Preface

Note

Source Code: teach_online/preface.md

Thank you for reading How to Teach Online! Whether you are a seasoned instructor or new to teaching, we hope you will learn some useful information that you will be able to incorporate into your classes! This resource will be broken down into individual sections focused on specific aspects of online teaching. We will try to provide multiple examples for each topic, and we will try to comment on feasibility and usefulness in the context of different disciplines, as some techniques and tools may lend themselves better to some types of courses than to others.

About

My name is Niema Moshiri, and I am an Associate Teaching Professor in the Computer Science & Engineering Department at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD). I work on computational biology, with a research focus on viral phylogenetics and epidemiology. I also place a heavy emphasis on teaching, namely on the development of online educational content, primarily Massive Adaptive Interactive Texts (MAITs).

This online training module was developed with the support of a UC Online grant, awarded to me (PI) and Karen Flammer (co-PI) by the University of California Office of the President (UCOP): An Online Training Module to Provide Instructors Guidance in Developing and Offering Fully Online and Hybrid Courses.

This is an open source Jupyter Book [1] project that has been released under the GNU General Public License (GPL) v3.0.

Disclaimer

This resource was written by a single person, and while I strived to gain insights from as many folks across disciplines as possible, everything written in this resource has my own biases and should be taken with a grain of salt. Further, the technologies and techniques I describe may go out-of-date in the future, so please keep in mind current evidence-based best practices as well as modern tooling. Rather than treating this resource as a de facto set of instructions for online teaching, think of it more as a repository of many (hopefully) useful tips that you can pull pieces of to incorporate into your own teaching.

Contribute

To try to combat my own biases as well as to hopefully keep this resource reasonably up-to-date, all of the source code is publicly available on GitHub, and Pull Requests are welcome!