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Author: Jason S. Todd

Jason S. Todd is the Director of the Center for the Advancement of Teaching & Faculty Development at Xavier University of Louisiana. He has also served as the Faculty Director of the Core Curriculum, Director of the Digital Humanities Program, QEP Director, and Writing Center Director. Todd completed his Ph.D. at the University of Southern Mississippi in 2006 and his undergraduate studies at Webster University in 1996. His short stories and articles have appeared in journals such as Southern Literary Journal, Southern California Review, Chicago Quarterly Review, Fiction Weekly, and Xavier Review. He teaches courses on American literature, comics and graphic novels, and genre fiction. He is the instructor of the popular transdisciplinary course Dystopias, Real & Imagined. He also serves as contributing editor for the Xavier Review and a troop leader and merit badge counselor for Scouting America.

About Jason S. Todd

Jason S. Todd is the Director of the Center for the Advancement of Teaching & Faculty Development at Xavier University of Louisiana. He has also served as the Faculty Director of the Core Curriculum, Director of the Digital Humanities Program, QEP Director, and Writing Center Director. Todd completed his Ph.D. at the University of Southern Mississippi in 2006 and his undergraduate studies at Webster University in 1996. His short stories and articles have appeared in journals such as Southern Literary Journal, Southern California Review, Chicago Quarterly Review, Fiction Weekly, and Xavier Review. He teaches courses on American literature, comics and graphic novels, and genre fiction. He is the instructor of the popular transdisciplinary course Dystopias, Real & Imagined. He also serves as contributing editor for the Xavier Review and a troop leader and merit badge counselor for Scouting America.

While we can hope that this Tuesday won’t bring “something awful,” we must recognize that it will likely feel even more charged than 2008 or 2016. With that in mind, I’ve been thinking about how to best support my students following this year’s election.
Published on Leave a comment on So Restless Indeed
The title for this blog post comes from Arcadia's song "Election Day," which has nothing whatsoever to do with the American political system. However, a 2021 study suggests that listening to 80s pop music can be an effective means of lowering anxiety.

Election Day in the U.S. is Tuesday, November 5—and it’s safe to say that most Americans are not only well aware of that fact but are also bracing for the emotionally charged days likely to follow. I’ve been reflecting on how to approach those expectations in my class next week.

I began teaching at Xavier in the fall of 2007, so I recall teaching on Wednesday, November 5, 2008, the day after Barack Obama was elected; I also remember teaching on Wednesday, November 9, 2016, the day after Donald Trump’s election. On both occasions, I was unprepared for the strong emotions expressed by my students. Both times, I ended up setting aside my planned activities to give students an opportunity to share what they were feeling. Was that the right decision? I’m not entirely sure. But in both instances, students seemed to appreciate my willingness to create a space for discussion.

According to Huston & DiPietro (2007), when responding to a stressful event, “an instructor’s response need not be complicated, time intensive, or even personalized.” Their study focused on faculty responses to collective tragedies, but their findings apply to other situations that bring up intense emotions. Students in their study often reported frustration when faculty ignored a major event and gratitude when instructors acknowledged that something impactful had occurred.

While we can hope that this Tuesday won’t bring “something awful,” we must recognize that it will likely feel even more charged than 2008 or 2016. With that in mind, I’ve been thinking about how to best support my students following this year’s election.

The Center for Teaching Excellence at Boston College encourages faculty to consider several factors when planning post-election classes:

  • Your comfort level: What are you comfortable discussing with students? Self-care is essential. Avoid engaging in topics that may elevate your own stress.
  • Student burnout: Are students able to engage in discussion? This has been a long, complex election year. Students might not have the cognitive or emotional energy to process the results immediately.
  • Connection to learning: How does this fit with the course content? For some students, discussing the election results might be more meaningful if there’s a clear link to course objectives.
  • Classroom community: How might this fit within your classroom’s culture? By now, you probably have a good sense of how your students engage with one another and their comfort level in discussing sensitive topics.

If any of these factors lead you to decide against dedicating an entire class to the election results, the team at the Center for Research on Learning and Teaching (CRLT) at the University of Michigan suggests a few smaller steps faculty can take:

  • Acknowledge the situation. By openly recognizing the election, we show students that we understand its impact on them. Huston & DiPietro (2007) found that students felt more unsettled when faculty didn’t respond to significant events at all.
  • Make learning adjustments. When students are stressed, their ability to learn can suffer. Consider temporarily easing your expectations. As Jin (2017) points out, external stressors can greatly hinder a student’s capacity to engage and retain new information.
  • Share campus resources. Most faculty aren’t trained as therapists, as Field (2023) reminds us. Sometimes the best support we can offer is to connect students with campus resources.

This election year, I won’t be in class on Wednesday, but I’ll let students know that they’re welcome to stop by my office for coffee and a friendly conversation. I’ll also be reducing the workload for the week, to give everyone a little more space to process the results—whatever they may be.

References

It’s only mid-October, but many of us are already thinking ahead to the end of the semester. Students may be anticipating Final Exams and tickets home, but I’m thinking about something a little different—course evaluations.
Published on Leave a comment on Take Control of Your Course Evaluations

It’s only mid-October, but many of us are already thinking ahead to the end of the semester. Students may be anticipating Final Exams and tickets home, but I’m thinking about something a little different—course evaluations.

You might remember the old days of carbon-copy forms, sealed envelopes, and drop boxes in the Old Convent. Thankfully, we’ve moved to Brightspace for evaluations, saving us from those logistical headaches. No more setting aside class time, reading out scripted instructions, or finding that one student willing to trek across campus with a stack of forms. Now, it’s just a matter of reminding students (again and again) to log into Brightspace and click on the evaluation link.

But why am I thinking about this now, in the middle of October? At Xavier, not every course is evaluated every semester. Only first-year faculty have all of their courses evaluated; non-tenured faculty, after their first year, have two randomly selected courses evaluated each semester; tenured faculty only have one randomly selected class evaluated each year. However, faculty can request evaluations for any or all of their courses.

We recently received a reminder from the Provost that the deadline to request additional evaluations is Monday, October 21. You can submit your request here.

Why You Should Consider Requesting Evaluations

Since earning tenure, I’ve requested evaluations for most of my classes. Why? There are several reasons:

  • Consistency: If one class is being evaluated, why not all? Having evaluations for all my courses provides a clearer, more comprehensive picture of my teaching performance.
  • Certainty: What if my best class of the semester isn’t randomly selected? By requesting evaluations, I ensure I capture the most insightful feedback.
  • Depth: The more evaluations I collect, the more data I have to work with. This richer dataset allows me to identify trends, strengths, and areas for improvement over time.

Course evaluations offer valuable insights into our teaching. The more data we gather, the richer the story we can tell about our teaching journey. While I’m no data expert, even basic visualizations help me make sense of patterns. For instance, this chart compares my positive and negative responses over the years.

A horizontal bar chart displaying various evaluation categories related to a program or service, rated from Poor to Excellent.
Fall 2007 to Spring 2022. This chart offers a comparison between positive (Excellent or Good) responses and negative (Fair or Poor) responses.

In addition to quantitative data, tools like ChatGPT can help summarize qualitative feedback. For example, I recently used it to analyze student comments on my strengths as a teacher. One recurring theme? Supportiveness and understanding. Students often appreciate how I listen to their concerns and adapt based on feedback.

What you do with the data is up to you, but one thing is clear: You can’t benefit from feedback you don’t collect. Whether you’re in your second year or your 18th or your 42nd, consider requesting evaluations for one or more of your classes this semester. The insights you gain might surprise you.

Established in 1994, CAT+FD is one of the older centers for teaching and learning (CTL) in the country. This is perhaps not surprising considering Xavier's commitment to excellence in teaching. Over the coming year, we will be posting a variety of reflections about the evolution of CAT+FD on this blog.
Published on Leave a comment on CAT+FD at 30, Part 1
The 30th anniversary version of the CAT+FD logo
A special logo for our trigintennial!
Original by Jim Rose.
Adapted by Bart Everson.

By now, everyone at Xavier knows that the university will be celebrating its centennial in 2025. Not everyone may realize that CAT+FD is currently celebrating its
30th anniversary. (I think it's a shame we've let a word like trigintennial fall out of common use.) Since this is my first year as director, I thought I'd use this space to reflect on how things have changed over the past 30 years.

Established in 1994, CAT+FD is one of the older centers for teaching and learning (CTL) in the country. This is perhaps not surprising considering Xavier's commitment to excellence in teaching. Over the coming year, we will be posting a variety of reflections about the evolution of CAT+FD on this blog. If you're interested in a deep dive into the history and evolution of CTLs in general, pick up a copy of Mary C. Wright's excellent Centers for Teaching and Learning: The New Landscape in Higher Education (2023, Johns Hopkins University Press).

Page one from the CAT News Report, Vol. 1, No. 1, May 1994
The first edition of the CAT News Report. Click the image for a PDF of the newsletter.

CTLs came about, in part, through the recognition that while graduate programs were doing excellent work developing their students into expert scholars in their disciplines, they were not always doing a good job of developing their students into expert teachers. However, because of the timing, the earliest CTLs placed a lot of emphasis on what would eventually become know and educational technology, or EdTech. In the inaugural issue of the Center for the Advancement of Teaching News Report, Dr. Ann Barron, then interim director, explained that the the new Center was committed "to advancing the art of teaching — at ALL levels — in a technological age," an interesting and significant distinction. That issue includes an article about the first Kellogg Mini-grant awards, which supported faculty interested in revising one of their classes, and an article about using Apple's HyperCard to create "multimedia courseware".

The link between CTLs and technology should not be surprising. Consider the year CAT+FD began (for newer readers, CAT+FD was originally just CAT). 1994 was a particularly significant year in terms of publicly available technology. That year, Netscape Communications released Netscape Navigator, which would become the first widely used web browser; Sony released the PlayStation, which, now in its fifth generation, is still one of the most widely used gaming consoles; Sun Microsystems introduced the Java programming language, one of the most influential programming languages; and Kodak released its DC40 camera, one of the first consumer-level digital cameras. The world changed that year, and CTLs like CAT+FD stepped up to help faculty adapt to those changes.

Thirty years later, CAT+FD continues to be true to that original committee, even as the scope of our work has expanded. We are committed to supporting faculty in all aspects of their career in this ever-evolving technological age. Whether faculty want become expert users of our LMS, Brightspace, or improve their student mentoring, whether they want to learn how to incorporate artificial intelligence into their classes or ways to embrace a pedagogy of kindness, CAT+FD continues to provide faculty with the resources they need to shape their professional lives at Xavier.

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Published on 1 Comment on Goodbye, Google! Part 2
Google 2015 logo
On Dec. 17, Xavier faculty and staff accounts will be migrated from Google to Microsoft.

Last week, I wrote about my experiments with Google's Takeout service (get it?) to move some (but not all) of the documents on my XULA Google Drive to my personal Google Drive. As I noted, Takeout works best, in my opinion, for very targetted exports and migrations. This week, I want to talk about a related but also separate concern: YouTube videos.

As you probably already know, Google owns YouTube. Xavier's switch to Google came not long after I embraced inverted teaching, often called flipping the classroom. I've been posting videos of lectures (20 minutes or more), mini-lectures (usually between 10 and 15 minutes), and micro-lectures (less than 10 minutes [ideally less than five minutes {according to Bart}]) for several years now and have over 100 on my YouTube channel. (Those definitions are my own, by the way.) So when I learned about our planned migration from Google to Microsoft, I worried about what would happen to my YouTube videos. My understanding is that our videos will not be removed from YouTube. Anything we have uploaded to our Xavier-based YouTube accounts will remain where it is, meaning it will be accessible and, if set as publicly accessible, included in any relevant search results. However, since my Xavier-based Google account will no longer be active, I won't be able to access those videos as the channel owner, meaning I won't be able to edit them or delete them. They will be frozen in cyberspace.

I'm not going to focus here on how I might continue posting videos for my students. Maybe that's a topic for another blog post (although I seem to be running out of time for all these blog post ideas). Instead, I will focus simply on how I plan on maintaining full control over the videos I have previously created and posted to YouTube. Once again, please remember: What follows are a few things I've tried out of personal concern and curiosity, things that I thought I would share with my colleagues, in case they have similar concerns. Just to be clear, CAT+FD is not involved in the Google to Microsoft migration, and we are not advising any actions by faculty and staff.

...continue reading "Goodbye, Google! Part 2"

Published on Leave a comment on Goodbye, Google! Part I
Google 2015 logo
Google Inc., Public domain,
via Wikimedia Commons

I started using Google's applications (often called G-Suite) back when Google's motto was still "Don't be evil," so when Xavier switched us all over to Google in 2015, I was pretty pleased. Over the years, I've amassed a massive amount of data on my Xavier-based Google Drive and YouTube account, and I've pretty much stopped using my personal Google account. When we learned this past summer that Xavier would be migrating all of our accounts from Google to Microsoft, I panicked. Not only do I greatly dislike Microsoft's products, but I also have a ton of work that I was worried about. We've been told that all of the files on our Google Drives will be moved and translated to Microsoft's Office 360 system, and that only Google Forms will not survive the process. However, we've also been told that although our YouTube accounts will not disappear, we will not be able to manage them any more. Apparently, those videos will just sit on YouTube's servers with no one having any editorial control over them.

...continue reading "Goodbye, Google! Part I"

Published on Leave a comment on Hanging on the Telephone

Debbie Harry using a rotary telephone.
"I'm in the phone booth; it's the one across the hall"

Thanks to Hurricane Ida, I'm getting to see what it's like for those students who have to, for a variety of reasons, do their schoolwork on a smartphone, and it's making me think about our reliance on education technology and the assumptions we make about our students. We need to think about how our use of technology might make learning even more difficult for some of our students.

We drove to Tallahassee to get away from the storm, returning on Tuesday, August 31, after ensuring that the roads were clear enough to get back to our house. We knew we wouldn't have power (or internet) when we got back, but we wanted to check on our house as soon as we could, since we live out in the country and have lots of pine trees in our yard. Our electricity came back on the following Tuesday, the same day Xavier reopened remotely, but our internet service is still out (the data cable is still lying in my front yard).

I am now on Day 18 without access to reliable high-speed internet service. At our house, we have our cell phones; however, since the storm, we have not been able to get more than one bar of signal.  Meanwhile, I still have work that needs to be done and requires access to the internet. Also thanks to Ida, we have very bad cellular service at our house -- one bar, at best -- and we are using way more data than we're supposed to.

A message from AT&T that we've gone over our data cap.
We went over our 9GB data cap for this cycle in just six days.

What all this means is that my highly connected life, in which I could work any time I needed to, has come to a grinding halt. I've repeatedly told colleagues and students that I will respond when I can, and that short text messages are actually the most reliable means of communication for me. I'm sure for some, I sound like I'm making excuses and trying to avoid work.

Responsive Pedagogy, Not Just Responsive Design

During the two weeks of asynchronous learning means everything is done in Brightspace, our LMS, which is fine, because I do everything in Brightspace anyway. After the past 18 months of remote teaching, I decided everything for my classes, even my face-to-face classes, would take full advantage of Brightspace. I don't even have a document called a syllabus anymore: instead, I have a number of pages in Brightspace that provide all that informatiom. Working in Brightspace when you have a full-sized monitor (or even two monitors) plus a high-speed internet connection is great. Working in Brightspace on a phone with an okay cellular signal is manageable, but barely so. The screens are slow to load, and sometimes they don't load at all. Uploading a PDF takes a very, very long time. Some screens, especially administrative screens with lots of settings, are hard to manage on a phone. And if you forget one little detail, you have to go through the whole laborious process again.

Some will ask why I don't just go somewhere with reliable wifi. I spent one Sunday in Hattiesburg at USM's library to do this -- and got a ton of work done, but that was a four-hour round-trip drive (although we were also able to load up on gas for the generator). The next day, I drove Baton Rouge, a three-hour round trip drive, and again got a ton of work done (that was Labor Day, by the way). Meanwhile, no one was cleaning up my yard or cleaning out my refrigerator or keeping an eye on my dogs who can't go outside because our fence is damaged. No one was talking to my insurance company about my car that got squashed by an oak tree.

Chart comparing digital byte units.
Wikipedia contributors. (2021, September 17). Byte. In Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved 18:55, September 18, 2021, from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byte

I'm privileged to be experiencing this during a major disaster, when compassion is more accessible. AT&T says they won't charge me for going over my data plan (although yesterday they started throttling our data rate to 128 kbps (yes, kilobytes)). Imagine doing this just because it's all you can afford to do. Imagine trying to do your work on your phone while sitting in the parking lot of a fast food restaurant because their wifi is better than your cell service. Imagine trying to look at PowerPoint slides full of small text on a 6-inch screen. Imagine having to cram all your work into one three-hour block of time because that's all you can afford to leave your house for.

All of us in academia try to balance our school work with our non-school responsibilities. It's a tough juggling act, and no one of us does it the same way.

I guess my point is that while I have always said I understood that some students might need to do their schoolwork on their phones. While I've always said I understood that some students are juggling multiple responsibilities that have nothing to do with school along with all their schoolwork, I've never understood just how difficult it is to do.

The advancements we've seen in educational technology over these past two decades have been really amazing. But #EdTech assumes a lot about the students (and the teachers). It assumes we have the personal infrastructure you use the technology, and for some reason, it also assumes that we that infrastructure allows for constant access to the technology. These are really bad assumptions to make. Demanding that students turn on their webcams during Zoom classes (What if they don't have a webcam? What if their internet connection isn't good enough to upload the video stream?) or expecting them to simply be able to do all of their work on a computer -- these are lousy assumptions.

Compassion means we need to make other assumptions, though. Compassion means we need to assume that our students are struggling as much (and probably more) than we are with COVID and Ida and Nicholas and parents and kids and bills and so forth. Before we automatically assume that our students can hop online and do whatever important work we want them to do, let's stop and think about why they might not be able to. Let's try to provide them with an education that is responsive to their needs rather than one responsive to just ours.

Published on Leave a comment on From Google to LibCal
HAL 9000, the computer from the movie '2001: A Space Odyssey'
"It can only be
attributable to
human error."

When I started working in CAT+FD, way back in 2015, faculty who were interested in attending one of our workshops would send an email saying they were interested in attending that workshop. It was not a particular efficient system, as someone had to regularly check the CAT Box (our name for that email account) and update the list of attendees. As many people know, I'm a big fan of automation: any system that can be set up to work on its own, should be set up to work on its own. It saves time and cuts down on mistakes. So, I started playing with Google Forms and Google Sheets, and by the end of that first year, I'd built a system that let people register and that created an always up-to-date list of attendees for each of our upcoming workshops without the need for anyone in the CAT+FD office to do anything.

That system has worked (I think) pretty well for the past five years. There have been a few hiccups along the way, as there usually are with an automated system, but those were few and far between. Since its launch, we've had over 2,000 registrations recorded through the system. (No, we don't keep any records of those registrations.) When, in March 2019, we had to rapidly pivot to fully online workshops, changing the system required only a few small changes.

This summer when we learned that Xavier faculty and staff would be migrated from G-Suite to Microsoft 365, we knew that was the end of our hombrewed system. Even though we've been told that all of the documents in our Google Drives will be converted for us to the corresponding Microsoft application, the system itself is heavily dependent upon functions that only work in Google. Transferring the system to Microsoft would require starting mostly from scratch.

Fortunately, our friends and colleagues in the Library have given us space on their LibCal account, which includes its own events management system. Although it works in much the same way, it does look different in many ways. And it also offers a few new features that we think will be very useful. If you take a look at the CAT+FD home page, you won't notice much of a difference: we're still listing the next few events with links to more information. Likewise, our full events page, which lists all of our upcoming events, doesn't look all that much differece. And again, our weekly email won't look all that different either. However, when you click on the link for any event from those sources to get more information or to register for the event, things will start to look different.

A screen capture of the information page for an event listed in LibCal.
The pages for each of our events are where you will see the main difference with this system.

As you can see above, this screen is very different from what you might be used to, and this blog post is mostly just to prepare you for that change. In addition to the different visuals, please note that you can now print the information about an event, save an event to your calendar, or post about an event to social media (We'd love it if you did that! Be sure to tag us @xulacat if you do!). We've also been able to add categories to our workshops, which will help us keep things more organized and may help you identify workshops that interest you. For example, if you wanted to just see a list of our upcoming #LEX Advanced workshops, you can do that now.

Another change is how the registration process works and the format of our workshops, but I will save that for another blog post.

Published on Leave a comment on To Merge or Not to Merge

A lot of faculty at Xavier have found, when they are teaching multiple sections of the same class, that it is helpful to merge those sections on Brightspace. Janice recently posted about the process to get your courses merged, so I won't go into those details. Instead, this post is going to consider the rather unique challenge many of our faculty will face this fall: teaching one section online and one in person.

...continue reading "To Merge or Not to Merge"

Published on Leave a comment on EdPuzzle, Edward Snowden, & Square Pegs

All we have to do is click with the right clique.

Anyone who has spoken with me in the past month knows that I am not a fan of synchronous remote teaching. Beyond the basic belief that teaching in the classroom and teaching online are two radically different pedagogies (in other words, A ≠ B (in other words, "You can't fit a square peg into a round hole")), there is the greater problem of imposed pedagogy -- requiring faculty to teach in a specific way rather than empowering them to teach in the way they think best. Moreover, the use of Zoom and other teleconferencing systems as a means of achieving that required synchrony have raised other concerns, such as the unfortunately named zoombombing, wherein bad actors disrupt the virtual classroom, often with hate speech, and the as yet unnamed problem of invading our students privacy.

Despite all that, I have done my best to follow the expectation to meet online with my classes according to the original class schedule, and to be honest, many of those meetings have not gone well, in part because getting students to engage in a large-group synchronous discussion online is even more difficult than getting them to do so in person. I find they are more willing to do small group discussions, using Zoom's Breakout Rooms function (here's a quick tutorial on setting up Breakout Rooms), but I have learned over the years that while consistency in teaching is good, redundancy in teaching is not good. So, I've been trying to find ways to run my classes that give them work that both challenges them but that keeps them connected to the actual class.

Photograph of Edward Snowden
Edward Snowden / CC BY

One of the classes I'm teaching this semester is called Dystopias, Real & Imagined (I think I deserve some kind of award for that level of prescience, to be honest), so for the past six weeks, I've been able to do a lot more just-in-time teaching than I had anticipated. Last weekend, I came across a video interview with Edward Snowden talking about the risks to civil liberties that come with the COVID-19 pandemic. Under normal circumstances, I would have posted the link to Brightspace and told the students to watch it on their own before Thursday's class, since under those normal circumstances, I don't like using class time to deliver content. Given our current circumstances, I thought about using Zoom's screen sharing function to watch the video together during class, but I've seen other people try this, and the video usually ends up being unwatchable (choppy audio and such).

So I did what I often find myself doing and borrowed an idea from my wife, who teaches high school English. Since going remote at her school, she has been using EdPuzzle, a site that lets you create assignments by embedding videos and inserting questions and commentary at specific points during the video. While this can be used to simply test understanding/attention (by asking a simple multiple choice question about something that was just said in the video), they can also be used to encourage/demonstrate critical thinking and to prepare students for a post-video discussion.

Active Listening

At one point in the video, Snowden starts to talk about the expanded surveillance powers the federal government gave itself after 9/11. Before he does so, I inserted a multiple choice question that asked students when they thought those emergency powers were retracted. After they answered the question, the video resumed, and Snowden gave them the correct answer. (Take a look at the screen shot below for the answer.)

Screenshot of the multiple choice question about the Patriot Act.
A question like this one about the Patriot Act prompts students to speculate on what is about to be discussed in the video. Prediction is a key function of active learning.

Screen shot of the question as presented to students during the video.
Making personal connections to course content is another important aspect of critical thinking.

At another point, Snowden explains how our cellphones are being used to analyze social distancing at the local level. Here I paused the video and gave the students a more complex task by asking them to use Unacast's Social Distancing Scoreboard, a site that uses the data Snowden discusses in the video, to look up the county in which they are currently living. Although the text box seems small, it expands with whatever the students type. A few of my students wrote short essays on why they think their home counties are getting such bad grades for social distancing.

One of the best functions of EdPuzzle is that you can prevent students from skipping ahead or even going backwards, so in order to answer these questions, they had to watch the entire 22-minute video. While this is a useful way to monitor student engagement, it's also, I think a way to make the task more transparent -- the system makes it impossible for the student to misunderstand what is being asked of them. Moreover, EdPuzzle tracks everything they do with the video -- when they started it, how much of it they watched. For the MC questions, EdPuzzle will automatically grade them; whereas for the open-ended questions, I went through after class and read each one and awarded the points.

To be honest, I was hesitant to use this. The interface for EdPuzzle is clearly designed for grade school teachers, as are many of the settings (EdPuzzle integrates very well with Google Classroom, but not at all with Brightspace). Also, sometimes my students get frustrated with my attempts to trick them into learning more actively. Two things convinced me I was wrong to worry though. First, about a third of my students, without any prompting, told me how much they enjoyed this activity.

this is a really cool activity

Second, once everyone was done with the video (after probably about 40 minutes, since some wrote really long answers), we had the best discussion we've had since going remote. Both these things really moved me. I don't know about you, but this past week, the students have really seemed to sink deeper into the malaise they've been in since going remote. They've been a lot less engaged, so it was great to see that must natural positivity coming through the screen.

Published on Leave a comment on Using Zoom for Office Hours

If you're like me, you spent a lot of time in the past week thinking about how you will hold your classes online, but not a lot of time thinking about how you will hold your office hours online. Office hours don't usually require much forethought. You show up and deal with whatever comes up.

But now we need to think about our office hours, in particular, how we will make ourselves available to our students during those times. There are a number of options for doing this, including Virtual Classroom and Google Hangouts. I've decided to use Zoom, since that's what I'm using for my synchronous class meetings. But instead of creating a new Zoom meeting for every office hour (which would make for a real mess every time I log into Zoom, even if I just did recurring meetings), I'm going to use my Personal Meeting Room in Zoom.

Personal Meeting Room

Zoom's Personal Meeting Room is a meeting you set up once (although you can change the settings whenever you want), but that you can start and stop whenever you want. This way, there's only one URL you need to provide your students. It's sort of like telling your student where your office is on the first day of class. Once they now where it is (theoretically) you never have to tell them again.

For the most part, setting up your Personal Meeting Room is the same as setting up any other meeting in Zoom, but you don't give it a special name or description, and you don't have to worry about any scheduling details. To change the settings, click on the Personal Meeting Room tab.

The toolbar for Meetings on the Xula.Zoom.Us web site.
The tabs available when on the meetings page on the Xula.Zoom.Us site.

The toolbar for Meetings when in Brightspace.
The tabs available when on the meetings page on the Zoom page in Brightspace.

Branding

One of the nice options with the Personal Meeting Room is that you can change the Join URL to make it more personal. Whereas with regular meetings, you just use whatever 9-digit code the system generates for you, with your Personal Meeting Room, you can customize the link. This makes it easier to for students to remember (just like how they remember your office location). It also gives you the opportunity to do a little personal branding.

A screenshot of the Zoom page listing the settings for my Personal Meeting Room.
With Personal Meeting Rooms, you can customize the Join URL to make them easier to remember (and to do a little personal branding).

Screenshot of the main menu on the Xula.Zoom.Us web site.
The profile settings, and many others, are only accessible by logging into Xula.Zoom.Us.

However, you don't change it on the Edit This Meeting page. Instead, you need go into Profile, but you can only do this through the Xula.Zoom.Us web site. You can't access your profile settings by going in through Brightspace. When you log into Xula.Zoom.Us, you'll see the following menu on the left of the screen. Click on PROFILE, and you'll be able to change a number of details about your account, including the profile picture that will appear in a meeting when you have your video camera turned off. You can also connect your Zoom account to your Google calendar, and many other things from this page. What we're interested in here, though, is your ability to change your Personal Link. Click on Customize, and you can change what follows the the main part of the URL (https://xula.zoom.us/my/). Instead of a randomly generated string, I plugged in my name: jason.s.todd. Your customization can be between 5 and 40 characters, but it can only contain letters (a-z), numbers (0-9) and periods (".").

A screenshot of the profile settings page on Xula.Zoom.Us.
From the profile page of the Xula.Zoom.Us site, you can change a variety of settings that you can't access through Brightspace.

So now I can add this link — just one link — on my Brightspace course. I can start and stop this "meeting" whenever I want, so when it's time for an office hour, I just go into Zoom, click on Personal Meeting Room, and click Start Meeting. I should note that this new URL I've created is just an alias of my real PMR link, that string of random characters. Still, it's a handy way to make it easier for your students to get in touch with you.

Calendar Events

I've also created recurring events in Calendars for each of my courses in Brightspace noting my office hours and providing the link. I've done the same thing with our regular class meetings. This way, when the students look at the Upcoming Events or the Course Schedule on Brightspace, they'll see, in addition to their upcoming deadlines, reminders with links for my office hours. In addition, if the student has installed Brightspace's Pulse app on their smartphone, they will receive notifications about these events.

This is a screenshot of the upcoming events section in Brightspace.
Using Calendar events and Due Dates in Brightspace provides students with clear reminders about what's coming up in your class. For new remote learners, this may have a significant impact on their ability to keep on schedule with your class.