Reflections on moving to teaching online

by Harry on May 13, 2020

Nobody knows what will happen with US colleges and universities in the fall, but it’s a fair guess that at least some, probably most, and not unlikely all, teaching will be online. Whatever is online in the fall will be unlike what was online in the spring: on the one hand people will have had a chance to prepare and train; on the other, classes will lack the glue that in-person meetings prior to going online made possible.

I’ll post some thoughts soon about how we might think about going forward in the fall, but for now I’m just assuming that some or much of our teaching will be online. In the spirit that learning about what seems to have worked and what seems not to have worked for different people will help us prepare, here are some reflections on my experience. I’d welcome your advice, but also your reflections on your own experiences!

I taught two classes last semester. One was 150 students, with 2 TAs, the other was 30, no TA’s. Let’s start with the smaller one.

Although it is a 3-credit class, we had 4 full hours (120 minutes) of class time per week. This proved fortuitous: I scheduled 4 hours for 2 reasons. 1) The class involves a group project, and in my experience students find difficulty coordinating out-of-class time to work together, so this provided them with that. 2) The cap was 22 but I anticipated (correctly) that it might be raised to 30 and wanted to be able to meet with them in reasonable-sized groups. So my plan was really that I’d meet them for 4 hours most weeks, but most of them would meet me for only 3 hours most weeks.

During the period in which we met in person I did my usual thing of making sure they learned each other names and had plenty of small group discussions that were small enough for them to bond, and get to know each other intellectually. This was made easier by the fact that 5 of the students lived together, another 3 were close friends of each other, and I knew more than half the students already (and many whom I knew already knew each other).

Basically, it was the optimal situation for moving online. The first two weeks online I split them into groups of 7-8, and met each for a full hour. Their prep involved writing TWO online responses to readings, and we would discuss one of those readings together during the meeting. 7-8 students ensures that all of them are well prepared, and all of them talk. The discussions have to be moderated – everyone is muted until they are unmuted, if you see what I mean – but this allows the teacher to ensure everyone is talking without being too obvious about it. And the reduction from 30 or 15 to 7-8 meant there was no real loss of flow in the discussions.

After 2 weeks I administered a survey in which the students made it clear that they didn’t feel they were getting enough time to talk to each other. So I kept them in groups of 7-8 to meet with me, but required each group to meet, also, for an hour without me to discuss a different reading, assigning a discussion leader, and giving them the task of reporting the results of their discussion to me. Basically organizing them into small reading groups. I was also able to give them an hour a week with their 4-person group doing the group project, and most of those groups have met with me outside of class time.

This class was a mix of majors, and a mix of seniority – about 1/3 are graduating next week, the others are all juniors and sophomores. Some of them have had real challenges during the semester – confidentiality (and the knowledge that some are likely to read this) prevents me from disclosing but at least 3 of them have been dealing with things (all unrelated to the crisis) that would have knocked me out for the semester but, in fact, those 3 all remained full and enthusiastic participants and said the class was a source of strength and meaning for them.

I found it exhausting to meet with students for 2 hours at a time. The main reason, I think, is that managing a discussion is just much more difficult online. In-person there are so many cues, not only to me, but to each other, about what they are thinking, who wants to talk, even what they are likely to say and whom they’ll be responding to. Most of these are absent online, but one is searching for them or for substitutes (which are also often not present!) anyway. I gradually found it less exhausting, and I suspect that is because I stopped anticipating failure, and because they became better at taking control of the situation.

The final project for the course was unchanged by the crisis: a group project (they were split into groups of 4) developing a case study in a particular moral dilemma about education, followed by individual commentaries on the case study. In a way the crisis probably helped – it probably made it easier for them to find time to meet as groups (though they lost some of the time that I had built into the class meeting schedule). Certainly the results (which I have just read) were just superb, revealing a lot of learning. I’d feel better about this for thinking about next semester if several students had not told me that this class became the focal point of their actual meaningful learning (as opposed to just going through the motions) after we went online: basically, I suspect that many of the students chose, for entirely sensible reasons, to make this course the one in which they did their real learning.

Now for the larger class. A 4 credit class with 150 students, in 7 discussion sections, one of which was taught by me. During the in-person part of the semester attendance was always very high, for both lecture and sections. About 60% of the students were seniors, and about 60% were business students, with a variety of other majors and class-levels. It was during what turned out to be the final in person class meeting that we learned that we were going fully online, and at the end of the class session several students were in tears and one hugged me very publicly (which I probably should have stopped her from doing but i) I was too disoriented; ii) it would have been mean and iii) I’m not sure I’d have succeeded).
I don’t think it’s been a great success. Initially I took the almost unanimous advice that all lecture should be asynchronous. I made a few, not very good, video lectures. I think everyone has had this experience – video lectures made in your bedroom on equipment not fit for purpose, with dodgy internet, are DREADFUL! And, like everyone, I found myself recording the same things over and over again, with stupid glitches getting in the way of one or another take. To my horror, none of the students have complained, and several have said that the video lectures were pretty good. They weren’t.

Much better, though, were the video discussions. A colleague and I were teaching some overlapping material, and I had 3 excellent undergraduate volunteers who had studied all that material before, so we made several recorded video discussions. One of us would recap the material very quickly (often material on which a video lecture had been recorded) and then we ran a discussion which had been very roughly outlined beforehand. Only one of the students is a philosophy major (the others are Biochem, and Econ/CommArts), and they all know I believe (correctly, though I’m not sure they know I’m correct) so although they’re all very smart they felt to inclination to pitch the discussion at a level too far above that of the students in the class. This, I think, was the best thing we did, and I highly recommend it – they were low-resolution, low-production value, but otherwise high quality educational TV. So much better than the professor talking nonstop. The feedback I got about these from students was very positive and I’d really recommend it for anyone who is teaching larger classes online in the fall (which will be a lot of people).

My discussion section was great. My students are all freshmen, and all knew each other and me before the class: I split 18 students into groups of 6, and met each group weekly online for an hour. Again, exhausting, but it kept them completely engaged, and was intellectually lively and fun.

The problem was this. With 150 students it is really hard to feel connected if you have no in-person or synchronous interaction. My large lectures involve a lot of discussion, and with this group I had managed to run several 75-minute sessions which were almost entirely all-class discussion and in which nearly everyone was visibly engaged. I think it’s the most success I have ever had with that; but, going asynchronous, all connection was severed. I don’t think I would do that again. In response to the student surveys, I reinstated once-a-week synchronous lectures, but attendance was, understandably, sparse, and I felt that I was wasting the time of the students who were there. Our campus platform (BBCollaborate) only allows a few people to be visible at a time, and hardly any students had their video showing (in section and my other class everyone had video showing, and after two weeks I took out my own subscription to zoom and used zoom for those classes, so everyone could see everyone else). We chose to make attendance at discussion sections other than mine optional, and attendance was low, although the students who did attend got a lot out of it. My TAs aren’t well paid, and the burden on them was considerable, so I couldn’t ask them (or even let them) split their groups into manageable sizes and spend many extra hours a week in sections.

The written work in the large class has been good (and there’s a lot of it – I moved from having 1 online discussion board discussion to 2 most weeks; same with the smaller class). But I’m convinced that a lot of learning that I don’t assess was lost, and I would guess that 30-40% of the students did considerably less learning than they otherwise would have. Whereas, in my own discussion section, and the smaller class, they all had considerably less fun, but probably didn’t lose very much learning.

Some observations.

  1. I could work out how to make good online synchronous discussions happen with groups of under 10, but not with groups above that size, and even with the small groups I am pretty sure that the fact they all knew each other already and were practiced discussing with each other made it much easier. The latter is not replicable in classes that are online from the start.

  2. In the small class all my evidence is that the synchronous discussions that were held without me present were excellent. But, again, I suspect that was very dependent on the fact that they knew each other well already, and were experienced students who had taken the class out of a focused interest. I adore and admire the freshmen in the discussion section of my large class, but I’m not confident they could have had good discussions without the presence of an experienced facilitator (which needn’t have been me – I could name 15 juniors and seniors whom I trust to run such discussions well).

  3. Remember that all the evidence we have about learning in online-from-the-start classes is about students who chose that format over the in-person option, for one reason or another. So we have to use careful judgement in deciding what to take from that model.

  4. Online synchronous teaching is really tiring. I’m basically an introvert, and I don’t find this lockdown emotionally difficult really, but I think I get a lot of energy from being in the room with students. And online I am constantly searching for cues about what they are thinking, who is and who isn’t engaged, etc. This is slightly easier on zoom, in which you can sort of see lots of faces, than in the platform we have at UW, where no more than 3 faces can be seen at a time, but it’s still far from easy. I’m curious whether colleagues with very large monitors found that helped or not.

{ 10 comments }

1

anonymous 05.14.20 at 11:24 am

” A 4 credit class with 150 students, in 7 discussion sections, one of which was taught by me. During the in-person part of the semester attendance was always very high, for both lecture and sections. About 60% of the students were seniors”

Wow. I attended classes like that-as a freshman. My senior classes tended to be normally-sized (20-30).

Those freshman classes were for all intents and purposes, not classes. A huge lecture hall, in which the professor didn’t know anybody (perhaps other than particularly eager students who made an effort to meet him). There was no roll call, so I tended to skip quite frequently. In fact, in one (physics-I was an engineering major), I evolved into skipping basically every class. A friend and I would get together three times during the semester (for the three tests) for a long weekend and cram homework enough to pass the test.

Later, as a graduate student and teaching assistant (in social sciences), I worked for a professor in a similar setting (huge lecture hall). Again, students for all intents and purposes didnt’ know the professor-only a few of them even knew me (I didn’t lecture, but administered tests and graded papers).

I suppose you could argue that giant freshman classes are reasonable-they are basically filters, to get rid of the students who don’t really want to be there.

But senior classes of 150? Those kids at high school were taught in groups of 25 -30.

Other than habit: why would anyone go into debt for that?
And other than habit: why would anyone go into debt for an online version of the same?

anon

2

Derek Bowman 05.14.20 at 12:34 pm

Thanks for this, Harry. I’ve been looking forward to hearing your reflections on this.

I love the idea of the recorded discussion with undergraduate volunteers. I recorded a short series of hybrid lecture-dialogue videos with a colleague for one of his classes, and he reported that the students found them more engaging than the lecture monologues he tried at first. But I can already see how much better the format would be with a few students thrown in.

You describe the students as volunteers, so I gather that means they weren’t compensated in any way. I wonder if there is a way to coordinate this the campus tutoring center or those who handle campus work-study to make these paid positions. As a friend and (for the moment) fully employed fellow academic, I had no problem recording a video for someone else’s classes, but I worry that it would be rather exploitative for me as a paid professor to rely on the unpaid work of students in this way. (To be clear this isn’t a criticism of you – doing it as an experiment under emergency conditions is very different than making it a pre-planned part of the curriculum. And I know from previous posts that this is something you are conscientious about).

3

Hidari 05.14.20 at 1:44 pm

‘Other than habit: why would anyone go into debt for that?
And other than habit: why would anyone go into debt for an online version of the same?’

Because the alternative is……?

4

Harry 05.14.20 at 1:51 pm

Derek. They were volunteers in the sense that I asked if they wanted to do it, rather than requiring it. All three of them were paid, one of them pretty well. But that’s due to the accident of me having money lying around that I was able to use for them and they happened to be on payroll. There’s no such provision for the fall (everyone on my payroll is graduating, and we’re not allowed to hire anyone). There’s an alternative — setting up a for-credit class, in which the task is to work on curricular materials.

I like your idea of getting it coordinated — I would say department level is probably more promising than at tutoring center level, but that’s just because faculty are more likely to trust students that their departments are providing.

Anon. To be fair its not a senior class, and it is rarely that size (usually a cap of 80, or 100 if I add in the first year students from my fall class — I’ll tell the long story about that sometime soon). It fulfills a B school ethics requirement, which some students leave till their final semester because they aren’t excited about it, and others (I am told) wait till they can take it with me (and because seniors register early they have an advantage). So most of the students are taking several smaller classes plus this one. If we offered 500 or so extra spaces one semester we’d clear out the seniors and juniors, and after that mainly sophomores would take it. In Philosophy, the upper level major classes usually cap at 20-30. (Hence the other class, which was 30 — I actually think that its is much worse having classes of 30 than 150, because 30 is too many to teach intimately, and if we offered more 150 person classes we could offer fewer 30 person classes, and more 20 person classes).

5

faustusnotes 05.14.20 at 2:17 pm

Harry that smaller class sounds pretty cool and interesting, and it sounds like you’re handling it well. The bigger one … well, I don’t know what one can do about that. I teach stats so probably could scale to such a class with asynchronous badly recorded videos, but I don’t think it’s easy to do a good job with that. Do you feel like you have any actual sense that you have 150 students? If you can’t stand there in front of them seeing their faces, do you actually feel like you’re teaching at all?

My university (in Japan) has been doing online teaching for a while now for about half our students, who are full-time workers, with a nice arrangement where we teach half the students in an actual lecture and then make the recording available online afterwards, so we were kind of ready for this crisis. However, the video recordings of lectures are poor quality, and the people viewing it can’t see the students who were there, and now I am teaching with an online lecture system (we were using zoom but now the execrable google meet) I think they get clearer and better lecture material, so I think it’s better for them.

Also, I don’t know what’s happening overseas but we have 3 overseas students in a cohort of about 20 who cannot come to Japan because their countries are banned. So they are studying remotely (they have scholarships so no issue of not getting their money’s worth) while working in their home country. This means even if the emergency ends in June we will likely continue teaching all classes online to accommodate them. The students so far say they prefer it to in-person classes for a lot of reasons: they’re busy working professionals without much time to commute and some of them are taking the lectures in break rooms or other settings at work, and I think they feel more comfortable being able to ask questions in chat rather than physically. I think also when you come from a night shift to a class (even though usually you got some sleep on that shift) it must be nice to be able to turn off the camera for 10 minutes and zone out. It seems to be working for us.

I am thinking that in some ways it’s better than physical teaching, it feels kind of closer than a lecture theatre, but I do find the lack of social cues difficult and it is tiring, and I too get a lot of energy from being in the room with the students. The real challenge is going to be the statistical programming class, which I’m still thinking about how to organize – there’s a lot of 1-to-1 interaction in that which I don’t think I can easily translate to a zoom-type format. (Of course this is perfect for me after a knee reconstruction, since I’m not well enough to be able to swan around a computer room for two hours checking everyone’s code, not with this leg)

Finally, it’s a damn good thing that we moved online. Some of our students are working directly with coronavirus patients, and although no one so far has experienced an in-hospital infection, if someone did and then came to a physical class it would be a disaster for everyone involved.

6

anonymous 05.15.20 at 11:37 pm

Because the alternative is……?

be an electrician and make more money.

anon

7

ph 05.16.20 at 10:40 am

Hi Harry and others. I spent about a month work-shopping with peers prior to starting online teaching. Experimenting with different interfaces, breakout rooms, and resources helped immensely. These role-playing activities allowed us identify and clearly defnine desired outcomes prior to the start of classes.

The single most important dimension of this process were email interactions with students in the weeks prior to the start of classes. We culled the email for word clusters individually and then summarized student concerns by year. Most of us are primarily concerned with undergraduates. The responses of 4th, 3rd, 2nd, and 1st-year students varied greatly. 3rd and 4th-year students were generally most concerned about value, and the perception that the online class credits wouldn’t be worth as much as meat-space ones. 2nd-year students were primarily concerned with club activities and the lack of contact with friends on campus. 1st-year students with no memories of university life to draw upon were totally disoriented, sad, and felt entirely cut-off.

After some deliberation, my peers and I agreed that educational goals would have to wait, especially for 1st-year students. Lacking any memory of campus life to sustain them through this period, 1st-year students first required a sense of community as equal and full members of the larger student body before we could ask them to also adjust to the novel challenges of the online learning experience. So, we had to build each class into a community of learners online first, as stakeholders in their own social and educational development.

As an informal group, we each explained all this to our first-year students, who have been extremely grateful and receptive. Students spent the entire first class socializing and having fun online in small groups of five or six, interviewing one another and sharing contact information. The ‘homework’ for week one was creating meeting logs of all the outside-class Zoom meetings each student attended. Five meetings earned a 90 for the week, 1o earned a 95, and over 10 earned a 97. The first 10-15 minutes of each class in weeks 1-4 will be devoted to just hanging out, with this tapering off as students become more comfortable interacting online outside of class on class and social activities.

Second-year students in week 2 learned that they will be using their Zoom proficiency to meet each week all in small Zoom study groups 2-3 times a week to prepare in-class presentations, to pool resources, and peer-review research tasks etc.

Pairing the students early for short interview tasks of 2-5 minutes, for the first 2o minutes of the first two classes really gets enthusiasm levels up. The ‘recreate breakout rooms function’ on Zoom allows teachers to randomly place students in new pairs, and keeps students on their toes. The renaming function also permits students to state preferences for breakout room discussions automatically.

The actual teaching takes about 40 minutes and is divided into 3 10-minute sections, with students breaking off into small groups in break-out rooms after each 1o-minute lesson for discussion and confirmation. We conclude with final summary, usually on a short power-point, and a final 5-minute breakout room of 5-6 students each to confirm, hw, readings. Leaving 10 minutes for questions. No library access, but to date only one student has complained openly.

Online students have no common space, no lunch-room, no place to socialize and meet to discuss classes or daily life, and initially felt every bit as isolated as their teachers. Putting the social space in place first has ensured that all students feel connected, and support each other. The second benefit, obviously, is student Zoom comfort and proficiency.

Early days yet, and there are challenges and adjustments to come.

Online learning is different from meat-space learning. Learning to inhabit the online environment and experience it as students through role-playing activities with other teachers, experimenting with different practices, in the same way K-12 teachers normally do, greatly increases the chances of successful outcomes for all.

Best of luck to one and all.

8

Harry 05.16.20 at 2:03 pm

“After some deliberation, my peers and I agreed that educational goals would have to wait, especially for 1st-year students. Lacking any memory of campus life to sustain them through this period, 1st-year students first required a sense of community as equal and full members of the larger student body before we could ask them to also adjust to the novel challenges of the online learning experience. So, we had to build each class into a community of learners online first, as stakeholders in their own social and educational development.

As an informal group, we each explained all this to our first-year students, who have been extremely grateful and receptive. Students spent the entire first class socializing and having fun online in small groups of five or six, interviewing one another and sharing contact information. The ‘homework’ for week one was creating meeting logs of all the outside-class Zoom meetings each student attended. Five meetings earned a 90 for the week, 1o earned a 95, and over 10 earned a 97. The first 10-15 minutes of each class in weeks 1-4 will be devoted to just hanging out, with this tapering off as students become more comfortable interacting online outside of class on class and social activities.”

Thanks for this. I actually think the idea behind these two paras (and the general message of your post) is quite well understood by a lot of administrators that I’ve been talking with and NOT AT ALL understood by a lot of the faculty I’ve talked to. It needs to be better understood by faculty, and administrators have to make it a part of their communications, and classes (and choices of platforms) need to be designed around them.

9

ph 05.16.20 at 3:16 pm

Cheers, Harry.

10

David O'Brien 05.16.20 at 3:59 pm

Thanks, Harry, for doing this; I think it’s a fab idea to learn from each other and our experiences. Some notes about my experience moving online with a small-ish seminar–about 15 students ranging from sophomores to doctoral students. During the in-person part of the semester, we had one 2.5 hour meeting each week. I thought it would be far too difficult to try to run any kind of open discussion, of the kind we’d been having, in synchronous online sessions. So I moved half of the meeting time to an asynchronous lecture form, kept an hour or so of weekly structured discussion by Zoom, and used the other half of the scheduled weekly meeting time for one-to-one meetings.

The asynchronous lecture was a simple recording of my voice talking over while annotating w/ a stylus some lecture slides, usually about three 20-minute chunks. After watching the lecture, each student had to submit a short question, to which I then wrote a further response.

The structured discussion by Zoom was a mini-conference about each student’s weekly response. In the couple of days before a Zoom meeting, each student submitted a <100-word objection to a claim or argument in the assigned readings, then I assigned someone else as their respondent (when I could, someone whose objection to the reading exhibited some kind of interesting disagreement with them) who wrote a <100-word response to them. Then I organized an agenda of speakers/respondents in a Word document, in an order that I thought made some kind of sense, and shared my screen at the start of the meeting so that folks knew what would be happening during the meeting. We went around the ‘room’, each speaker/respondent giving an overview of their objection/response (or reading it if they preferred), with the floor open for several minutes of discussion from other students afterwards. (If you wanted to intervene, you’d raise your hand and went on a queue; my job was largely to keep the queue; I chimed in with a few thoughts only when the queue was exhausted.) The expectation was that you’d chime in on 2-3 discussions, other than your own ‘session’, each week. I’d usually write up a little summary document after each session, taking people back through the objections/responses we’d heard, trying to help bring out some of the themes that emerged and offering a few further thoughts.

The one-to-one meetings were organized by a Google document, with the time divvied up into 10-15 minutes slots, and students could sign up. At the start of each main Zoom session, I put the link to the Google document in the chat window and reminded people I’d be around if they wanted to sign up for a 10-minute slot. I used the Zoom ‘breakout room’ feature to take people in and out of one-to-one rooms, with the main meeting room as a waiting area.

Good things:
-I’d had an unusually difficult time getting students to come to office hours earlier in the semester. But the online 1-1 meeting slots were constantly full. And they’d usually fill up–I could see this–right after I announced I was putting the link in the chat window, and students could see other students signing up. I talked to most people more than once, and everyone at least once, in these meetings. They were, I think, very helpful both for me and them.
-There were things I liked about the Zoom meetings. What I liked best was that taking the role as chair/moderator imposed fairly strict limits on how much I said. Given that each student already had a designated respondent, I never had the temptation to respond immediately to/evaluate a student’s objection myself in the first instance. Knowing they’d be talking through their objections also had a pretty marked, and pretty salutary, effect on their writing. The discipline of having to say things aloud, in a way that other people could follow, made people’s writing a lot clearer and more straightforward after the first week of online meetings.
-Like other folks, I had a lot more consistent participation, from a lot more people, in the Zoom meetings than I’d had in person. I suspect part of that was down to the predictability of following an agenda, and part of it was down to the fact being able to read the objections/responses in advance allowed people to plan their contributions. I also–as an afterthought, really–wrote up a short document that gave people four ‘models’ for intervening in the discussion (under the headings of Clarification, Development, Response, and Thought, with a quick description of each and an example), because I was worried people would find it awkward or uncomfortable to intervene. Several students reported that they found this very useful, and referred to it to frame their interventions. I’d definitely do this again in a regular semester.
-Like Harry, I thought my recorded lectures were pretty crummy. But several students wrote to say that they liked them–in particular, how useful it was to be able to pause them and replay trickier bits. The questions they asked about the lecture material were quite a bit better than their questions earlier in the semester had been.

Worse things:
-I suppose the biggest downside of doing it the way I did was the large amount of extra work in writing responses to questions, follow-up summaries, etc. Recording video lectures also took me forever–I’d find myself stumbling, or mumbling, or not quite saying things right, or irritating myself with verbal tics. Painful.
-It was sometimes hard to make the Zoom meetings work on weeks when students had idiosyncratic concerns about the reading, or thoughts that it was hard for other people to engage with, or simple misunderstandings. It sometimes felt like listening to a series of disconnected thoughts (even if I could see that there were some interesting connections–that’s why I started writing the follow-up summaries). I definitely wouldn’t do it for a whole semester; I suspect it worked, to the degree it did, only because these folks had had a couple of months to get to know and trust each other to some degree. And while the predictability helped to make sure everyone got to engage substantively at least once, I think some more variation would have helped a little.
-I had to make quite a few depressing compromises, dropping some material and not getting to everything I’d wanted to. So I felt that students were left with a less well-rounded grasp of the literature than I’d have liked.

Comments on this entry are closed.