in a timely fashion (within a day is fine)

A strong faculty presence in the course (“Students, you don’t have to teach yourself.”)

• come to class and teach (classroom version):
  • easy, even if you are doing nothing more than reading a lecture or PowerPoint slides aloud (but you do better than that!)
• come to class and teach (remote version):
  • teach your class synchronously through videoconferencing
  • teach asynchronously by
    • making audio or video recordings of yourself lecturing, commenting on the readings, or doing demonstrations
    • recording narration on your PowerPoints
    • doing lecture capture (a video of you and your whiteboard, for example)
• provide some form of direct contact from faculty to students at least once a week
  • synchronous class sessions
  • online discussion boards actively moderated by the instructor
  • small group or one-on-one video conferences
  • text/video/audio announcements to the entire class

Personalized assessment and assistance (“Students, I am not here just to judge or rank you; I am here to help you learn and improve.”)

• scaffold large-stakes assignments
  • several quizzes before an hour exam
  • small version of an assignment before the big one (example: short video before the major presentation video)
  • long project worked through in stages (example: paper: abstract, bibliography, outline, draft, etc.)
• read drafts of student writing, let them consult you on work-in-progress
• provide written assessment feedback (comments), not just a score, for some student work (need not be all assignments)
  • even a simple “Nice work!” as well as a score/grade on a quiz goes a long way
• Get graded work back in a timely fashion so they can use your comments to improve on the next piece of work

A sense of community (“Student, you are not alone in the class.”)

• get students talking to each other (not just you) in discussions
• have students work on a specific task in pairs or small groups both in and out of class. 
  • see the separate tab on these topics in this LibGuide
• have students respond to each others’ work or do peer evaluations
• have students perform social reading by jointly annotating digital texts using tools like Hypothes.is or Perusall
• break up lectures with low/no-stakes polls using free tools like Zoom and Poll Everywhere