Speaker 1: � Hello and welcome back to the Academic Society. It's Toyin here. Today is actually the first day of my online class and so I thought I'd share this day with you and share what I've been working on and how I'm navigating my online class, one that starts online and last continues the whole way through the course online. So the nice thing about this class this summer is that I'm actually co-teaching it with someone so that means we're creating the course materials together. So we've been both filming the video lectures that we're going to be using so I only had to do half of the work which is so great. So today is actually the first day of class. It's on a Friday which is very strange but what we're going to do is we're meeting with the students. We've selected two time slots 10 a.m. 2 p.m. to meet with the students whenever they're available. They can come to either session. Both sessions will be recorded so they can watch it later if they happen to miss it but basically it's like an orientation session with the students that the students actually see our faces, get to talk to us, let them know who's teaching their course. We're going to share the expectations of the course, how much work needs to be done every day, when things will be due, kind of go over like syllabus type of things, ask a couple get to know you questions and share what we think the class is about. How the students how we want the students to interact with each other during the class. We've made this like whole outline about what we're going to say and who's going to say what so hopefully it goes pretty smoothly. I imagine we'll have less students at the 10 a.m. then the 2 p.m. session but we shall see. All I've done this morning is assign the students their online homework assignments for the first month but then oh issue happened of course. I go in just to make sure everyone's seeing everything correctly. All of the homework assignments have errors in it and so the students can't actually see the problems. So we have someone who does our online homework software stuff so I emailed him. Hopefully he's seen my email and we'll get it fixed sooner rather than later but I'll have to let the students know that that issue has happened. So all we can always expect some kind of tech issue with an online course but I think as long as you have the time to do it and you don't panic and come up with something to say to your students about it and help them not panic and then have come up with a plan to fix the problem. I think you should be good to go. So it is 9 47. I'm about to get ready to do my live orientation with the students today. One tip about going live and meeting online with your students is I always like to restart my computer before I do it because sometimes there are things where I'm not able to do it. I'm not running in the background. The computer is struggling with things and it will cause um it will take up a lot of bandwidth and the zoom or the live call will start buffering and going like really slowly. I noticed that every time I restart my computer before meeting with my students online it's a much more smooth process. Things open a lot quicker and there's not a lot of like jumping and it's just a smoother process. All right so nine minutes until I'm going to go ahead and log on. To the zoom call and be there to introduce my introduce myself to my students. All right just finished my first class session. Fix the camera here. Just finished my first class session. It went really really well. The students were very like vocal and they participated. At the end we went around and asked the students to introduce themselves and share an interesting fact about themselves. Very interesting that in an applied linear algebra class there are many students who love basketball. Many power lifters in the class and a lot of musicians in the class. So it was great to see that they had a lot of things in common with each other and I think it will help them to bond with each other even though they will not be seeing each other face to face. We plan to use Piazza which is like an online forum as kind of like a community for the class so the students can talk to talk with each other. They can submit questions and everyone will be able to see the questions being answered. So they seem very receptive to how we structure the class and they're excited about learning. So first session done there were like 30 students there. So I think we have maybe 20 or 30 students that we haven't met yet so we'll see if they come to the next session. So far so good. I'm about to do a bit of co-working with my accountability partner and then get ready for the next session in a few hours. So I'm co-working right now. So during our co-working sessions we actually do 30 minute pomodoros with my accountability partner and so my goal for the next session is to do a little bit of co-working with this 30 minute pomodoro is to go live in my group for McNair scholars. So this summer I created a program for McNair scholars. If you're not familiar with McNair they help undergraduate students especially underrepresented undergraduate students go to grad school. So they give them information about what grad school is about, teach them how to apply for grad school. There's some GRE prep in there and they always have a summer research program but the pandemic is happening. Students are at home and they're not traveling as much and so one of the McNair people in my community reached out to me to create a program for McNair students to teach them how to teach them my time management technique. So basically I'm teaching them how to take the process of applying for grad school and break that down into like smaller sub steps and how to like organize it all just so they can like keep it together in their brain so they don't feel so overwhelmed about it. So I'm going to show you how to do that. So I'm going to show you how to do that. So the first lesson happened this week. It was about reflection and really coming up with a why you want to go to grad school because when things get hard you're going to need to return to that why to like push through and make it through grad school. Also I had a grad student come in and do a question and answer session with them so they can ask some questions about grad students. So what I'm about to do now is go live in that Facebook group for them and kind of recap the week and ask them what they learned for the week. All right, so I'm coming back from my break. I took a little break to have lunch, watch a little of my guilty pleasure show and I am getting ready to do my next live orientation session with my students. It'll be the same thing that we did before. The students had the option to watch either one. I just want to take this time before we do this to ask, let me know in the comments, do you have any questions about online teaching or specifically what I'm doing with my class to help my students see everything clearly so that to reduce confusion and also to build community within the class even though they are not with each other physically and face to face. But yeah, I'm just going to pull up all the things I need. I can share our little outline of everything that we need to do. So I'm going to take this time before we do this to ask, let me know in the comments, do you have any questions about online teaching or specifically what I'm doing with my class to help my students see everything clearly so that to reduce confusion and also to build community within the class even though they are not with each other physically and face to face. But yeah, I'm just going to pull up all the things I need. I can share our little outline of everything that we talk about with our students during our orientation session. All right, so first me and my co-instructor introduce ourselves, let the students know who we are. I always share that I've taught the class and I actually taught the same class this spring semester where we were face to face and had to transition to online because of the pandemic. And then I share the expectations that we have for the students on a day-to-day basis. And then my co-instructor shares the expectations we have for the students weekly. So the things that will pop up every single week for them. And then I share web work, which is our online homework system. It's completely free. Luckily we were able to make this class completely free using an online book, as well as a free online homework system. And then my co-instructor is going to share how we plan to communicate with the students and where they should look for announcements from us. Then I talk about kind of like the culture of an online class and how the students really have to be interactive. The students really have to be proactive. The students really have to state when they're struggling, ask for questions early and often, and stay on top of the deadlines and not wait until the last minute. And then finally, we are going to go around and have the students introduce themselves, share a fun fact about themselves, and then ask them if they, well, last time I liked that my co-instructor did this, he asked, does anyone, is anyone required to take this class? Almost everyone was. And he asked, do you know why this class is necessary for you? And many of them didn't know. So we took the time to explain why this class is so important, why applied linear algebra is helpful in so many other fields. And I think the students really appreciated that. And then we just opened the floor for additional questions. So that's what we're about to do again for this next session. All right. So yes, like Dr. Black mentioned, I'm Dr. Ali, and I taught this class last spring. So I taught it face to face, and then we had to transition to teaching this online. So hopefully we took the best parts of the online version of my class and created this class for you so that you can learn all about applied linear algebra and to make it as easy as possible for us to all be on the same page and as clear as possible. So what I want to share first is just the expectations for each day for the course. So on a day-to-day basis, what do we expect you all to do? So this class is an asynchronous class, meaning that you can consume the content whenever you want. There's not going to be like a live session for you to receive the lectures. So we have prerecorded our lectures. So we have pre-recorded our lectures, and then we're going to take a look at them. And then we're going to take a look at some of the lectures, and they are video lectures. So daily, you will have a video lecture to watch. And then with those video lectures, there will be worksheets. And the worksheets will break down what we taught in the lectures even more and give you a chance to practice the problems on your own. These worksheets will not be turned in, so they are not for a grade. However, the worksheets as well as the lecture videos, we will use that content to help build the quizzes that you will take. So we will have weekly quizzes for our class, and they will be based on the lecture notes of the lecture videos as well as the worksheets. And then finally, we'll also have web work assignments to go with each lesson. And the web work assignment, the web work is our online learning system. So can you let us know in the chat if you have used web work before? All right, my class is officially over and I'm done for now for the weekend. The second session went well. They were a little more quiet, but they also knew a little bit more about the class than the first class, about the topic of learning algebra than the first class. But I just ended the day by posting an announcement for the students. I let them know what things they should be doing this weekend to prepare for next week for class. I also put links for the video recording of what we did today in case anyone missed it. As well as like links to the introductory content for our class. But I'm about to end my day as I always do with a walk around my neighborhood. I hope you enjoy this day in the life for my first day of class for online teaching where I'm actually starting the class online and not transitioning in the middle of the semester. Let me know if you have any questions about online teaching. I can share some resources about it in the description of this video. All right, have a wonderful day. Bye.