First online Free Minds class

If you don’t know about Free Minds, check out the site: https://freemindsaustin.org/. I’ve taught philosophy most of the years of Free Minds, but last night, we our first online class.

The faculty and staff made a hasty transition to online instruction, like the rest of ACC liberal arts. We don’t run quite the same schedule as ACC, being a Foundation Communities partnership, so in a way, our class last night was sort of a preview of next week: Students and professors having familiar conversations using unfamiliar tech. It was strange and comforting.

Continue reading “First online Free Minds class”

CE-Credit Survey

    I'm collecting data about CE students in credit sections. As we transition to online instruction via Blackboard, we want to ensure that no CE students are left behind.

    Please complete this survey only if you currently have CE students in a transfer credit course. Thanks!

    Department:

    Do CE students automatically appear as students in Blackboard credit courses?
    YesNoI don't know

    I have CE students in the following credit section(s):

    My CE students already appear in the appropriate Blackboard credit section: YesNo

    If you answered No to the previous question, then you have at least one CE student in a section you are teaching, but they do not appear in your Blackboard transfer credit course. Please try to add the CE students into your Blackboard course (instructions below).

    Were you able to add your CE students into the appropriate Blackboard credit course?
    Yes, it worked.I couldn't find the CE students.I found the CE students but adding them didn't work.

    Instructions for adding a student to your Blackboard course

    • Log into Blackboard and click through to your course

    • Under Course Management, click on Users and Groups, then Users

    • Click Find Users to Enroll

    • Click Browse to open the search panel

    • Select what to search for.

      • The username is the student's SID. If you know the SID, this is the quickest way to search

      • You can search on the student's first name, last name, or ACC email address.

      • "Contains" usually works for last name or first name. If you know the complete email address, you can also use "equal to."

      • If your CE student appears in the search results, check the box at the right and click Submit

    • Now enroll the student:

      • The username of the student you selected now appears in the Username box.

      • Ensure that the Role is set to Student

      • Click Submit

    • You will return to the list of users in your class. Please verify that the CE student you enrolled appears on your list of users.

    • Complete the last survey question above

    Thank you for your help!

    Ideology, part 1

    An apology, with context

    Trigger warning: If my recent comment in an email to department chairs about ideologues offended you, then you may want to rethink reading this post.

    I’ll start with an apology for letting my sarcasm off the customary tight leash in my comment about ideologues and normal people. I was (sincerely) trying to make a serious point with a little humor, and if that offended you or raised eyebrows, I am sorry.

    As is often the case with me, I see an opportunity in this situation for reflection, so, in that spirit, let’s talk about context.

    Continue reading “Ideology, part 1”

    Faculty Contingency Planning Survey

      Please take a moment to provide information that will help with contingency planning. Of course, we hope that no one falls ill, but we want to prepare to support our faculty and students no matter what happens. You can help by providing the information about your contingency partner and about courses you might be able to cover for a colleague.

      Section 1: Contingency Partners

      Contingency partners are colleagues who have agreed to cover your sections should you become ill. Please let us know whom you have identified as contingency partners and to which of your Blackboard courses you have added them. Don't worry about which sections your partners have added you to. Your partner will provide that information when she or he completes this form.

      I have identified one or more contingency partners and I have added them to my Blackboard course.
      yesno

      Partner 1's name:
      Partner 1's section(s):

      Partner 2's name:
      Partner 2's section(s):

      Section 2: Availability to cover courses

      If you are able to cover a section during a colleague's illness, if needed, we'd like to know the courses you are able to cover. (These are courses you would be willing to cover in addition to the sections you've agreed to cover with your contingency partners, if you have any.)

      I can cover for a colleague if needed.
      yesno

      Please tell us the courses you are able to cover:

      Thank you for your help!

      Going strait online

      The Strait of Messina, that is. As in, right between Scylla and Charybdis. 

      Charybdis: Try to do everything and fail at most of it. 
      Scylla: Compromise. Give up some things, and hang onto what's essential.

      Odysseus had to sacrifice some of his crew to Scylla to avoid losing the entire ship to Charybdis. (Yes, I know that people use this image to mean two equally bad alternatives. I can’t help it; I like Homer.)

      In the wake of ACC’s COVID-19 response, an LA prof asked me for advice about going online, and here’s what I said:

      Set low expectations and prioritize mercilessly. This is triage, not reconstructive surgery. The outcome has to work, but it doesn’t have to be pretty. Our goal is to survive, with as much integrity as possible, until the end of the spring semester. The only way to do that is to hang onto what is foundational.

      Let’s say you decided to overhaul your course and transform it into a lighthouse beacon of online teaching. You look, for instance, at TLED’s excellent collection of resources, and you think: Whoa — I could do anything with all this stuff!

      Wake up. That’s not where we are this week. What if you have little or no experience with online teaching, and you have to be ready in, like, two weeks? Now that magnificent collection of resources looks a lot like you’ve been asked to count grains of sand on a very long Sicilian beach, by next Monday.

      So, look away for a moment. Take stock: What is actually necessary for you to do to make your course work? Start with the foundational and genuinely necessary, and build up from there — if you have time. This is triage.

      If you’re a professor in that situation, you’re likely to translate your tried-and-true teaching strategies strait from f2f into online. Under normal circumstances, you’d have all sorts of people telling you that you’ve got the wrong approach because online teaching isn’t analogous to f2f teaching, etc. They’re right, but ignore those voices, especially if they’re inside your head. This is triage.

      ACC is going to give you access to a mentor (who should be an experienced online prof) and to instructional designers. Use these resources to find ways to leverage what you do best as a teacher and turn it to your advantage online. Avoid Charybdis, and pass by Scylla.

      If your class is heavily text-based, my staff are available to scan and deliver pdfs right to a google drive with your name on it, ready to be dropped into your Blackboard course or shared with students.

      If you typically lecture, look at Collaborate or try a lower-bar videoconferencing tool like Google Meet — and again, we’re here to help you hook it up with the training you need.

      Let’s say you’re into student discussion groups: Recast them into discussion boards. Post a video of yourself setting up the discussion and then turn them loose. Use Google Meet’s chat function to get your students engaged in what you’re saying by posing questions. Get students to collaborate digitally and make a YouTube video explaining something. (Your students are probably ready to do that on their own, so leverage their skills as well!)

      I’m asking department chairs to set up Blackboard shells for courses or clusters of courses and invite generous experienced online profs to drop their assignments and other useful artifacts into that shell. Steal from them — if their assignments help you achieve your goal, copy them into your shell and sail on.

      We need to make it through the strait, one way or another. Embrace the fact that it’s not going to be a luxury cruise. This is not the time to judge yourself by an inappropriate standard, like the work you would do if you had the inclination and all the time in the world.

      This is triage. We can do triage.

      LA AoS COVID-19 Response Plan

      The week of 03.23 – 29, all f2f and hybrid sections in LA will transition to online instruction. Here is the AoS plan to support professors with this transition.

      Mentors/eBuddies

      • Faculty Contact: your department chair
      • Mentor Contact: Wade Allen or your department chair

      Your Mentor/eBuddy is an experienced online professor who can be a resource for you as you transition to the materials and techniques of online instruction.

      Resources

      We are encouraging each department to create Blackboard shells for each course or course cluster, to enable DL faculty to share discipline-specific content and teaching techniques. These materials will range from teaching tips to actual learning objects (like quizzes) that you can copy into your own Blackboard course.

      This knowledge base repository of links, foundational skills and techniques contains generic resources that can help you with the challenges (and advantages!) of online teaching.

      Administrative Team

      The entire AoS administrative team is here to support you. We will provide services such as:

      • high-speed duplex scanning to help you prepare course materials for online instruction
      • training and support on apps and tools for teaching online (e.g., Zoom, Google Meet, and also Blackboard hacks)

      TLED

      TLED is offering dozens of Blackboard training courses all over the district to give you the foundational skills you need to mount and run your courses.

      In addition, instructional designers are available to help you with design challenges and getting your current course translated into the online medium.

      Non-digital literacy

      a guest post by Frank Cronin

      The Liberal Arts Academic Master Plan and Non-Digital Literacy

      As we prepare our Liberal Arts Academic Master Plan proposal, we must consider what we should set as our goals. In this new world where we are constantly on the frontier of some new technological form of communication, we should be concerned about improving our students’ digital literacies. On the other hand, we should also be concerned about non-digital literacies, the Hard Skills of effective listening and speaking. Fortunately, ACC has many courses in the Communication Studies department that can help, not only students, but faculty be better listeners and speakers.

      There are three negative trends in society’s listening and speaking skills that we could address.

      1. Published in 1998 Deborah Tannen’s The Argument Culture: Stopping America’s War of Words, describes an American culture in which rational discussion of ideas in order to share and consider has been replaced by a culture which as Tannen states “…makes us approach public dialogue, and just about anything else we need to accomplish, as if it were a fight.”  We have seen this continue to develop especially in the political arena. Many of my students last semester in and Integrated Reading and Writing co-req with Government and other INRW courses, say they avoid political discussion for this reason. When people talk politics, they argue.
      2. Another one is the vulgar fabric of our social discourse. In the arts, on news shows, and in the hallways of ACC coarse language, rarely specific or informative, is becoming much more common.
      3. The last concern about modern communication is the shift to more written communication especially in texts and on Twitter.  Many of my students admit to overuse of their phone particularly for texting. And faculty know it is not unusual to walk into a classroom and see students texting while completely ignoring other students sitting next to them. At the same time, Texas public schools and ACC are now requiring fewer students to take Communication courses.

      In 2013 the Texas Legislature passed House Bill 5, no longer requiring a Speech course for graduation. Since then, high school students have been coming to ACC with less preparation in verbal communication skills. In 2015 ACC implemented the Effective Learning course. To make room in some degree programs for the Effective Learning course, the Communication course requirement was removed. Whereas all degree programs used to require a communications course, now only 10 of 19 Associate of science programs, 19 of 35 Associate of Arts programs and 38 of 100 Associate of Applied Arts programs require a communications course. Consequently, just as the need for more training in communications seems much more important, less is available to our students.

      In the Liberal Arts ideas are paramount. Just as important are the skills of listening to and speaking the ideas.  So, as Liberal Arts moves forward with its own Academic Master Plan, how does the discipline teach its students and faculty the basics on non-digital communication? We have various resources for doing this. 

      Communication Studies teachers belong to one or more professional organizations. One is The National Communication Association (NCA) founded in 1914, and it provides guidelines for ethical and effective communication. In one of its publications, “What Should a Graduate with a Communication Degree Know, Understand, and Be Able to Do?” one section focuses
      solely on the ethical aspects of communication and just some are

      • Articulate the ethical dimensions of a communication situation 
      • Choose to communicate with ethical intention 
      • Propose solutions for (un)ethical communication

      These guidelines can direct not just the Communications faculty, but other faculty and students. Another resource is incorporating speaking and listening skills in non-Communications course. In 2104 Professor Mark Butland and I started teaching a co-req of a Developmental Writing and the Public Speaking course. Because of our collaboration I have imbedded speaking and listening skills in to all my classes including INRW and EDUC courses by doing group work and presentations.

      I see as a challenge how we can use the next resource, Communication Studies courses themselves. With Guided Pathways students are less likely to take one of those courses if not in their degree plan. And how do encourage teachers to take those courses? I have been trying to find out since last summer when I took SPCH 1311, Introduction to Communications, with Professor Joansandy Wong, what kind of professional development credit I can get for taking
      that course. Some sort of professional development credit would encourage faculty to take a Communications course.

      INRW is setting up a Communication Café at the HLC Accelerator for fall 2020. Though the focus will be on writing, that is a form of communication and often precedes spoken communication as in writing a public speech or preparing written notes for a meeting. The Communications Café could possibly be aligned with the following resource.

      Professor Theresa Glenn, Department Chair of Communication Studies and her colleagues have been discussing a Communications Lab. It could be a resource for students and faculty. The lab could help with the following:

      • How to reduce communication apprehension
      • How to improve interviewing skills and resume writing
      • How to enhance presentation skills
      • How to facilitate small group work

      Liberal Arts has a chance with developing its Academic Master Plan to emphasize the importance of non-digital communication. We know from research that the business world values these Hard Skills of listening and speaking. We know from history and reading the daily newspaper that our political discourse can be improved if more citizens know how to listen to each other more empathetically and discuss our important issues rather than getting bogged down in arguments in which each side is only interested in defending its own views.

      A Guiding Pathway for CoReq

      The Wizard of Oz, Illustration by W.W. Denslow (d. 1915), Library of Congress

      Many of you have heard me argue against the term guided pathways in favor of a participle with connotations that I find more compelling: guiding pathways. The present participle suggests to me a more open, engaged, mentoring approach to pathways, which fits better with the liberal arts. As I have often quipped, the Yellow Brick Road was a guided pathway, and look what happened: Witches, Forks, and Flying Monkeys.

      In the spirit of guiding pathways, I’d like to start a conversation about serving CoReq students in a more effective, focused way, a way that leverages faculty expertise along three different axes: the developmental ed experts, HUMA1301 Great Questions, and the LA Gateway. CoReq is moving in the direction of an INRW/ENGL1301 pathway, so let’s envision a thoroughly integrated curriculum, to maximize the clarity of the student’s trajectory and simultaneously the effectiveness of support services along the way.

      Continue reading “A Guiding Pathway for CoReq”