April 13, 2020

This message is distributed to SBFACU-L, SBNSF-L, SBNSOTHER-L, and SBADM-L.  (Click here to view description of distribution groups.)  

The following is being sent on behalf of The Instructional Support Team
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Welcome to week 3! The Instructional Support Team is sending everyone well wishes for the new week. A few updates:

Zoom Security:  Zoom defaults are changing rapidly in response to concerns about Zoom bombing. Zoom now includes a "security" feature in the bottom bar next to “participants” that will more easily allow you to access features to control your Zoom chats. These features are available only on the Host machine.

Assessment of Student Learning:  Considering how to deliver your midterms? Need guidance on your GauchoSpace Quiz or Assignment settings? Feeling stuck? Reach out to help@collaborate.ucsb.edu for assistance or a Zoom consultation on best practices, or to get an expert to review your activity settings before you make it available to students. You can also contact Mindy Colin, Lisa Berry, or Linda Adler-Kassner to discuss designing those assessments.

If you are an existing iClicker user: i>clicker REEF for students: i>clicker is offering free Reef subscriptions for your students for Spring 2020. This will enable you to use i>clicker to conduct polls and get instant feedback from your students.  Students will respond to polls using the Reef app on their phones or the Reef web interface. i>clicker can be used in conjunction with Zoom. Note: Zoom also has built in polling that may be sufficient for most courses; i>clicker is advantageous if you already have polling questions written into your slides.

During this emergency remote teaching quarter, we recommend that you use i>clicker for engagement and feedback only, and that you do NOT use it to give course credit for attendance or performance. We ask that you rely on i>clicker for technical support, as local technical support systems are highly strained.

Featured Instructional Strategies: Pause-and-think and Zoom breakout rooms        
Professor Kathy Foltz (MCDB) offers suggestions for engagement using a combination of asynchronous and synchronous modes:

  • I'm delivering asynchronous content via Gauchocast; I've embedded questions as a "pause and think" strategy. I then offer an optional synchronous Zoom tutorial (scheduled during the class time) where we can discuss the questions and they are also posted to a Q&A discussion forum. Students report that this works - if they cannot zoom in, they can still access the basic content on the forum. This class is 250 students (advanced upper div) and we are seeing about 50-60% attendance in our optional synchronous sessions (including discussion sections with TAs)

Professor Lin Atnip (Religious Studies) describes using Zoom breakout rooms as opportunities for students to engage with reading:

  • I used Zoom's Breakout Rooms feature to allow students in a large class to interact with each other more intimately, encourage participation by students who don't usually talk, and to change things up in a long seminar to keep students engaged. I gave each group a small section of text to discuss (when you click "Breakout Rooms" and choose the option to split the class automatically into the desired number of groups, you can see who will be in each group before you actually send them to their "rooms"--this allows you to assign them their readings while still gathered in the plenary session; e.g. "Carlos's group will discuss this passage," etc.). I split them up for 5 minutes (this may have been too short a period of time), then reconvened everyone and had them briefly report on their discussion/interpretation. The short tutorial on using this feature can be found here.

We want to hear what you are doing, too! Submit your strategies via this link. 

Have a great day, and we’ll be back with more news as the week unfolds.

The Instructional Support Team