Teaching at Norwich University

Summer 2021

I picked up some asynchonronous online Calculus 2 and Intermediate Algebra courses. These were already fully designed and supported with videos, otherwise I could not have kept up with the work. I viewed my primary role in these courses as setting clear expectations, keeping the students on schedule, and being there for them when they had questions. I held a couple office hours every weekday and a fair number of students showed up with questions. This is not my favorite way of teaching: asynchronous and compressed are challenging for students, but I believe I did the best I could with the limited time and resources.

Spring 2021

I lucked out and once again taught two sections of MA 101 (Mathematics: A Liberal Art) and one section of MA 232 (Elementary Statistics). I was happy for this opportunity to directly iterate on these classes. This semester was remote the whole time, but was initially planned to be hybrid at some point. In anticipation of the hybrid part (that never actually happened), I initially had the students broken into three groups and each group had one day a week to show up online and work through activities together. They were assigned videos to watch and problems to work through on the other days. When it became apparent that we were going to be remote all semester, I had everyone come in on the same day, and used the other two days a week for extended office hours. Those office hours came in handy as the students were guaranteed to be available at those times. For MA 232 I streamlined the topics we were covering and shortened the videos by a good amount. For MA 101, I made the class project based instead of exam based. This approach fit that style of class better and allowed us to dig deeper into applications. Once the students learned what a project was supposed to look like, they turned in some really interesting and good work. I need to tweak my rubrics and the instruction pages for the projects a bit, but I'm overall very happy using projects for MA 101.

Fall 2020

I taught two sections of Mathematics: A Liberal Art (MA 101 A and B) and two sections of Elementary Statistics (MA 232 F and G) in a hybrid format. For me, that meant that the course material was be available online and we met in smaller groups throughout the week to do activities related to the course material. After thanksgiving, we were completely remote. This was my first semester at Norwich, so I didn't have much time to prepare for these courses. I spent a lot of time making videos to support the classes. Some students loved the videos and particularly like being able to pause and go back. Others did not like the videos. The small group discussions in class were effective overall, and doing the exams and quizzes online freed up class time. Some of my videos for statistics were too long and MA 101 does not feel like a class that works well with exams.

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