Organized Resources for Teaching in this Pandemic

There are SO MANY RESOURCES floating around. This page is my attempt to get them all in one place so that individual faculty don’t have to hope they’re on the right lists or reading the right Twitter threads. PLEASE, PLEASE comment or send me things to add to this page. I am confident that this post represents a small fraction of the ideas I’ve read in the last two weeks.


Webinars and overviews:

Rick Cleary, Ray Levy, and Mike Weimerskirch gave a (recorded) panel on “Active Learning Online” in the Electronic Seminar in Mathematics Education. This link includes several other useful resources, including links to the collaborative notes from a related workshop and the new MAA Connect Community for Online Teaching and Distance Learning.

Nathaniel Miller and Virgil Pierce gave an MAA Webinar about “Teaching Online and Upper-level Mathematics Courses”, which was recorded and is available here. They work through a lot of the technology and facilitation issues a new online educator would need to get started. Our recent guest post by Steve Klee and Anne Ho offers both individual experiences and a check-list for planning from a similar perspective. Maria Andersen has another related webinar and page of resources. I see evidence of another past session with Debbie Gouchenaur, but I do not know if it is accessible.

The National Council of Teachers of Mathematics (NCTM) is offering a webinar on 3/24. There are lots of resources in the K-12 world, though I have to seek them actively.

Chad Topaz is doing “national office hours” for faculty looking for teaching/design consulting support.

Multiple authors are cautioning educators to keep this work stream-lined and to rethink expectations [a, b] for the well-being of all involved. Kate Owens and I wrote a piece about some of the issues related to grading in this context. Some of the Twitter discussion of this point has use the hashtag #PassFailNation.


Free or expanded tools:

Some internet providers appear to be offering temporarily free internet for students; I’ve heard that these offers also expand basic packages to the point that they might be useful for more digitally mediated learning. I don’t know if there is fine print, and I don’t know what infrastructure needs to be in place.

Similarly, companies like Overleaf are offering temporarily free upgrades.

PRIMUS has made a number of articles free for all to access. Similarly, JSTOR has made many more of its resources free to users.


Learning Differences:

Monise L. Seward share a list of apps that can help with supplemental instructional assistance for dyslexic, autistic, and visually impaired learners and learners with writing difficulties. Monise’s context is 6th grade, but some might be adaptable or might make us reconsider our use of existing higher education tools. My interaction with this list led me to this Twitter thread with more design-level principles for inclusion around learning differences online.


Tutorials and Tool Comparisons:

I found this comparison of online whiteboards useful. I’ve also heard that BitPaper is promising. It was important to me that I could link to a whiteboard without students needing to create or use a login.

Many students will need to submit work digitally, so I’ve seen lots of discussion of scanner apps. My students have used GeniusScan for years; it’s free and has a good tutorial. David Clark made a nice tutorial for the GoogleDrive app (aimed at students), though sadly his approach only works on Android smartphones. People are especially interested in apps that coordinate well with learning management systems, allowing students to scan and upload files without intermediary steps of saving and moving files around. Here is a tutorial about CamScanner that connects with Canvas. As Jo Ellis-Monaghan pointed out to me, this is also useful for faculty who want to share materials before or after class.


Community Support:

I have felt very supported by my communities in this challenging time. Twitter in general has been packed with people thinking about this teaching transition (including thinking thoughtfully about teaching ideas related to the pandemic). If you’re not on Twitter, you can still search the hashtag #mtbos (math Twitter blog-o-sphere, I think) to get started. I also have lots of support on Facebook, through communities including the groups for the Academy of Inquiry-Based Learning, STEM faculty blundering through remote teaching in a pandemic, Equity & Social Justice in Mathematics Education, Almy Education eLearning in Math, and multiple private groups to which friends have invited me.


If you’d like to write something more substantial in the form of a blog post to help other educators, please be in touch.

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