Advice
For VCU-specific information, visit the main Teaching page and the Teaching Policies page. For teaching resources specifically related to research methods, visit the Methods page.
Teaching resources
Learning outcomes
Online teaching resources
VCU
Preparing Future Faculty Program at VCU a national program to provide teaching experience and resources to graduate students.
Leaders and Entrepreneurs Academy a resource for students seeking careers in government, non profit, healthcare and public service.
Mentoring and Professional support from the Graduate School at VCU.
Ideas for course content
Class exercises and curricula
Board game for use in urban sociology classes.
Curriculum and resources to help students "recognize the differences between fact and rumor, news and advertising, news and opinion, and bias and fairness."
Curriculum for having students do the six-week SNAP challenge of living solely on a food-stamps budget.
"TRAILS, the ASA Teaching Resources and Innovation Library for Sociology, offers thousands of pedagogical gifts (Good Ideas For Teaching Sociology). It's also the perfect place to publish your own teaching resources."
Multimedia resources and sociology blogs
Some of these sites have open licenses (i.e., CC BY-NC-SA), meaning that the material can be used with no or few restrictions.
Streaming Videos on Kanopy from VCU Library
Podcast that features interviews with sociologists, with a focus on their research methods and findings.
Podcast devoted to reporting on social science research.
Documentaries and feature films.
Wide range of videos on various topics, including using SPSS.
Podcast featuring interviews with sociologists who have authored recent books.
Long-running blog devoted to organizational sociology.
Public sociology blog.
Podcast on sociological topics
Podcasts featuring academic sociology discussions.
This page contains more than a hundred of documentaries good for sociology and categorizes them by 31 themes of Sociology 101.
Podcast on economy-related topics that covers work by prominent sociologists.
VCU multimedia workshop that provides hardware, software, spaces, and expertise to help the VCU community produce creative work of all kinds. Practically, that means concentrating in three main areas: graphics, audio and video projects; the world of hands-on making; and exploring new and emerging technologies.
Textbooks
Open educational resources (OER) are "teaching, learning, and research resources that are free of cost and made available without copyright or licensing restrictions that limit how they are used." The following are OER sociology textbooks:
Software and platforms
Perusall (for collaboratively annotating PDFs and other documents)
Go to perusall.com and click on Log In the upper-right-hand corner.
You can choose the Sign in with Google option to sign in with your VCU email account and password. (Or select whatever sign-in option you prefer.)
Enter your email address and click on OK at the bottom. (You can review the terms of service and their privacy policy on this page.)
Click on Create or enroll in a course.
Click on I am a student.
Enter the Course code that your professor provided to you (for example, CHEN-5GQVH).
Click on the Assignments tab at the top of the page and then click on the assignment that you wish to work on.
To comment on the document, highlight text by left-clicking and dragging over the words. A comment bubble will appear on the right-hand side of the screen. Enter your comment in that bubble. Click Enter when you are done, and the comment will be saved.
To delete a comment, click on the trash can symbol right under the comment.
To comment on someone else's comment, click on that comment and write in the bubble that appears under their comment in the right-hand window.
Zoom
Preventing "Zoom bombing"
Media reports have highlighted the phenomenon of "Zoom Bombing," whereby certain bad actors -- often not actual students but interlopers looking to make mischief -- are using Zoom's "sharing" feature to disrupt classes by displaying obscene or offensive images or video.
It's always best practice to control access to your meetings by only sharing your Meeting links with those guests you wish to include. The more control you can exercise over disseminating these links: be it through e-mails to specific persons, links posted on Blackboard or other pages only accessible to enrolled students, etc -- the better. The most likely course for targeting is to search for a Zoom meeting URL or code that has been posted on a publicly accessible website (e.g. public course websites like RamPages, public Google classrooms, Syllabi that have made their way onto the public web). Only disseminate Zoom links over private channels (e.g. Blackboard, Closed Google Classroom, BCC'd to students)
VCU's Information Security Office has generated its own Zoom Meeting Security Guidelines with lots of helpful hints for keeping your meetings secure.
As far as "Zoom Bombing," you always have the option of changing your "Sharing" settings to limit content sharing to yourself, as host. This setting can be found on your Zoom Profile page under "Settings > Meeting > In Meeting (Basic)."
If you find you need to change the setting in the course of a meeting, click on the caret next to the "Share Screen" icon on your Meeting tool bar and choose "Advanced "Sharing Options."
Then choose either "Only Host" or "All Participants" depending on your needs.
Note that if you make this change during a meeting, it will only apply to that specific meeting. To make your choice the default for all future meetings, you'll need to change that setting on your Profile page.
Adapted from information from David Morefield and Logan Clary.