Center for Teaching & Learning Sara Brenneis (Spanish)

I will record two separate videos – the intro video will be a little less formal (I may record in my yard or around my house, with my kids in the mix) on my iPhone, whereas the orientation video I will do in my office or home office on Zoom to go over the structure of the LMS and how I expect the students to navigate the course. 

I hope to communicate 1) that I am a real person, with a home life and my own interests and distractions, just like them, in the first video and 2) that I can get down to business in terms of focusing on the nuts and bolts of the course, just as I hope they will be able to do, in the orientation video. 

I plan to include a Q & A discussion forum in Moodle so that students can ask questions about the course structure and content in a low stakes way before the class gets under way. I will be sure to respond to the forum in the days leading up to and after the first class meeting. 

In the first synchronous class, I plan to ask students – those in the tent as well as those tuning in remotely – to bring a “protest object,” something that represents a protest movement, or that they themselves have used to protest, or an image that speaks to them about a protest movement, to share with the class. This will be an icebreaker activity that also directly relates to the content of the course and to the students’ own personal engagement with the topic. 

After this icebreaker activity, I plan to assign accountability groups and then have them separate out into break out rooms in Zoom. In the breakout rooms, I will ask students to engage in a small group discussion about the objects their peers brought, as well as to exchange contact information and ‘best way to reach me’ information with each other. I will use these accountability groups either in this first session or a subsequent session to formulate goals for the course that the students will share among themselves.