The year is coming to an end. The summer and fall were challenging and… different. While I really miss the lab and energy from in-person teaching, I have honestly enjoyed learning about teaching online. The shift to remote instruction forced me to rethink the main goals and learning objectives of two courses I routinely teach: BIT 477/577 Metagenomics and BIT 479/579 High-throughput Discovery Science. Both are half-semester courses and driven largely by lab-based metagenomics or automation projects. For both courses I started the redesign — it truly became a redesign — by learning from DELTA workshops about Moodle course design and working on course maps. With lots of help from the NC State University Libraries, we infused open pedagogy and assignments in which students worked together to peer review and create video tutorials, podcasts, annotated paper summaries, or JoVE.com style manuscripts. We used Hypothes.is in both courses and similar teaching philosophy of “no throw away assignments”! Students knew about the opportunity to create public-facing products. This also helped us introduce credit, authorship, and privacy discussions: students could post their work anonymously, using pseudonyms, using their real name, or not post at all without repercussions to their course grade. The podcasts were individual assignments and had a peer review component. Jason Evan’s Groth from the Libraries met with each student for consultations! The final submissions were wonderful to hear… and learn what they did, who they interviewed, and how they mixed in music and sounds! In the High-throughput Discovery course, students created complete lessons with learning objectives and questions for the website. I still have to post and format the ones from this fall to include with the group from the spring. While we missed the lab component, I had fun and love the creative and inspiring assignments students completed instead of a typical exam. The projects demonstrated that students were able to synthesize several ideas and create accessible resources that will benefit future course participants, for example, I shared the metagenomics tutorials with Dr. Claire Gordy and Dr. Davida Smyth for their students. While there are many things I would change or redo including assignment timing, video lectures, adding some synchronous sessions, incorporating more structure to common notes… overall, we evaluated work and created new artifacts. Those are higher order skills! I’m happy and proud of the work and time students out into completely asynchronous self-directed courses! Thank you students for being patient, flexible, and willing to experiment and learn together!
Check out the course pages:
