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Thread: Academic Twitter, we just finished our first summer of online-only educ. It went better than we expected. Some tips from our experience to follow:
First, some context: We ran 19 courses for 109 students. Classes were 12-18 students each. To accommodate diff time zones, we had AM & PM tracks. Courses ran 2 hrs on alternating days.
None of our students knew ea other so we were starting fresh. We used Zoom for the seminars and Slack for course materials, comms.
1) Synchronous > Asynchronous. All our courses, except 1, were synch, small-group seminars. Students were unanimous that the worst thing abt a remote spring were hours of prerecorded lectures w/little or no interaction.
Some recorded lectures are more engaging than others, of course, but none can beat small-group learning.
2) You can have a more natural seminar discussion that you’d expect on Zoom, but you have to adapt some. All our faculty rejiggered their syllabi — adding more discussion Qs, providing more guidance on what to look out for in the texts.
Online seminars generally need more structure. You can’t be as loose as in-person. Our faculty were a bit more directive in leading conversation & more aware of who was speaking & who wasn’t.
Our practice is generally not to cold call, but for online we did (gently). Sometimes we’d send a note via Zoom chat encouraging a student to get into the mix.
3) Assign discussants or response papers! We did this for all our courses, and it helped a lot. All our students knew they’d be called on to help lead discussion at some point so it helped them get over some of the initial awkwardness of speaking in front of ppl you’ve just met.
4) Use breakout rooms! One of our instructors used a method he learned from yeshivas — the chavrusa, where 2 students discuss a selected bit of text. He wd pair students & send them to separate rooms to discuss. After 8 mins, they’d come back & shared what they’d discussed.
Students loved the chavrusas. Getting to know each other online is hard, & these one-on-one pairings made a difference. In the future, we’ll try to use these in all our online seminars.
5) We didn’t use most of the features Zoom has. Most detracted, rather than added. It was better to focus on ea other & the text. But some faculty made good use of the share screen function to bring up passages of text to read together & discuss.
6) Intro videos. We asked each student and instructor to make a short video introducing themselves, what they hoped to get out of the class, & answer their choice of a playful, but serious icebreaker Q. We shared w/instructors & students before the program.
7) Encourage student interaction. We encouraged each class to create an “unofficial” Slack channel where they cd converse apart from us. We ran a series of student debates as a cohort-building exercise — it worked b/c it was competitive & team-based.
8) Playfulness & seriousness are sisters, as Plato tells us. Don’t be afraid to be cheesy or less buttoned-up than usual. Our students loved the moments where pets or children unexpectedly wandered into view, where faculty futzed w/their cameras, etc.
We’re all human, and we’re making the best of a strange & unexpected situation together. Try to find humor, as much as you can, in our current circumstances.
If you have questions, reply or DM us. The coming semester is tough, but it’s possible to deliver a high-quality course online. We’re skeptics abt online, but it was better than we expected.
Our students said they preferred in-person learning, but all wd do another online seminar w/us, even absent a global pandemic!
One more tip -- adopt a method for queue and tell the students that's how you'll conduct discussion upfront. Our faculty tried diff methods -- just raising hands, Zoom virtual hand raise, hybrid w/Zoom hand raise & 2-finger interjections.
The only thing that didn't work was keeping mics on & letting ppl just speak. Crosstalk is not so intelligible on Zoom. But your experience may vary. The important thing is that you estb a classroom norm since your colleagues may do things differently.
