Technical Resources for Remote Teaching

Having an online home for your class materials ensures students always have access to course content. These sites can also be used to send and archive class communications which can make communicating with your students more efficient. Course pages in a Learning Management System such as Moodle or Google Classroom also can be used to support a variety of online activities including:

• Collecting and returning completed assignments electronically
• Managing online quizzes
• Securely recording and posting grades
• Online discussion forums
• Managing group work

Instructors should be familiar with these features in the event instruction needs to shift online for a period of time.

Looking for an alternative to a class web page? Consider storing and sharing content in Google Drive. You can create folders in Google Drive and share them with your class Google Group email. Google Drive can be used for distributing documents and files, as well as hosting videos for viewing in Drive or embedding on an external page. You can copy the link to your shared content and post it on a web page or send it to your students via email.

Additional Online Teaching Resources

• Our Moodle resources page
• TWEN help for faculty (Law School only)
• Google Workspace help resources for faculty
• Create and Share a Folder in Google Drive

Looking for support with something else? Contact IT’s Educational Technology group through the Service Desk at itservice@lclark.edu or 503-768-7225.

There are several options for staying in touch with your students both in emergency situations and for routine communication during the term:

Email

Make sure you can access your LC Gmail account on your phone or on the web. Gmail works well on smartphones, tablets, and web browsers. If you are borrowing a computer, make sure to follow security best practices. See the LC Email Info page for information on your LC email account.

Class Google Group

A Google Group is created automatically for each class to make it easy to communicate via email and collaborate and share in Google Workspace Apps. This is one of the most common ways faculty already communicate with students and a link to your group is available on Webadvisor class rosters.

Class Google Groups Helpsheet for Faculty

How-to Update Automatically Generated Google Groups

Moodle Announcements

Moodle courses have an announcement forum which is useful for posting information for the entire class. Students cannot reply to posts and are sent an email notification copy of posts after 30 minutes. Be sure to let students know how often they should check for announcements as students have the ability to turn off or filter emails from Moodle.

Moodle Announcement forum help for faculty

Stream in Google Classroom

Create an announcement in Google Classroom by adding a post with no assignments. The post will appear on your Stream page in chronological order along with assignments, questions, and other posts. If you want, you can move an older post to the top. Students receive emails when you post to your stream; however, keep in mind that students can turn off these notifications. Be sure to let students know how frequently they should check for announcements.

Post announcements to Google Stream help for faculty

Set up Virtual Office Hours using Google Calendar Appointment Slots

Create Appointment Slots in Google Calendar and either send or embed a link to your students for them to sign up for individual meetings with you. Want to meet using video conferencing? Just add a conference link to your meeting!

Creating, Editing and Sharing Appointment Slots (video)

Appointment Slots (helpsheet)

Meet using Zoom Videoconferencing

Zoom is a natural choice for teaching a class that will meet outside the class, requires a high level of interaction, has a large number of participants, or requires recording or other advanced features. Zoom can also be used if a faculty needs to teach remotely to stream video lectures directly to a class live. All classrooms are equipped for one-way communication. If two-way communication is required, check the capabilities of the classroom. Most do not have cameras and microphones. You can borrow a webcam mounted on a tripod to connect to the classroom computer or use a webcam-equipped laptop. A student, given the proper instructions, could handle this setup. Information Technology is available to assist with initial set-up and training.

For more information, visit our Zoom Videoconferencing page.

Google Hangouts Meet

Google Hangouts Meet is a videoconferencing platform included as part of the Google Workspace core services package. It is a web-based service that enables real-time audio and video communication for individuals and groups. While Zoom is comparatively more robust, Hangouts Meet is a quick and easy solution for setting up video chats between users within our lclark.edu domain. Sessions may be added to any Google Calendar invitation by selecting Hangouts Meet from the “add conferencing” dropdown when creating a calendar event.

For more information, visit our Google Hangouts Meet page.

Make an Instructional Video

As an alternative to streaming live video, faculty could record short videos to be delivered as remote content. Videos could be hosted in Google Drive and either viewed directly or embedded externally on the web via Moodle. Students could watch the video at any time from a device with internet access.

Faculty would need a computer with a camera as well as some type of video editing software. Depending on the complexity of the video, Zoom or QuickTime could be used for simple videos with minimal edits. More elaborate editing would require software such as iMovie, Final Cut Pro, or Adobe Premiere (all available in the Resource Lab & editing suites).

Moodle

Using Moodle, courses may be facilitated entirely online, with content and assignments delivered via Moodle course shell. All courses have Moodle shells automatically created, and support documentation is available on our Moodle Resources page.

Google Classroom

Perhaps beneficial if your course relies heavily on document collaboration, particularly in Google Drive. Anyone with an @lclark.edu address who has self-identified as a teacher when first accessing Classroom can create a Google Classroom instance. Students can be invited via email, via google group membership, or can self-join using a code. Google Classroom help links are available on our Google Resources page. If you are an instructor who does not have access to Google Classroom, contact itservice@lclark.edu and we can enable access for you.

Technical Assistance

Helpsheets are available covering the basics and frequently asked questions for Moodle, Zoom, Google Workspace, and other software tools. If you do run into technical difficulties, feel free to contact the IT Service Desk with questions and we will respond as promptly as possible. It is important we know what issues our users are encountering so we can be as efficient as possible with our response.

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