Read on Twitter
If you will forgive me a little non-humble bragging: my student evals this semester for my 70 person upper-level lecture class (taught via zoom) were AMAZING. I thought a thread on what they really seemed to appreciate migh be of use to folks teaching online in the spring. 1/n
For the last few years Iâve been using TopHat as an interactive classroom tool. It costs the students ~$25 but I negotiated with my rep for waiver codes for anyone on finanical aid. It allows all kinds of in-class questions so you can check to see if they understand in real time
This year I used it even more to break up the lectures. I also started each class with a question for them to answer as they were filtering into the zoom. Sometimes class related, sometimes just fun. Once a week I just asked how they were feeling and made a word cloud.
This I think was especially important - the top answers were always âtired," âstressed,â and âoverwhelmedâ and I think it helped them to see they werenât alone in feeling everything they were feeling.
The class has always done small group journal club once a week, where they prepare a google slide to answer a question about a paper, and ultimately the class presents the whole paper. This actually worked BETTER on zoom w breakout rooms than in 14 groups in a classroom.
Getting to spend some regular time getting to know a few of their classmates also made a HUGE difference this semester, when they canât just casually interact around the classroom. (I will note that setting up pre-determined zoom breakout rooms took a LOT of trial & error)
The other things that were mentioned multiple times in the evals were that I really wanted to make sure everyone understood the material and that I was very passionate about the topic. I definitely shaved off a little from some of my lectures to allow more time for Qs
Zoom teaching does not have the easy improvisational back and forth that classroom teaching can have. There are going to be some weird pauses and you just have to get used to that and kind of build it in. As for the 2nd thing, itâs true, I get very excited talking about science.
The bottom line I think is that especially now, students want to feel like you care, like you recognize that you are talking to real humans who are going through a whole bunch of shit and not just talking to your computer. They want interaction in all possible forms.
Oh! One other thing I did is after the first exam, I had an âAsk me anythingâ class so they could get to know me better. They asked all kinds of things, from my career trajectory & research to my favorite movies and music. They seemed to like that too!
Also if youâre curious about how to do a flipped classroom journal club with 70 students Iâm happy to share more details - I think they really learn a ton about reading papers and itâs a great way to break up lecture days.
OK, here is my large-scale class journal club process. I have no idea how many tweets this will take. First, for a class of 70 I divided them into 14 groups of 5. One day after lecture I sent them to breakout rooms and gave them 5 min to chat and come up with a group name.
We had some good punny names: Pink Freud, All Fight No Flight, Myelin Nation, Hungry-Hungry Hippocampus, etc. Every time we had a journal club coming up, I would send them the paper and 14 questions that they should use to help them work their way through reading.
Some example questions:
-Describe the experimental groups for Experiment 1. What is a sham surgery? Were the manipulations systemic or local?
- Figure 3-G: What was the purpose of this experiment? What did they measure? How do the results support the behavior results?
-Describe the experimental groups for Experiment 1. What is a sham surgery? Were the manipulations systemic or local?
- Figure 3-G: What was the purpose of this experiment? What did they measure? How do the results support the behavior results?
More example questions:
-What flaws do you see in this paper? What would you do differently, or have the authors do to follow up?
- What were the main goals and hypotheses of this study? What are your thoughts on doing parallel human and animal studies?
-What flaws do you see in this paper? What would you do differently, or have the authors do to follow up?
- What were the main goals and hypotheses of this study? What are your thoughts on doing parallel human and animal studies?
For each paper, I created a google presentation that had 14 blank slides, each containing one of the 14 questions and having one of the group names at the top of the slide. Right before the JC class, I would share the google doc with everyone.
They would look to see which question their team had been assigned, and then they had 15 minutes in breakout rooms to fill in the slide and answer the question. They always did a great job and had fun with the slide design
After the 15 minutes were up, a representative from each group would present their slide, in order so that we effectively went through the whole paper. I would maybe ask some questiosn as they came up or add some additional info if needed.
That is basically it! At the end the class had created a full slideshow on the paper that they could study from. I think itâs fun to have a class in which thereâs a tangible âproductâ at the end. Learning to read papers critically is IMO one of the most important skills.
I kept track of which groups had been assigned which questions and tried to mix it up week to week so that the same group didnât always get the background question, for example.
Oh one final note - if you can, record your lectures!! I have personally never tried to both watch a lecture on a computer while taking notes on the same computer, but it sounds really hard. Give students the opportunity to review what you say at their own pace.
