Today marks the resumption of classes at Bemidji State University, all of which are now housed online. Many of my colleagues around the world have come up with a variety of different ways of flipping their classes over. My focus has been on enhancing online interaction and replacing face-to-face interaction as much as is reasonable. And as I mentioned before, the former involves discussion threads and the latter involves Zoom conferences!
Monday and Tuesday encompassed the bulk of my Zoom meetings. One of my classes will meet for a second time tomorrow (their request); otherwise, every class has met, giving me a little insight into how this is all going to go. TL;DR: yeah, it’ll work.
Here are a few observations after running 4 sessions:
- Small classes, in general, translate better to online conferencing software. This is probably a big old “duh.” The more people you pack into one place, the more things you have to do to keep things organized. For my larger classes, that has involved using Zoom’s built-in “hand” system to avoid having folks turn one another into robots by attempting to talk at the same time. I use the same system for small classes, but when you have 6 or 8 people doing that, you still get most of the fluidity of in-person classes; the same is not true of larger classes. The pace is noticeably slower and clunky. Currently, I have no solution because I don’t think there is one; you just have to adapt.
- Conferencing software is pretty neat. The fact that this stuff exists makes my life as a teacher a hell of a lot easier. For one, it’s easy for me to display PowerPoints, web searches, and anything else I think students need to see. You can do that in person, too, which just means that I rather appreciate the functionality of this software in 2020. Kudos to the folks working on this stuff.
- I’m not convinced that “lecturing” in this manner really works. I gave a lecture on evaluating sources to my Argument and Exposition students. While I think most of them got what they needed out of it, I’m going to pay careful attention to how useful any sort of lecturing will be for the remaining weeks (about 5-6). This is the only class in which I have lectures of any kind, though I am not a “lecture heavy” instructor by default. For the most part, I manage classes through conversation.
I’m sure I’ll have more to say in the weeks to come. More sessions = more data points.
The big takeaway for me is that the existence of these technologies does make it a lot easier and more enjoyable to teach online. In other words, it’ll work. But I still think that these technologies are insufficient substitutes for in-person learning. As much as I’m trying to go all out for my students to give them something to look forward to (oh how optimistic I am), it’s likely that these tools are little more than a stop-gap. It’s a very nice band aid on a wound that needs stitches.
Anyone else up to anything exciting? What nifty things have you been playing around with in your classes?
