As I wrap up my Spring semester online courses, I'm starting to think about next Fall when (hopefully) our university will return to full in-person classes. Because of COVID, over the last year I have more-or-less turned 3 of my in-person courses into fully on-line courses. My main question here essentially is: what's the best way to change them back into in-person courses?
For one of these courses (call it "Course 1"), I was already half way through transitioning to a flipped-classroom and so being forced to record a bunch of video lectures just moved that along quicker. When we're back in-person, class time will consist of a short intro or review, mostly focus on students working on problems/homework in groups and presenting solutions, and finish with a quick summary.
For "Course 2" I can mostly do the same as Course 1, but I have very few in-class problem sets created. In-class group work was nonexistent in this course before and during COVID, but I can imagine working in that direction. Both Course 1 and 2 are courses that I've realized lecture alone isn't working as well as one would like, and so I'm happy to work toward giving students more time-on-task.
The main issue is "Course 3" which is a bit higher level than the other two. First of all, the thought of creating suitable problem sets for group work for even half of the class time is overwhelming. Pre-COVID the students in this class had a lot of success with a lecture-only format, so I feel less pressure to change the mode. Yet I now possess the whole course in video form, so certainly there's an advantage to be had somehow. It seems foolish to just return to what I was doing pre-COVID and keep all my digital materials secret from the in-person students.
I'm sure all of us are in a similar situation with our own individual nuances. So I'm looking for advice from anyone who has successfully turned an online course into an in-person course.
- What did you keep and make available for your in-person students?
- Was there anything pre-existing that you decided against using in order to re-create it live in the classroom (e.g. certain lectures)?
- We all know now that it takes a ton of writing/creating to go from in-person to online. How much new material did you have to write/create to move from online to in-person?
(Not that it really matters, but just in case: Course 1 and 2 are first and second semester calculus. Course 3 is an introduction to Discrete Math.)
