Welcome online MSCS faculty! There are several scenarios I will cover, but first, I will cover the policies and expectations of running an online MSCS course.

You may be asked to teach or facilitate an online course. Unfortunately, due to time, budget, and available personnel, you may be asked to teach a course that has not been built to be an online course. This website is geared to give you hints/tips/tricks and to guide you in teaching these types of courses.

Online MSCS Format

Online MSCS courses may be taught in parallel with the in-person version of the course. All of these courses should be merged on Canvas for a central interface.

Online MSCS students are known as KPV students (in-person students are K), and their fee model is different than in-person students. Online MSCS students must NOT be considered to be on campus, ever–whether this be true or not. This means that all learning modes and office hours must be distance.

In-person students will not be able to register for the online section, and online students will not be able to register for in-person sections. So, even if a student wants to work it out to take one or the other, they will not be able to due to the differences in fee model and tuition.

Software / Systems

All online MSCS students go through an online orientation where they learn about the following tools

  • Canvas (online learning management system)
  • Zoom (remote video teleconferencing software)
  • Piazza (forum-like messaging system)

All assignments and learning material must be made available on Canvas. However, alternative means of accepting submissions may be worked out provided it can be done exclusively by remote. For example, my COSC562 (Operating Systems) course uses GitHub for student’s operating system repository.

Learning Design

Due to limitations in timeframe, budget, and available personnel, you may or may not be teaching an already developed course, colloquially known as “noodlizing” a course. This means that a course has been developed for about 8 months in conjunction with graphics designers, video editors, and learning designers provided by the company Noodle. Currently, we are building about 3 to 4 courses every 8 month with Noodle.

Meetings and Modality

All online sections are provided as asynchronous with a guided live session every other week. This is the bare minimum. In my course, I have a guided live session every other week, and for the off week, I hold office hours at the same time. Furthermore, due to the online students most likely having a full-time job, these live sessions will be held in the evening, typically after 1800 (eastern).

All meetings must be recorded and provided to students to review throughout the semester. There are three options provided on Canvas through UT: (1) Panopto, (2) Zoom Cloud, and (3) Studio.

Zoom cloud will record your zoom sessions and upload them. However, getting links to the students may be more difficult than it is worth. Instead, I recommend recording on your local machine and then uploading them through Panopto. Panopto video groups the video by course, so all the student has to do is click “Panopto Video” on Canvas, and all of the uploaded videos will be there.

To be able to use Panopto, it first must be enabled via Canvas. Under “Settings”, click the Navigation tab, and then find Panopto Video. Elements in the top are “enabled”, whereas elements at the bottom are “disabled”.

This will add a tab to the Canvas navigation pane, and it will be visible to the students.

To upload a video, click “Panopto Video”, and then click the Create button.

Then, click “Upload Media”.

Drag and drop, or click browse to find your video. Zoom will encode in MP4 format.

Other Videos

You may upload other recordings to Panopto as well, but these folders will disappear after the semester ends. If you want something more permanent, your netid/password gets you a UT YouTube account. Use your full email address when logging in: <netid>@utk.edu, which will then bring you to the two-factor authentication. From there, you can upload and edit any videos.

Video Equipment

There are several backpacks that contain video equipment, such as a camera and lighting and tripods to help you record these types of videos. Please email me directly, and I will check out a backpack to provide you.

Teaching Facilitators

Some courses will be primarily led by a full-time, in-person instructor or tenured/tenure-track faculty member. However, in most cases, the online section will be facilitated by an instructor, lecturer, or graduate teaching associate.

The primary learning materials are the responsibility of the in-person instructor, but turning those materials into online-capable, and holding the every-other-week-live-session is the responsibility of the instructor, lecturer, or GTA.