A lot of us are teaching online for the fall. Not as many of us as should be teaching online in the fall, of course, but a lot of us (and as I’ve mentioned before, if you’re not, plan to teach online anyway, because it’s a definite possibility). And I know I’ve said it before as well, but I want to remind you to be kind to your students. Trust them. Do not spy on them. Do not treat them like they are definitely doing something wrong.

Many instructors are still trying to figure out how to simulate the classroom experience with online instruction; this is a bit quixotic, because the simple answer is “you really can’t.” We will do better when we remember that online and face-to-face are inherently different experiences, and we spend our energy better simply trying to make them the best of what they are, rather than trying to make one into the other. But there’s another shade of this discussion that’s more troubling: how will we watch our students, to make sure they’re paying attention and that they’re not cheating?

Again, the simple answer is: you don’t. The somewhat more complex answer is: good assignment and curriculum design.

The wrong answer is requiring students to keep their cameras on at all time and grading them on the same. The other wrong answer is to invest in test proctoring software and other surveillance solutions. Testing as we’ve been doing it in standardized scenarios, with high stakes, scantrons, and surveillance by authority figures, is counterproductive to the enterprise of education, and this is a great opportunity to quit it cold turkey, if we’re willing to take that opportunity.

I’m not saying we should do away with testing entirely. Assessment matters, and testing is a tool that we have available for that. Tests can be a learning environment as well as an assessment tool, if they are designed well. When we quiz ourselves, we help cement our learning as usable, recall-able material. I use quizzes, especially in my online courses, as a tool to reinforce readings and other forms of content.

But there’s a difference between a productive quiz and a punitive test. A productive quiz is low-stakes and allows students to quickly identify what they missed, why they missed it, and how to correct it. My reading quizzes have at least three attempts allowed, and are open-book. They’re there to highlight what I want students to take away from the reading, not to punish them for not doing it. A punitive test is one with high stakes and little opportunity for redemption, one that starts with the assumption that students will cheat and therefore must be watched like prisoners.

In addition to testing, we also have to adjust our assumptions about what “paying attention” means. There are a lot of ways to pay attention. As a student, I was the one drawing fanciful things in the margins. I was paying attention. But I was keeping my hands busy and redirecting the side chatter in my brain with those sketches, as well as using the sketches as a way to index my notes for later recollection, since the sketches were often easier to quickly find in my notebook than specific words.

Likewise, a student may find having all their classmates’ faces in front of them distracting in a Zoom session. They may prefer to just listen to the teacher’s voice while looking down at their notes. Or, a student may find that staring at a screen at prescribed hours is difficult; we process screen information differently than in-person or print information, often in a less linear way. Recorded sessions allow this student to pause, take a break to stretch and refocus, and return to the content.

So what makes for good online course design?

1. Break up content into small, clear steps. Order these steps in a logical way, so students can move from one to another. Sometimes in a classroom, as a tool, we withhold the end result for a big, memorable reveal. That doesn’t work so well online; students should know why they’re doing what they’re doing and what order they should do it in. Likewise, it’s much better to watch five or six 10-minute videos than it is to watch one big hour-long video. It makes it easier to return to content if necessary, and it makes focus easier, too.
2. Design assessments that are reinforcement rather than testing or sorting. This means embracing open-book assessment, which can be a very effective learning space. This means ditching the time limits (or using very generous time limits) and the surveillance. Instead of multiple choice quizzes (although, as I’ve mentioned, those are sometimes very useful if done low-stakes), consider a short reflective paragraph.
3. Streamline the course. We all have our pet lesson plans, of course. We all have that example we’ve used since 2010 (or earlier). But this is a good time to get radical and return to the course goals and ask yourself, about every item you include as you upload it, “What is this thing’s purpose? Do I really need it? How will the student actually interact with this thing?” If you are teaching a relatively standardized course, strip it down to just what’s needed according to the standard requirements: if it says 4-5 assignments, do four, not five.
4. Do not require students to show their faces or record their voices online! It is absolutely not necessary for a student to have their camera on while you are lecturing. It is absolutely not necessary for you to see into a student’s home while you are teaching, and certainly not while they’re taking a test. Students may have any number of reasons (tech, psychology, family situations, culture, whatever) that they are uncomfortable on camera or recording themselves. For instance, if you assign a video, be sure to emphasize that there are other options besides being in front of a camera: students can remix other videos, make slide show videos, etc.
5. Use the technology you already understand. It’s tempting to use a lot of new tools right now. Limit yourself to maybe one new toy. If you know your school’s LMS well, use it well; this is not the time to try something entirely new. If you know Google’s collaboration tools well, use those. Limit the number of tools you’re using and lean mostly on the mainstream ones where you can, because students are having to learn a lot of new tools too, and you want them to focus on the content of your course more than mastering new tools.
6. Trust students. I can’t stress this enough. Trust students. They’ll rise to the level you show you expect of them. If you write policies that imply you expect them to cheat and are just playing a game of cat and mouse with them, well, you’ll be having to play a lot of cat and mouse, because you just made that the expectation. If you write policies that show you trust them, then you’ll find they trust you back.

There’s a lot of useful information about online teaching out there. A lot of resources. Go find them. And go forth trusting your students and streamlining your curriculum and you’ll be fine.

One of the biggest misconceptions underlying problems in education is that education is, at its core, simply the accumulation of content: memorizing facts and formulae somehow makes an education. Blame standardized testing if you like, since it’s much more cost-effective to test for content than for processes or skills. For the present argument, where the blame should fall isn’t important. What’s important today is the distinctions between content, processes, and skills.

This distinction becomes even more important right now as educators are trying to assess what can be done remotely, asynchronously, etc and what must be done face to face, synchronously, etc. At a macro level, we’re having to reassess what the function of the educational institution itself is in education: what makes a school? Why is a school important? At a micro level, we’re having to assess what our classes are at their most fundamental in order to assess what level of risk is acceptable for them to carry out their purpose. And one tool we can use in these fundamental assessments of our own curricula, programs, and institutions is the distinction between content, process, and skill.

Content, then, is discrete facts and knowledge. It’s knowing the dates of the American Civil War. It’s being able to define key terms, like rhetoric or metonymy. Content does matter; content helps frame understanding and allows us to talk about ideas and meaning. Without content like vocabulary, formulae, etc to build on as a foundation, much of education grinds to a halt. But content also can be stored easily, even entirely apart from students and teachers. Content can exist on a shelf, to be accessed as needed.

In my composition courses, for instance, students need a certain level of content: they need to know terms to identify parts of rhetorical situations, they need to know terms to describe writing processes, etc.

Processes are series of predictable steps that we learn to go through on command. Learning a process is learning, for instance, the scientific method in a lab class, or an order of operations in a math class. In a lab class where the goal is specifically to learn a process, it’s not terribly important whether the lab itself is mixing a chemical with a reagent, or if it’s testing the navigation of a fruit fly. What matters is that the students practice and demonstrate the process of conducting an experiment and properly documenting it. Likewise, it’s not important what numbers are in an equation, only that students demonstrate the process of solving it (hence, “show your work.”)

In my composition courses, there are certain processes that students need to learn. They need to learn how to receive feedback (I tell them, for instance, to read backwards: read the summary note at the end first and then look for the detailed line edits and comments). They need to learn how to use a database, which is a process. It doesn’t matter what topics they’re searching for on the database, only that they’re learning how to expand and limit results with the tools available through a fairly predictable series of steps.

Skills are much more flexible things altogether. Skills are the ability to problem-solve in real time for certain kinds of problems. They’re the ability to adapt processes by understanding not only how to do them but what they mean. Skills involve, for instance, combining equations together in novel ways to calculate the amount of materials needed for a new construction, or to use the scientific process to solve a problem, rather than simply repeat an experiment. Most skills have some kind of analytical and critical thinking component. Consider even the “workplace skills” that seem mundane and are often treated as binary know/don’t know: coding in C++, for instance, is not just content or processes, but combines content and processes into the ability to analyze and solve problems as the occur.

In my composition classes, students are acquiring digital literacy skills: the ability to encounter new material on the internet in their daily lives and analyze it according to critical thinking processes, and even reproduce or generate new digital media. They are learning writing skills: the ability to consider their own strengths and use those to solve new problems in new rhetorical situations. (I should note when I say “new” I mean “new to the learner” generally, not necessarily “never seen before”)

It’s worth noting that these three things build on each other in a cyclical manner: you need content to learn processes, and processes to learn skills, and you need skills to create new processes or revise old ones, and you need processes to create or revise new content.

If, as many people believe, education is just a content delivery system, then online-only is just fine for everything. In fact, it’s likely the superior system. For content, online courses probably offer deeper learning environments, not shallower. In an online course, students can review material more readily, skip over the content they’ve already mastered more quickly, spend more time on the content they struggle with, etc.

Online-only is also adequate for a lot of processes and skills, but here the matter gets muddier, so here the argument for the necessity of face-to-face instruction gets a little stronger. For my classes, online-only is fine. Writing is something that can be done remotely, and feedback on writing is often delivered remotely anyway (and has been for a very, very long time), so remote instruction is more than adequate. All content, processes, and skills can be modeled, practiced, executed, and evaluated remotely very easily. In fact, it’s very much a replication of real-world writing environments.

However, there are other things that can’t be taught remotely. For instance, consider the fencing classes I took as an undergraduate. We had a textbook (a very well-written textbook written by our professor!), and it had all the content we needed. We had reading assignments out of it and even quizzes on the content. But that was our homework, because there was no point in spending much class time on the content, when the course mostly focused on processes and skills. Processes included lunges, ripostes, and parries. We practiced these in isolation on command, as one often does with processes. These had to be adjusted in face-to-face instruction, where our instructor could, if needed, correct our very posture physically, so we could build the right muscle memory. However, we could practice these processes on our own just fine too; they didn’t require an opponent or an observer to practice. Skills, on the other hand, required face-to-face instruction. In order to solve the sorts of problems that fencing skills solve (that is, how to use physical and mental processes unique to fencing to best an opponent doing the same processes), it was necessary to practice against opponents: sometimes classmates (usually for practice), sometimes the instructor (usually for evaluation).

I don’t mind if a journalist never interviews an informant face-to-face in their journalism classes; they can do their work just fine without, even though face-to-face interviews are certainly a resource that many journalists rely on. A programmer or a designer can certainly master their skills in online environments with no detriment to their professional capacities. But I think we can all agree that some things should be face-to-face; we don’t want nurses who learn how to take blood pressure strictly as content rather than as practiced skills, and to practice those skills requires actual patients (whether their classmates or patients in a teaching hospital). We want our field scientists trained in the field; a chemist needs access to a lab, a geologist needs access to samples, a musician needs access to ensembles, etc in order to learn the skills that we expect of them.

There is no one-size-fits-all-disciplines answer to how to safely conduct education right now. There will, however, be a reckoning in all disciplines that requires returning to fundamentals and thinking about the purpose of each class, each lesson plan, in order to justify whatever risks and methods are used to teach it. In that evaluation of what we teach, why we teach, and how we teach, we’re going to have to ask what parts of our curriculum teach content, processes, and skills. And then we’re going to have to evaluate the processes and skills in particular to determine if those are things that can be taught remotely or that truly do require a specific setting for learning.