Someone to Teach With

April 17, 2020
Bok Center staff on Zoom meeting

On the morning of Tuesday, 10 March, Harvard’s faculty, students, and staff logged on to their email to find unprecedented news from president Larry Bacow: in just under two weeks (including Spring Break), Harvard would move instruction online, with the vast majority of its students off campus and taught remotely through Zoom, Canvas, and other digital means. The university’s sudden move to remote teaching and learning was obviously tremendously disruptive to students, who had to pack their belongings and find new accommodations, whether with family, friends, or elsewhere. It also meant that the University’s thousands of faculty and graduate student Teaching Fellows suddenly were recast in the new and unfamiliar role of online instructor. With the exception of the (relatively modest) number who had taught an online course through HarvardX and/or the Division of Continuing Education, most instructors in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences had only learned of the existence of tools like Zoom a few days prior to discovering that they would be using them, exclusively, to interact with their students.

While remote teaching initially struck just about everyone as something new, bewildering, and disruptive, at the Bok Center we were prepared to adapt what we already know and do with Harvard instructors to the new environment.

We quickly activated our partnerships with colleagues in the Office of Undergraduate Education and Academic Technology for the FAS, as well as in the libraries, museums, and other campus support units, to develop a series of programs and resources that would help faculty not only to master the technical aspects of online teaching, but also to think deeply about how to translate their goals and priorities into activities and experiences that would make sense for students who were also adapting to new technologies and the new realities of life in the era of COVID-19. Specifically, we offered faculty five ways to connect with us:

  • Dozens of faculty signed up for individual consultations with our Senior Staff, during which we discussed everything from how to hold remote office hours, to how to adapt capstone assignments and final exams, to how to help faculty consider how to provide emotional support to students in a time of stress and uncertainty

  • Hundreds of faculty tuned in for one or more of the 27 faculty meet-ups which we co-hosted with the Office of Undergraduate Education. These meet-ups covered topics ranging from general classroom management to assigning group work, proctoring exams, and teaching labs online, and provided a forum for faculty to ask questions and compare notes with each other and members of the Bok Staff and OUE

  • Over Spring Break several dozen faculty signed up for Practice Teaching sessions, in which they met in small groups over Zoom with one or two member of Bok’s senior staff to try out various online teaching strategies, including ways to share slides and other media and how to use Zoom Breakout Rooms to facilitate small group discussion in large courses

Zoom Offerings for Faculty

  • During the first week of remote teaching, Bok, OUE, and Academic Technology co-organized a program which placed a volunteer trained in using Zoom in over 100 faculty’s virtual classrooms to help them get off the ground and troubleshoot any issues during their initial course meetings after the transition. The program, which drew on volunteers from all across the support staff of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, was a tremendous success, and served as a visible reminder to faculty and students alike that they were not alone in learning and adapting to these new instructional mediums.

  • Finally, we have developed an entirely new portion of our website, Teaching Remotely, which offers advice, instructions, and examples of effective ways to teach online. Since it launched on 9 March, the site has received thousands of unique visitors and has continued to grow at a rapid pace, as we hear from students as well as instructors about their successes as well as their new and ongoing questions about teaching and learning remotely.

If you would like to take advantage of the Bok Center’s resources, whether to follow up on an idea you’ve been considering or to ask about new ways to meet your goals online, we invite you to visit our Teaching Remotely web pages and sign up for an online consultation!