Performance Studies

Remote Teaching Resources

Planning Guide for Remote Teaching

Plan and Prioritize

❏ Make sure you’ve covered the basic preparations outlined in this Readiness Guide for Remote Teaching

❏ Evaluate your students’ circumstances. Are they in different time zones? Do they have limited access to the internet or unstable connections? Are there any accessibility considerations? Your choice of remote options, such as whether to hold synchronous class meetings or provide asynchronous activities, will be shaped by these needs.

❏ Use familiar, NYU-provided tools so you can focus on teaching instead of tech support. Tools that are integrated into NYU Classes or accessible through NYU Home are secure and available through single sign on with Net ID and password. There are also detailed instructions for using these tools that you can share with your students available through the searchable NYU Support Center database.

Review and Revise

❏ Flag any upcoming activities that can only be completed in-person. Many activities can be successfully completed remotely but some, such as high-stakes testing, may need to be rescheduled or re-designed into an alternative format.

❏ Consider your goals and expectations for student work in a remote context. How will you measure participation, or handle communication around deadlines? Revise instructions and requirements to reflect the new format of the course.

❏ For example, if you choose to use discussion forums to replicate in-class discussion time, students will need to know how long their posts should be, how many peers they need to engage with, and the due dates for the initial posts and responses.

Communicate

❏ Inform your students right away that course activities will continue remotely and all updates will be posted via NYU Classes. Send this communication via the Messaging tool in NYU Classes. Messages sent through NYU Classes are archived so that students can access them at any time.

❏ Update your syllabus. This includes updating with complete links to remote course sessions and materials and clear due dates for any assignments, including participation activities such as posting in discussion forums.

❏ Provide clear and detailed information around the new workflow. Students will need to know how to access course materials, where to submit assignments, and when to join a live class meeting.

❏ Share a communications strategy. Include information such as the best method of reaching you (email, NYU Classes messages, Zoom office hours, etc) and when they should expect a reply. If you don’t plan to check email on the weekend, let your students know.

Remote Instructional Strategies for Specific Contexts

Share Course Materials

❏ The Resources tool in NYU Classes is a document repository for instructors to share files with students. Learn About Resources

❏ Google Drive can be used to share and receive files. Permissions can be set to restrict editing access as needed. Learn About Google Drive

❏ Creating a course group in Google Groups will make sharing and accessing the document easy to do with one click. Learn About Google Groups

Discussions

❏ Forums in NYU Classes allow for threaded asynchronous discussions. Instructors can engage with students and assign grades to individual forum topics. Learn About Forums

❏ Collaborative Annotation: PDF and Image files in Google Drive can be asynchronously and collaboratively annotated using the Comments tool. Learn About Google Docs

❏ When multiple users are present in the same file, the chat feature can be used. Learn About Chat Functions

Small-Group Discussions

❏ Create small groups for asynchronous collaboration and resources sharing in NYU Classes. Learn About Creating Groups

❏ During a live synchronous Zoom session, create Breakout Rooms for small groups of students. Learn About Zoom Breakout Rooms

❏ Students can also create their own Zoom sessions for small group meetings outside of class meetings using their NYU Zoom accounts. Please note, they must request recording functionality.

Class Meetings and Lectures

❏ Live meetings should be hosted on Zoom. Access the Zoom Guide

❏ There is a Student Guide for Participating in Zoom Sessions you can share with your students.

❏ Recorded lectures are a great option for asynchronous remote courses. NYU Stream capabilities include webcam-only recording as well as screen recording.

❏ Express Capture in NYU Stream records just your webcam (no screen capture). This option is great for short updates or mini-lectures with no visuals. Does not work with Safari. Learn About Express Capture

❏ Kaltura Capture in NYU Stream records your screen; you can turn your webcam on or off. This is a great option for showing slides while you record a lecture. Kaltura Capture does not require an internet connection so that videos can be uploaded later. It also links directly to your NYU Stream account upon upload with no storage time or capacity limits. It does require download and installation. Learn About Kaltura Capture

❏ Zoom in NYU Classes gives you the ability to hold synchronous meetings, share screens, and record the sessions for later consumption, but Zoom does require an internet connection. Videos must be downloaded and re-uploaded to NYU Stream within 120 days or they are deleted.

❏ Please Note: All videos must have captioning in order to be accessible for all learners. This can be done using the NYU Stream captioning tool. Learn About Captioning

Whiteboard Replacements

❏ Zoom Whiteboard/Annotation tool accessed via Screen Share in a Zoom Session. You can control the whiteboard alone or share it with students for collaboration.

❏ Any G-Suite item, such as a Google Document, Slide, or Sheet, can be shared with the class for an on-the-fly collaborative whiteboard. Creating a course group in Google Groups will make sharing and accessing the document easy to do with one click. Learn About Google Groups

Student Presentations

❏ Screen-sharing and co-presenter options in Zoom

❏ Students can use the recording options available in NYU Stream (linked above) to create and share their own videos.

Assessing Learning and Providing Feedback

❏ Writing Assignments: Peer Reviews can be completed in Google Drive using the commenting, track changes, and chat functions. The History Panel allows users to view the document’s history of edits.

❏ Knowledge Checks/Quizzes: See this excellent FAS guide to Writing Better Online Assessment Questions

❏ NYU Classes Tests & Quizzes Tool. Learn About Tests & Quizzes

❏ You can use Google Forms through NYU Google Apps to create self-grading quizzes with several different question types.

❏ You can create interactive and branched video quizzes in NYU Stream. Learn About NYU Stream Video Quizzes

Office Hours can be hosted on Zoom.

❏ Consider using the Waiting Room feature to ensure your 1-1 conversations are private. Learn About Zoom Waiting Rooms

❏ We have created a document with step by step instructions for setting up your remote office hours. Please let Allison (amb22@nyu.edu) know if you have any questions!

Student Success

❑ Faculty Engagement & Communication

Communicating with your students is the absolute core of a remote class. Active and timely communication supports teaching presence.

❑ Generally speaking, responses to emails and other student questions should occur within 24 hours. Some faculty prefer to disconnect over the weekend, however, that is the time when most students are working and questions may arise. In that situation, you may want to indicate that you will respond to urgent questions only over the weekend.

❑ If you are getting the same questions repeatedly, post an announcement to the entire class addressing the question or through a QA discussion on Forums. Learn About Posting Announcements

❑ It is not necessary to reply to every post every student makes in your discussion forum. Excessive faculty posting can preemptively close down conversations. The question becomes "how much is too much and how much is not enough?". We recommend commenting on around 1/3 of all substantive posts as a reasonable place to begin. Making sure to spread your comments over the course of the week is also important to encourage students to actively and consistently participate over time.

❑ If you publicly value substantive discussion by giving points for it and modeling it in the forums, students will do the work. Just make sure that when you post additional thoughts and questions you're scaffolding their learning and not talking over their heads. You can pull together threads of ideas or themes that you see across several students' posts and make connections back to the course text or primary concepts.

Web and Video Conferencing

○ If students intend to host their own Zoom meetings, they will need to activate their Zoom accounts by going to nyu.zoom.us and logging into Zoom. Students do not need their own Zoom accounts in order to join your remote class session.

○ By default, students will not have the ability to record. They can request recording access through NYU IT. Learn About How To Request Recording