Claudia Brittenham on Asynchronous Courses

Claudia Brittenham on Asynchronous Courses

November 20, 2020

Claudia Brittenham

As the university transitions to remote learning for the remainder of the autumn quarter, Claudia Brittenham (Associate Professor, Art History and the College) discusses strategies with asynchronous teaching in a recent interview with Online Pedagogy Assistant Katie Bevil of Remote Humanities. Brittenham addresses instructional opportunities and challenges of remote teaching while recognizing the goal: to ensure that students are learning and building on their skills through this experience.

“What I was most concerned about was: Is this going to work? Can I deliver anything like the experience that I deliver in the classroom via remote learning? And I’d say, it works. My students are learning. They are not having the same experience that they would have in the classroom. And one of the most important things for me as I was thinking about course design was not trying to say: do a one-to-one translation of, this is what we did in the classroom, we’re going to have to do this online. But to actually go back to course objectives and figure out, what is the remote way of accomplishing each objective? In some cases, like student presentations, they’re really congruous. But there are other places where they’re really actually quite different. And that’s fine. And I think there are things that my students are learning remotely that they wouldn’t have learned in the classroom.”

Read the interview to learn more about Brittenham’s strategies for remote teaching.