Introductory ethics courses are the bread and butter of university general education offerings in philosophy, typically taken by non-majors navigating basic graduation requirements and/or discipline-required electives. I’ve been teaching this class in some form or another at a variety of institutions since I was a graduate student in the late 1990s, and I’ve tried a wide variety of different approaches to the subject. Teaching it now, in the Plague Years, I find myself excited about the new possibilities arising from the challenge of creating a version of the class that can move seamlessly between face-to-face and online learning environments at a moment’s notice while also reducing the cost of student participation.
The version of Intro to Ethics I taught for the Spring 2022 term met once a week for 2.5 hours at a stretch, and my employer expected the class to meet face-to-face; if we had to go online, the class would still be synchronous. When I first thought about what I would do under these conditions, I understood that one of my main problems was going to be creating safe opportunities for my students to interact with me and with each other over a rather long stretch of time. I also knew that it was likely that at some point in the term, I would have students who were unable to attend because of quarantine or isolation, but who still needed to be able to participate. I committed myself before I even started designing the class to using Open Educational Resources (which you’ll see listed in the syllabus outline below) as much as possible. Why? Because in addition to occasionally teaching philosophy, nowadays I am a research and instruction librarian, and I take it to be an ethical obligation to do what I can to facilitate student access to information (an obligation taken up in opposition to absurd textbook costs). This same ethical obligation also prompted me to commit myself to some version of ungrading for classroom assessment and an approach to classroom technology focused on universal design.
To solve the venue shifting problem, the safe and accessible participation puzzle, and likely quarantine issues (spoiler: it did come up, starting in the third week of class), I got creative with classroom technology. I divided our in-class time into lecture/discussion and application exercises, which allowed room for reviewing material as a whole class and then practicing its use in small groups. For the lecture/discussion bits, I used a remote microphone and had auto-generated captions running on a projector using both PowerPoint (for lecture stuff) and an online in-browser tool called Web Captioner, which can be set up to run under whatever window I’m working in. In addition to making it possible for me to speak while masked without shouting all the time, this setup was easy to share online using Jitsi Meet with students confined to online-only participation. Students participated in small group discussions in class using a Slack workspace, which includes a #captions-gone-wild channel to document what happens when AI subtitles get bizarre – I’ll take whatever cheap engagement I can get! The sort of work I might have used the whiteboard for in the past was instead done interactively using Padlet, which allowed me to create visual and text environments in which students could move things around, add and respond to content, add comments, etc.
The heaviest homework my students had to do was their Reading Notebook, which I checked both before and after we met (they were expected to improve their notes during class). I provided them each with a document in OneDrive with note prompts to fill in and annotate, and the before-and-after check let me see what I needed to talk about and made it easier for me to gauge their understanding of the material. We did short quizzes before and after lecture using Kahoot, designed to check and reinforce comprehension. I assigned two short (5-to-7 page) essays, both designed as application/case study pieces, and a final exam exercise that required each student to write a peer review report on an anonymized version of someone else’s second essay. Two class meetings were set aside for working on those essays, so that students received immediate feedback while they wrote.
My overall grading goal for this class was minimization—most of the feedback students received happened in the context of our actual classroom interactions, with room left for correction and improvement. The Reading Notebook and Padlet/Slack participation were graded pass/fail. Student quiz scores were the average of both quizzes taken in a meeting. The essays and final exam exercise were scored on a rubric in the usual way. This was not a class of hard lines and fine-grained performance distinctions—it was meant to be a developmental experience rather than an evaluative or competitive one.
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Laura M. Bernhardt
Laura M. Bernhardt (PhD, MLIS) is a Research and Instruction Librarian in the David L. Rice Library at the University of Southern Indiana and a former Philosophy professor (who occasionally still teaches philosophy as an adjunct). Her research focuses on information literacy, the scholarship of teaching and learning, ethics, and aesthetics (especially the philosophy of music and the philosophy of popular culture), with recent publications on visualizing the ACRL’s Framework for Information Literacy and philosophical themes in the music of Pearl Jam.
