The biggest hazard from teaching online I think is that you get huge waves of grading that have very firm time requirements.
If I assign students to prepare a speech 6 minutes long, I have to listen to 40 or so 6 minute speeches. There’s nothing I can do to reduce that amount of time at all.
It could be argued that if you assign papers you have a bit more control over how long it takes you to grade, and you can shorten it, but I am not sure that’s true at all. For me, reading student papers always takes longer than listening to them speak. I think even with the fixed 6 minute speech I’m still doing pretty good with classtime on grading. I’m hoping to turn everything around by Saturday so we’ll see how it goes (everything came in last night).
In my other course where I would traditionally assign a paper I have been allowing students to present their ideas either by recording themselves on a powerpoint or submitting an audio file as the assignment. I’m hoping to work a bit more on oral assessment, and giving students multiple opportunities to practice speaking their ideas to others.
The power of oratory cannot be denied now more than ever. The deluge of podcasts and the dominance of video calls, vlogging, and websites like TED Talks and The Moth show that the power of speech is not something old or less important than writing. It is not writing, but it is definitely composition. Unfortunately most people in my field teach public speaking as the transmission of facts and truths from research, which is extremely thin and limiting. Speech creates understanding in incredible ways since it is ephemeral, immersive, and helps us feel our way through ideas as we listen to the persons speech patterns, tone, and how they adjust what they are saying as they go.
My focus will be to push for more casual recordings, more one-take recordings, and more supplemental or response recordings as students interact with one another’s work. I hope that by December we’ll be in a place where submitting a voice memo from the phone is at the same level of critical engagement that a nice paper would be. Considering how little time college students spend on papers, I feel that this might be a good way to practice critical thinking.