March 27, 2020
Dear Colleagues,
It has been over a week since you translated your courses online, and we want to reiterate our congratulations and sincere gratitude for the tremendous effort you have made, as we continue to educate our CMU students during these extraordinary circumstances.
We are also writing to share two important issues as you continue to make adjustments in your teaching practices.
- As you plan for upcoming online assessments, we strongly encourage you to convert intermittent high-stakes assessments (e.g., hour-long tests, finals, major papers) to more frequent, lower-stakes assessments (e.g., shorter, more frequent quizzes or short papers). This approach has several advantages: (1) it provides grading/feedback opportunities throughout the semester so instructors can more flexibly compute a representative grade (e.g., for work completed up to various points in time) if we should have disruptions in teaching continuity; (2) some faculty have concerns about the academic integrity of high-stakes assessment in the online/remote context, which may be ameliorated by more lower-stakes assessments and (3) it has been shown, through a large body of learning science research, that using many low-stakes assessments enhances students’ learning and retention. Note: Eberly will be hosting a webinar on this topic (and posting the recording with additional resources) on Wednesday, April 1st at 11 a.m. Pittsburgh time. Visit the webinars page for more details.
- If you are adding instructional videos or other activities to your students’ workload as a part of translating your course online, please remember that students’ weekly number of hours, on average, should be consistent with the number of units (for semester-long courses). Please be mindful of this issue and consider checking in with your students on their workload (let alone other issues), a strategy that many faculty have found quite revealing and helpful.
If you would like assistance in addressing these issues or with any other teaching or technology aspects of translating your courses online, please email eberly-assist@andrew.cmu.edu to request a 1:1 consultation.
Again, thank you for your hard work and dedication during this heavy lift. We know this has been a challenging time, and we are inspired by your creativity, commitment and resilience each day.
Sincerely,
Jim Garrett, Provost
Marsha Lovett, Associate Vice Provost and Director of the Eberly Center