 I'm Salvatore Bobonis and in this brief video I'll explain how to run an all online university class. The world is changing and universities that don't adapt to the realities of 21st century technology are likely to face severe fiscal challenges in the future. But as universities struggle to get online, they've adopted two models, one of which is completely unattractive and the other completely unsustainable. These are what I call the bronze model which is cheap and easy but looks ridiculous in the social media age and the gold model where classes are so expensive to produce that it's inconceivable that it could be done on an institution wide basis. This presentation explains how to develop silver model online classes that leverage simple information technologies to achieve something approaching gold standard learning outcomes at more like a bronze level cost. Most universities going online have either taken a very low road or a very high road while failing to develop an appropriate scalable middle way. At the top of the market is the gold model of online classes that are professionally produced by professional videographers and in which discussion is facilitated via hardware filled video conferencing facilities that are simply, it's unimaginable that this could be scaled out to every class at an institution. But at the other end of the spectrum are bronze model online classes where lectures are simply recorded as delivered in the lecture hall and stuck up on a website or on a learning management system participation quote unquote is consists of students adding a comment to an online bulletin board never actually interacting with other students at all. What we really need is a silver model in between these that attempts to achieve the same kinds of immediacy and interaction as the gold model but does it at a cost level that makes it scalable to the university as a whole. This kind of silver model can be achieved taking an online native approach to building a class from the ground up using simple off the shelf components. Lectures recorded via desktop capture, readings downloaded from the Internet, discussion in online collaborative meeting rooms and assessment via online submission and examination. First moving online means that lectures don't have to be delivered in conventional one and two hour blocks. Head lectures can be delivered in a modular way piece by piece in easily digested chunks just like this video you're watching now. It's technologically simple to do this. Think of the video you're watching at this moment PowerPoint for slides. I have a simple Logitech headset which provides perfectly good sound. I use a very light desktop capture software package called Fast Stone that I bought online for $30 and of course YouTube for lecture delivery. I record the lecture, save it, upload it to YouTube. It's that simple. Then lectures can be unpacked so instead of one or two long lectures each week what I like to do is have a longer more substantial orienting lecture upfront that lays out the main issues or theoretical issues for the week then several medium length lectures that develop specific points and finally a short capstone that takes a specific applied example and runs with it. I also like to assign one, two or three external videos. There's lots of high quality short video on YouTube or high quality longer video published by NGOs and other educational institutions that can be used to supplement lecture material. For most topics readings can also be pulled from online sources. First almost every classic text from before 1920 is now in the public domain and freely available online. Second, contemporary texts are simply online. I mean they're published online to begin with and I really think we should be using a lot more of contemporary writing that is written for the internet. It's the 21st century after all. If you do want to use copyrighted work almost all copyrighted work is now available in eReader format. Just have your librarian order the eBook, get a link and give your students a link to the library eBook. You can sign in and use the copyrighted content via the library website. For instructors who want to use their own course notes as texts I strongly recommend take those notes and put them up on wiki books. Then your students can access them but everybody else can access them as well. Now, a major advantage of the all online format is the ability to pull apart the 20 or 25 or 30 student discussion section into small teams of four to five students. The first thing we do in a large discussion section of 20 to 30 students is pull them apart into working groups. Well, why not just have them in working groups right from the first minute? The students can be assigned to small groups that they work with collaboratively throughout the semester. I use Adobe Connect software which provides them with video conferencing, a chat window, a notes window. They can put files, share files in the room. It's a small personal conferencing space that works for four or five students in a way that it simply doesn't work for 25 or 30 students. Teaching assistants or tutors can just drop in. As long as the students are working at a specific time in their tutorial room, the tutor can stop in to see how things are going on video and talk to the students. What's really important is that online conference rooms leave an audit trail which facilitates meaningful evaluation of class participation. Participation marks don't have to depend on a tutor or teaching assistant remembering one out of maybe 100 students. Instead, the tutor or teaching assistant can actually go to the room and see what the student did in the room during the tutorial. Online paper submission, exams, etc. If they're done online can support much richer feedback than the in-person equivalence. So, for example, we use turn it in for written work. Turn it in, whatever you may think of it as a anti-plagiarism program, is great for providing verbal feedback. You read the paper and then you talk to the student for three minutes. And when the student wants to find out the reasons for the mark, the student listens to you for two or three minutes. It's a way to create a point of connection with students that we simply no longer have in classes of the size we typically teach in the 21st century. Blackboard also supports automated question-by-question feedback, so you can give specific feedback on a multiple-choice test for right versus wrong answers. And you can also do more personalized feedback if you want to. I don't do this, but it's pretty easy just to record webcam video feedback and email that to the students. Learning management system integration in the silver model is a straightforward matter of watch the lecture videos, read the assigned readings, do the collaborative activities, and then submit assessments via the LMS. Let me show you my own LMS. I'm here in Blackboard where I have weekly assignments one per week for every week. If I go into a typical weekly assignment, you will see a watch section. So students can download my PowerPoint slides and also directly access the YouTube videos. I also have external sources each week. There's a reading section, so I can not only have readings assigned, but I can provide some context around the readings. And here I even assign the students to find their own readings. So there's one reading assigned by me, a second reading assigned by me, and a third reading that the student is supposed to find for her or himself. Something to think about the readings and then the tutorial assignments. So the tutorial is organized around two to three assignments each week that students are supposed to prepare some materials in advance and bring them the tutorial room. And how do I know they brought them the tutorial room? Because they have to copy and paste what they did into the tutorial chat window so that I, their colleagues, and the tutor can all see it. Key takeaways. A scalable silver model can be used to deliver online classes that are the test I would like to use is at least as good as. A large, in-person, typical chalk and talk lecture. Second, low cost, uncomplicated desktop capture is the best way to record lectures and put them online. And third, a straightforward weekly cycle of watch, read, do, assess is easy for both teachers and students to master and get comfortable with. Thank you for listening. You can find out more about me at Salvatorbabonus.com where you can also sign up for my monthly newsletter on global affairs.