Reflections on moving to teaching online

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.