By Stacy Palen

As I adapt to teaching online this fall, I find that the one thing I really need students to know how to do on their own is read the textbook. I’ve always assumed they knew this skill because I remember being in high school, checking out the textbook at the beginning of the year and taking it back and forth to school with me. Maybe you remember making covers out of brown paper bags to protect the books… and I remember teachers explaining some kind of note-taking method in great detail that I used for a while and then adapted to my own purposes.

But this falls in the realm of “things aren’t what they used to be.” Some schools now have classroom sets of texts that students do not take home. Some don’t use books at all but use free online materials. Some have ebooks but not hard copies. And even for students who do have traditional hard-copy texts that they can take back and forth, some of them never received instruction on how to read them.

This is interesting, because I have never taken ten minutes of class time to explain to students that reading a textbook is not like reading Harry Potter. Nor have I taken ten minutes to give them a strategy for approaching this kind of reading. It just never occurred to me. (I have given entire assignments to my upper-division classes about how to read a journal article, but that’s pretty specialized.) As I think about what I really need students to do while learning in an online environment, the textbook looms larger, rather than smaller, in my mind. Well, then. If that’s true, I guess I’d better tell them how to do it.

To this end, I made a video, about 10 minutes long, in which I explain my textbook-reading process. This is not a perfect process; it’s not the best process; and it might not be the process you use. But it’s a process that gets students thinking about textbook reading as a skill that they can learn and then adapt to their own needs.

I’m pretty pleased with how the video turned out. I made it on my iPad; I used the “Screen Recording” feature in the “Settings” to capture what I was doing in Notability. Then I edited it in iMovie and uploaded it to Kaltura. There is a little 8-second, University-specific boilerplate introduction that I asked our Marketing/Communications team to make for me so I can drop it into all of the videos I make in the future. This 10-minute video took me about 3 hours to make, but I didn’t know what I was doing. Going forward, I think I can cut that time roughly in half; I need to plan for about 10 minutes of work for each minute of finished video.

I’ll be making more of these, so let me know in the “Comments” section below if there’s a particular video topic that you need. If you need it, other people probably do, too! I’ll see what I can get done.

By Stacy Palen

No one knows what this fall semester is going to look like, and it stresses me out!

We might be back in normal face-to-face classes, but we might be back at half-capacity. Or we might be all online. Or we might start face-to-face, and then the second wave will hit, and we’ll have to go online for the rest of the semester. Or maybe we’ll just have to go online for two weeks, when there is a local outbreak. Or we might need to have replacement materials available for students so they don’t feel compelled to come to class when they are sick. Or maybe none of the above, because of the Yellowstone supervolcano, which I hear is currently scheduled for August…just kidding…I think.

In an effort to get control over the things I can control, I’ve started planning my fall courses as both face-to-face and online, in parallel. This means double the work, but given the magnitude of the uncertainties, it feels prudent.

As I have been thinking about this, and starting to organize resources and activities for students, I’ve also started to make a list of the things that are missing, and I’m figuring out how to pull them together.

Over the next few months, I’ll share what I’m doing to get prepared here on the blog. I’ll be making short videos for students about study skills, such as a “How to Read a Textbook” one, as well as other videos introducing and summarizing each chapter of the textbook. There will also be open-ended questions for LMS discussions that I can factor into students’ grades, and there will be web resources, such as “Using the Web” problems, which can also be found at the end of the textbook. And lots of other things that I haven’t thought out fully yet.

Many of us have taught online for a long time, and many of us have an online section; others, however, do not. I know that, for myself, moving four different courses (not just Introductory Astronomy) into the online environment before the end of August is…overwhelming.

I’m sure we are all feeling frazzled and overwhelmed, so let’s be frazzled and overwhelmed together! I hope you’ll share your clever ideas, resources, online or at-home activities, methods for interacting with students, and so on, in the “Comments” section below. Or drop me a line, and you can even guest-write a post about your idea!