One of the things you’ll have to consider this semester is fostering community between different groups of students: the ones who can attend in-person and the ones who can attend remotely.
We’ve provided some examples below of how you might address this challenge. Click on any of the recommended tools to learn more about using them.
Unpacking discussions in-person
You could ask students to have posted their response to discussion prompts you’ve planned to discuss in-class by the night before. You could then have some time to review the students posts, and choose which ones to discuss and unpack in-person.
Making time
You could ask students to post their responses to the discussion prompts while you’re in class, and then set aside the time you might have used for small group discussion to allow students to respond to each other’s posts. This could mean that you would need students to bring devices to class.
Choose-your-own-discussion
You could give students the choice to either respond in-person or via the online discussion prompt. This would create some flexibilities for you and for your students. You could set expectations that students will have at least responded to two prompts for the week: these could either be in-person or online. It might require that you keep track of who speaks in-person.
Note buddies
If some of your students attend in-person on Mondays, and then a different group of students attends the Wednesday in-person sessions, you could create pairs or triads of students who are note-buddies. They could create a shared document where they can respond to discussion prompts in small groups, and then at the end of the week, they can turn in the collective “notes” document to a Canvas assignment.
In the loop
If some of your students attend in-person on Mondays, and then a different group of students attends the Wednesday in-person sessions, you could match them up with a student who is attending the opposite day and ask them to create a plan for sharing information, their responses to discussions posed on the opposite day, and to keep each other “in the loop.”
Making a record
At the beginning of the term you could ask students to volunteer to add to a notes file (perhaps in the Canvas Chat); each class meeting could allow students in pairs, or alone to have those note-taking responsibilities. This could be a discussion record for your class. If someone misses their day, ask for another volunteer.