Online teaching and learning

Advice and technology pointers, with a mild engineering bias

Contents

This is very much a work-in-progress, oriented towards teaching at RMC, and suggestions are welcome.

Online teaching guidance

RMC’s instructional designers have produced a course design and development toolbox.

Arizona State University’s Design for Online Learning Toolkit includes advice on learning design, learning objectives, online assessments, digital course materials, course communications, online labs, academic integrity online, supporting new online learners, group work, instructor presence, and engagement through videos. ASU is the first US University to have a fully online ABET-accredited Engineering programme.

The IEEE has produced a series of one-hour webinars, many of which deal with online teaching in general, and engineering topics specifically (not just EE).

Textbooks

As of April 2020, the RMC library is looking into textbook options for the fall semester, with e-texts being preferred in the highly-likely event the semester is online. We have a number of textbooks available in electronic form already. Faculty can examine the existing collection for suitability.

Please also consider a free textbook for your course if something appropriate is available. Also consider whether you can conduct your course without a textbook – this will be easy for some courses, impossible for others.

Moodle and BigBlueButton

Moodle is RMC’s Learning Management System and BigBlueButton is the integrated live conferencing feature. To reduce student confusion, please use these, rather than anything else.

RMC’s course design and development toolbox, mentioned above, includes tips on Moodle and BigBlueButton.

Moodle has excellent documentation. A good place to start is their module on Managing a Moodle Course.

BigBlueButton also has documentation including tutorial videos.

Media production

If you have a laptop or a modern phone or tablet, you have everything you need to record audio and video and produce support media for your courses.

Screen recording

Audio editing

Video editing

For basic video editing:

If you need more features than those provide:

Screenshots

There are lots of ways to take a screenshot, depending on your computer, phone or tablet. Here’s a comprehensive guide.

Simulations and remote experiments

There are many approaches to conducting remote laboratories, which will be more or less appropriate depending on the laboratory and the discipline. Arizona State University has some strategies for remote labs.

Some strategies require purchase of equipment, software, or simulation platforms that we don’t currently have. If you would like to use these, you will need to get your requests in as early as possible, through your Department Heads, with convincing justification.

Physics, Chemistry, Mathematics

Electrical Engineering

This web site is not an official publication of the Royal Military College of Canada nor of the Department of National Defence. Ce site web n’est pas une publication officielle du Collége militaire royal du Canada ni du Ministère de la défense nationale.