Check out these “flyers,” with collections of ideas related to specific teaching approaches:

Asynchronous Teaching

Synchronous Discussions: All-Distance

Synchronous Discussions: Hybrid

Recording Mini-lectures

There have been reports of a practice called “Zoom Bombing”, where an uninvited – and often devious – guest shows up and posts inappropriate content in the chat window or on video.

If you are concerned about the security and privacy of your meetings, follow the guidance below.  You can configure many of the settings as defaults for all of your meetings.  Log in at vassar.zoom.us and select Settings to make these your defaults.

Zoom also provides guidance at the following blog posts:

https://blog.zoom.us/wordpress/2020/03/20/keep-the-party-crashers-from-crashing-your-zoom-event/

https://blog.zoom.us/wordpress/2020/03/27/best-practices-for-securing-your-virtual-classroom/

Scheduling Meetings

• Generate meeting ID automatically – Unique meeting IDs expire 30 days after the meeting has occurred, and provide protection if a meeting ID was shared accidentally to a public audience.
• Require meeting password – Don’t share your meeting password.
• Enable waiting room – Review attendees before admitting them to the meeting. For large classes or conferences, consider assigning this job to a co-host.
• Only authenticated users can join – This option ensures that only Zoom users can attend your meeting.
• Disable Join before host – This option prevents the participants from joining prior the host.
• Disable Allow removed participants to rejoin – If you need to remove a participant during the session, this prevents them from rejoining.

During Meetings

• Mute all – As the host, you can mute all in the Participant pane. You can also stop participants from unmuting themselves, and ask them to use chat for questions. For large classes or conferences, consider assigning this job to a co-host.
• Lock meeting – Prevents any additional participants from joining.
• Screen sharing is host only – By default, only hosts can share their screens. Hosts can grant individuals the ability to share in the participant pane.
• Allow participants to chat with host only – Available from the chat pane. Restrict chat to host only, no one, or everyone.
• Disable annotation – When sharing content, use the More option to disable attendee annotation.
• Remove unwanted participants – Beside the participants name (in the Participant pane) select More, and then select Remove.

You can record your Zoom meeting, but sensitive information should not be recorded (nor should it be included in a meeting title/description or any text field that may be stored in Zoom). When recording, do the following:

• Advise attendees that they are being recorded.
• Record the active speaker using screen sharing, not Gallery view. See Recording Layouts for details.
• Spotlight video to lock the active speaker to the presenter and uncheck ‘Display participants’ names in the recording.
• Do not discuss Restricted information (eg. personal information, personal health information, financial information).

Protecting Recordings

Do the following when sharing recordings to protect their privacy:

• Protect recordings with a password.
• Enable only authenticated users to view
• Prevent downloads.

In light of the recent COVID-19 public health crisis, all Grand Challenges events for Spring 2020 have been postponed or are being reimagined. During this time, the program would like to focus its collective energy on ways in which it can support our community through these new challenges. A new website will supplement and amplify our inclusive learning communities; it will create methods to share with each other, to be there for each other, to tell stories and share resources.

The Vassar library has created this Remote Learning & Library Services guide.

 

As of this morning (March 20), CIS has extended the Pro license for Zoom to everyone with a Vassar email address. This means that students can now create their own meetings and they instructors can designate students as meeting co-hosts or alternate hosts.

Additional Zoom setting changes:

• It’s now a default that meeting participants will need to be logged in (“registered users”) to join a meeting; you should only change this setting if you specifically need to invite a non-Vassar person.
• If you share the link to your meeting recording that’s saved in the cloud, users will need to log in with their Vassar ID to access it. (You can also require an additional password.)
• If you enable recording in your meeting, participants will be prompted to give their consent. If a student attempts to record the meeting to their local disk, the host will be prompted to give permission for that.

Many of us are confronting working and/or teaching online in a hurry. Before I became an educational administrator at Vassar, I was a teacher. I earned my master’s degree online from UMUC. It was a great fit for my life (working full-time and raising small children.) My classmates and I had several years to reflect upon the implications of studying and teaching online. Conversely, many of our faculty will be jumping into teaching online next week!

For those faculty, I recommend reading reviewing this article and its associated resources: https://chroniclevitae.com/news/2315-going-online-in-a-hurry-what-to-do-and-where-to-start

What’s in there?

•  Some great general advice – big picture thinking to help you assess what tools and techniques are the best match for your teaching style and style of class.
•  A  link to great resource put together by the Stanford academic technology experts, with great explanations that help one understand online learning lingo.
• A guide to “just in time teaching.”

The article was also featured at https://www.chronicle.com/article/Going-Online-in-a-Hurry-What/248207

I would encourage all faculty to think deeply about the implications for students and faculty and choose strategies with which they are comfortable. Don’t feel pressured to teach online a certain way. All of us as a community are grappling with the unexpected and the unplanned, so our expectations and our pedagogy will need to adjust accordingly.