Distance Teaching (Surprise!) and COVID-19

As it turns out, I’ve been sick and isolating at home since Monday, and so I had to transition to remote even before students left campus.  I’ve thus had a few intense days of immediate immersion in online teaching. I’ve been reminding myself both to choose my words carefully and emphasizing building and creating right now and for after this crisis resolves. I’ve asked them to think about what world they want to build and create going forward. I’ve tried to remind them that regardless of discipline, they all have a stealth major: learning to deal with complicated institutions, for with very few exceptions, they’ll be involved with such institutions long after they leave campus. And even as I’ve shared explainers about ‘flattening the curve,’ I’ve tried hard to remain in my disciplinary lane.

My campus uses Canvas, and so for the first time I’m trying to take advantage of the discussion forums and chat function. The chat I’ve used just for students to tell each other where they are, what their physical surroundings are (e.g., cat, no cat), and what they’re thinking and feeling.

It’s been kind of funny, dashing virtually from the chat function to a discussion forum and then back to chat so that we can bookend the academic work in the discussion forum with the feeling work in the chat.

But the bookending with emotion is important no matter the discipline: biochemistry, business, sociology. Students have just lost their peer group. Some fear for themselves, their families, their towns, and their countries. And so if you are in this situation, I guess my best counsel is to decide what emotional marks you want to hit and then hit them often. Remind them that whether in an accounting, dance, or history course, they are in this together, and they’ll get through it together.

Here are some concrete examples:

I offered the following Canvas questionnaire:

Can you please tell me a little bit about what/how you’re feeling right now? Knowing this will help me bend the course around you.

Can you tell me a little bit about the internet access in the place you stay when you’re not on campus? Do you think you’ll be able to access Canvas and Google documents, for instance? Feel free to tell me about any other tech concerns you might have, including laptop/device access.

Is there anything else you think I should know, anything else you’d like to express?

And in one of my classes, I offered this discussion prompt:

Please read this article reflecting upon Toni Morrison’s 1993 Nobel lecture and listen to the speech (audio embedded in the article).

“How lovely it is, this thing we have done — together.”

As the world as it is has prevented us from meeting face to face to reflect on the last collaborative process, we have to adjust to our new circumstances. I ask that you take some time to craft a careful, thoughtful response to the following:

Did you learn anything about yourself through the process of contributing to the first collaborative essay? What will the challenges be as you embark on the next collaborative process amid circumstances that have radically changed in practical, technological, and emotional terms? What steps do you commit to taking to explore what is possible and offer hope during a challenging time?

Please use class time to write your own response and post it.

Over break, please read your peers’ responses and write back meaningfully to them. Make each other feel heard and seen. This is a way to maintain the fabric between you so that when you return to take up the threads of the next collaborative essay, you won’t be strangers.

Carefully crafted words that flower in the fullest, best parts of humanity can be packed up and taken with you wherever you go. Work your magic.

“We die. That may be the meaning of life. But we do language. That may be the measure of our lives.”

*****

Note from WaterGirl:

For sharing, and for future reference for yourself, you might want to bookmark the whole series.

https://balloon-juice.com/category/health-care/covid-19/distance-teaching-coronavirus/

You can also find it under Featuring in the sidebar (it’s in the menu bar / hamburger on mobile).

 

Live Instruction

Zoom is the go-to standard for live instruction. Most institutions have licenses.  Students are often familiar with it. It runs on all platforms, and Zoom Rooms allow you to schedule your Zoom session just like a course. It can scale to 100 participants for a standard license or 300 for an institutional one. Do some practice ahead of time to learn how to deal with muting, getting the interface the way you need it, making sure your screen sharing works, etc.

Zoom can also record your session so you can use it as a poor-mans recorded lecture tool. It works both as a tool for simulating a discussion session, as well as for something like office hours with students dropping in.

If you have a TA or some other assistant, having that person able to monitor a chat  space where questions can be posted and feeding them to you to answer makes the whole thing go massively better. They can also triage questions and if they feel it only applies to that student, they can just answer it in chat.

I’ve heard some questions about whether Zoom can ramp up to handling every unviersity course in the the country overnight, and I think the answer is yes. They built out on AWS and then moved into their own cloud stack, but have retained the ability to do surge capacity on AWS, so yeah, I think they can scale just fine. They may have some outages as they work out what the real demand will be, but I think they’ll move in front of that quite quickly. They have a  good team.

Also, in my experience, Zoom works better on mobile devices than computers. So if you aren’t doing screen sharing, just run it on your phone. It’ll probably be easier, better quality, and more reliable. If you miss your white board and you have an iPad Pro with Pencil or a Surface or a Galaxy tablet with pen, then you can do screen capture on those devices and work out problems for the class. These can vary a lot in terms of quality. A standard iPad with a 3rd party stylus isn’t very good. I have a 12″ iPad Pro with 2nd generation Pencil and it’s amazing.

Recorded Instruction

The worst outcomes result from taking your traditional 50 minute or 80 minute  class, recording it, and putting it online. That may be where you have to start, but try and change that as soon as you have time. We have to break down some basic conceptions here. The 50 or 80 minute lecture is not the product of some grand pedagogical consensus. It’s an administrative construct designed to operate schools efficiently, particularly in an era before computers. It’s the factory model.

Armed with that set of constraints by administrators, instructors have developed  means to make that work relatively well. There is something to be said for physical presence, subtle non-verbal interactions, reading a room, etc. But we can shed that administrative constraint here and adopt better approaches for students. You likely have an intuitive sense of the pacing of your course by week, but the students don’t particularly care about that. That’s your time management need, not necessarily theirs. As we go thorugh this, the pacing may shift relative to where you want to do assessment. And that’s okay as long as it doesn’t get too out of hand. Online courses generally give students some flexiblity to adapt the pacing to their needs.

So, start by thinking about how you choose to learn. It’s generally in short  bursts allowing for time to review and apply it, reinforce whether you  understand it, and then tackling the next concept. If you are recording your lectures consider taking your normal 50 or 80 minute lesson and break it up into conceptual elements  that are 5-10 minutes long. They should be a complete concept, they should look back slightly to remind students what this module will build on, and they should look forward to the next module. This helps anchor the concept in the larger  context. As a result, your 50 minute lecture may not fit in 50 minutes of  recording. That’s okay. The other benefit of smaller modules is easier maintenance in that if you need to revise or re-record a module, you just need to do 5-10 minutes.

If you take a 45 hour of instruction class and break it  up into 5-10 modules, you’re looking at maybe 300-400 videos. You want to be able to create one of these, maybe do a little bit of editing – add a title screen, trim a bit from the start and end and push it out to your campuses system fairly efficiently. Our faculty generally prefer Youtube hosting with embedding the link in a Canvas lesson.  That also makes it a bit easier if you need to re-offer the course and you can copy  everything over to the new course space and just edit it. With so many videos, you’ll need to do some extra effort to make the listing/directory easily navigable with clear titles. If you number your videos, don’t put them in the title of the video.  Often times instructors want to add a new video and that throws off the numbering. Number them in Canvas and break them up in a chapter/video manner so that if you do need to renumber, you won’t have to renumber all of them.

And a course is rarely actually linear. Typically you’ll build off of something you introduced several weeks ago, and here you have an opportunity to point students to review a set of concepts as an introduction to something new. ‘Go review videos 3-4, 3-5, 4-2, and 4-3 before starting 7-1’. That’s something you can’t easily do in a traditional class, but is trivial to do here.

Don’t go crazy with technology. You want solid, reliable over flashy.  If your institution has a service or software such as Replay, you may be best off sticking with something that your institution will provide support for, even if it’s not the best for your use case. Most faculty just want to go through a Powerpoint presentation with a voice-over.  Using a camera is better as students are more engaged looking at you than just listening to you. If you feel a bit more technically capable, I’m a fan of Filmora  for recording. It does a good job of screen capture (your Powerpoint) as well as  your video camera and microphone in an overlay window and giving you good editing  tools. It’s a nice bit of software that runs on Mac or Windows. Not terribly expensive. But if your school has Replay and support for it, I’d just stick with  that to start.

Supplemental Instruction

This does afford you the chance for supplemental instruction. Don’t be afraid to point students to other content. Professional YouTubers are very good at this, they have full editing gear and experience, and they know how to do the ‘performance’ of engaging teaching, and making things interesting. That doesn’t come naturally to many instructors, particularly when you are just speaking to a camera. You don’t need to replace your own instruction with this content, but students may find a lesson that came with a week of planning, professional

editing, and  animations to be more illustrative. Especially here in the beginning when you’re  scrambling to get something working, leveraging the work of others can take some  pressure off. EEVBlog, Physics Girl, Wootube, etc. Every discipline has someone passionate about that discipline out there creating content. This will work better  for lower-division than upper-division instruction, but you’ll be surprised at how much advanced content is out there.

If you’ve lost your labs, you’ll have to move to demonstrations since presumablycyour institution is still open and you can simulate the lab. Again, record thesecrather than trying to do them live – it will never go well. You may be able to pull the demonstration off perfectly, but having to do the cinematography at the same time will break you.

If you have more time or you have TAs who can help with this, a really good model I’ve seen work is to take a problem or a demonstration and record it 3 times. Do a 1 minute solution (advanced), a 3 minute solution (typical), and a 5 minute solution.  Students that feel like they have this down, they can do the 1 minute video. Most  will do the 3 minute, but those that are stuck might need the 5 minute – which may be more detailed, cover some remedial material, walk through the math in more detail, give a 2nd or 3rd explanation, etc. This will obviously take longer, but may help reduce the amount of live explanations if students get stuck.

You may be surprised at how much experience your TAs have with video or audio recording and editing. It’s not that uncommon.

Tools of the Trade

Most people can get by very well with Zoom and either Replay or something like Filmora.  If you can afford a bit of gear, take lessons from pro YouTubers. They’ve driven the cost of much of this stuff down, so you can really up the quality of your instruction for not much money. Your laptop camera and mic will certainly work fine to start, but a separate camera and mic will make your results much better.

1) Lighting – Get a softbox lighting setup: https://www.amazon.com/Soft-Boxes/b?ie=UTF8&node=14014901 These provide diffuse lighting from a non-point source, so they knock down shadows. You need more light than you realize. $40 and up.

2) Camera – Logitech StreamCam. $150. This probably also takes care of your microphone needs. It’s not as good as a dedicated mic, but it pretty good. You may need to add a stand for  flexibility.

3) Microphone:  The best reviews of these, IMO, including audio samples:https://marco.org/podcasting-microphonesRecommend the Audio-Technica ATR2100x-USB. $100. This assumes you’re sitting and  presenting, not standing. If you have a decent camera like the StreamCam, you can  probably skip this. But get a USB mic so you don’t need to deal with other hardware.

If you’re doing demonstrations, the camera with stand and lighting will be key.  Alternatively, your phone can do a servicable job here – especially a recent flagship Galaxy or iPhone. There’s software for using an iPhone as an external camera such as iWebcam. Depending on what you’re doing you can step up even to a DJI Osmo Mobile 3 Gimbal – $120. Really amazing bit of hardware for stabilizing  video, even does motion tracking, etc.

If you do have access to your campus, see if your department can set up a few classrooms or conference room as studios. Or set your office up as one. Mount a camera, lighting, etc. so you can present in front of your white board or at your desk.

And many disciplines really benefit from recording their lessons out in the world. An iPhone and gimbal setup and you can give an urban planning lecture in a setting that illustrates your topic. Or from a museum or what have you. The change in venue is engaging for students, and you may enjoy the opportunity to get away from things a little.

I’ll do a separate post on assignments and testing.

*****

Note from WaterGirl:

For sharing, and for future reference for yourself, you might want to bookmark the whole series.

https://balloon-juice.com/category/health-care/covid-19/distance-teaching-coronavirus/

You can also find it under Featuring in the sidebar (it’s in the menu bar / hamburger on mobile).