Acknowledgements

This book wouldn’t have been possible without Meghan Kennedy, Instructional Designer and Co-Director of the Center for Teaching, Learning, and Engagement (CTLE) at Glendale Community College, AZ. Meghan wrote the booklet full of ideas (Kennedy, 2019) that accompanies the physical Active Learning Kits available to GCC faculty through the CTLE. She was generous in giving me time and space to work on this project when I had the idea to adapt her work for the Live Online environment.

I am deeply grateful to those who gave me detailed and constructive comments on one or more chapters, including Meghan Kennedy and Debbie Baker. They gave freely of their limited time to push me to clarify concepts and provided excellent suggestions for additions to the text.

I’m also immensely grateful to Dr. Maria Andersen, who realized immediately when pandemic lockdowns started that faculty all over the world would need help shifting to remote teaching. She distilled a decade of experience teaching remotely and synchronously online into a webinar, “Best Practices for Remote Teaching with Dr. Maria Andersen,” which I attended on March 12, 2020. I leaned heavily on what I learned from her, not only in writing the Worksheets, Chat, Video Thumbnails, and Breakout Groups chapters of this book, but also in training GCC’s faculty during our rapid pivot to remote teaching. In particular, Dr. Andersen named and described the 3-2-1-Go chat method that revealed to me, as she puts it, the “pedagogical superpowers” of videoconference chat (Coursetune, 2020).

I want to acknowledge the Digital Education Programs and Initiatives team at Indiana University, who made creating this book exponentially easier and faster by publishing their own work, Zoom to the Next Level: Active Learning in the Virtual Classroom, as an Open Educational Resource (OER) licensed under Creative Commons. The Videoconference Tool Features part of this book is a derivative work based on their original book. All I needed to do was document the same features in Google Meet and Webex Meetings that they thoughtfully outlined for active learning in Zoom.

Finally, I want to thank the Residential and Adjunct Faculty of Glendale Community College. You are my reason for creating this work, and because you can use it, it will exist for any other teacher who needs a few ideas for their next synchronous online teaching session. I hope to have made something useful and beneficial for teachers and their students.

Thank you, one and all.