Though I had taught online philosophy courses before, it was still concerning when the COVID-19 pandemic moved everything online. It is simply not ideal to teach philosophy asynchronously. We did what we could, though the larger roster sizes were an added difficulty. Essays needed to be shorter and we needed to rely more on assignments that could be graded automatically by our Learning Management System (LMS), such as quizzes made up entirely of multiple-choice and true-or-false questions. In short, it was not a setup that could allow for rigorous philosophical discussion. This was the part that I lamented the most. So, I came up with an idea to address it.
In the Spring of 2021, I created a new assignment. Each student would be required to meet with me in a 50-minute long meeting. In the meeting, we would discuss the assigned reading from the week in which the meeting was held. It was required, of course, that the students had done the reading ahead of time. To make sure that they followed this, the meetings began with me asking the students to give synopses of the readings. I told them that I was not looking for any specific details in their synopses and that I only needed them to give me enough detail to show that they did the reading and were ready to discuss it. If they struggled with the reading, they were allowed to pose specific questions instead. After that formality was done, we simply had a conversation about the reading. I would have some questions of my own to ask, however, I would always open with letting the students ask questions first. After that, my first question was always “What did you find interesting about this reading?” More often than not, that was enough of a catalyst to get the conversation to fill the time.
I created a sign-up sheet in excel online, with times for meeting with me throughout the semester. I had to make sure I had a few more slots than I had students to accommodate unforeseen schedule changes. I started with two students maximum for each meeting, and after just two semesters, I determined that that was the optimal maximum. One of the benefits of this limit was that I received more contributions from each student. In the few meetings I had with three students at once, it became noticeably easier for a quieter student to get away with saying considerably less than a more talkative student.
This assignment was a great success. I am sure many instructors struggle with simply getting students to do the reading. Though I did not want students to be nervous going into the meetings, a conversation with the instructor without several classmates to hide behind was intimidating enough to motivate them to be prepared. As an added measure, I made the meeting with me equal to a quiz grade. Rather than receiving a failing grade, if a student did not do the reading, I asked that they reschedule. Students were engaged and they asked good questions. Normally, so many students who are struggling with the material just suffer in silence. But for this assignment, they were forced to articulate what exactly they were struggling with.
What I enjoyed most of all was getting to interact with my students in a course mode that ordinarily did not allow for that. And since these meetings only had one or two students in them, I got to know my students better than when it is a full class. As I have already mentioned, the quieter students were forced to speak. One such situation sticks out in my memory because first impressions turned out to be unreliable. I had a student who missed our scheduled meeting twice, which gave me the impression that this student was a bit rude and was not taking the course, or at least the assignment, seriously. Had that been the end of it, I would have left the course with an overall negative opinion of the student. However, once we finally did have the meeting, they came off as rather polite and exceptionally bright. One learns much more about people in one-to-one conversations.
In end-of-course evaluations, many students said that they wished they had more than one of these meetings during the semester. I did ponder this possibility, but it took a lot of my time to do one meeting with each student, so doing two meetings with each student didn’t seem feasible. This is one thing that concerns me for the future. The assignment went so well that I would like to continue using it for all my courses, online and in-person; but if I were teaching three or four courses with large rosters at once, this would likely be infeasible. However, I have a few ideas that might help. I could require shorter meetings of 30 minutes; I could make the meetings about one of their essays before they submit them; I could only have these meetings for 100 and 200 level courses; or I could only use this assignment for (asynchronous) online courses. So far, I have only used this assignment in three asynchronous online courses, so there is plenty of experimentation left to do. At the very least, I highly recommend this assignment to anyone teaching online asynchronously.
Brian Dirk Eckley
Brian Dirk Eckley is a Ph.D. student in philosophy at Purdue University, currently in his final semester (Spring 2022). His work uses Simone de Beauvoir’s existentialist ethics on contemporary moral problems. Accordingly, he specializes in applied ethics, moral theory, and existentialism. He has his B.A. in philosophy and political science from Ferrum College.
