Teaching online is like flying blind; you have so much less information than you do in person, and can't read body language, get an immediate overview, check in on students in the thousand tiny ways that come without thinking in person.
Teaching virtually is doable, and still valuable, but it's definitely a degraded experience.
I think we all know that this is true, that online courses have subpar experience compared to physically being in the classrooms especially with younger kids. The question is, how can we make an online classroom experience be as good as it can get and also scales up?
Does “scaling up” have to be part of it? Maybe teaching is better done with small groups, and being online doesn’t change that. Could the time-shifting and decentralisation of online learning reduce class sizes instead of increasing them?
For what it's worth, that used to be a very common model of teaching, especially in early school (and it still is pretty common at university level, with TAs). It would be common for fourth-graders to teach first graders, as I understand it, especially in rural schools where there were very few teachers available.
I think there are problems with he system though, as you can't rely on the teaching capacities of an 11 year old child, even if they are quite gifted in that particular subject matter. I think doing group work with a mix of older and younger children would help a lot though, but it is still probably best if the concepts are first introduced by an adult who has at least some pedagocical training.
My 14 year old son, didn't take to online learning at all well (we're in Finland - the school already used google classroom and a lot of online technologies and had all the resources and training they needed).
It seemed to be the lack of attention both ways - the teacher can't really see how well the students are understanding the information and the students are perhaps taking less in (maybe the youtube/snapchat use has dulled their perception of video lessons) and are less inclined to ask for help.
I wonder if video lessons of traditional in-class teaching will ever be effective long distance to younger pupils. And shorter online interactive lessons - duolingo/khan academy etc. or something else is required.
Unless we solve this early, the problem you describe could be terrifically self-perpetuating.
Online learning (in its current state) requires lots of motivation and discipline. These are skills learned from tight feedback loops which historically happen in-person. If kids fail to pick this up early, they will be even less inclined to online learning. As a parent of a young kid, I'm very concerned that we're going to learn this lesson after it's far too late.
On the flipside, this serves as a demonstration for what is good teaching practice. The classes that suspiciously see no change go to show you can't scribble on a whiteboard and call it a day.
I think it's a bit disingenuous to call the rushed switch to online learning during a pandemic a failed or sub-par experiment, as I've seen in the WSJ.
The slapdash system we cobbled together on the fly while trying to figure out if we were dying doesn't hold up against the decades old, well tested and vetted in class educational experience? It would be problematic if it did, wouldn't it? It would mean we were completely wrong about the best way to educate.
The biggest note I see from this is that maybe it's not a great idea to force children to sit still and "learn" for 8 hours a day. If the only way for that technique to work is to have them physically controllable, something might not be working.
So I've taught a few thousand activists/journalists in security over the years in person and a couple of hundred over remote webinars. I've also built online self paced courses. My takeaway is that the biggest mistake educators make (and I was guilty of this at early stages) is trying to directly shift things like lessons plans from the physical to the online world. One way lecture style stuff which is kind of outdated (or occasionally just lazy) for many use cases in a physical classroom really fails for a lot of stuff when put online.
To do it well, online courses have to be approached completely differently. You have to switch your way of thinking, switch how you apply learning (esp adult) methodologies, switch your time planning and also change your expectations. For example adults mostly learn and enjoy learning best through facilitation where possible, stuff like group work. That's very hard to do well with current online tools. Also attention spans are very different.
Even small things like physical movement. In the training room you the educator can move around and in most sessions you can integrate opportunities to get the people you are training to stand up and move around for a bit (for example get a group to look at a problem and address it on the wall). You can't do that when someone is looking at a screen. Plus it's tricky to encourage people to feel able to spontaneously contribute or throw in a question etc on web. It's obviously also harder for more than one person to speak. Plus the way that people tend to be zeroed in on the educator means they are less likely to have positive engagement that spins off from what someone else is saying. E.g picking up follow up questions, asking their classmate how to do something or putting forward their own theory on something.
There are some advantages to using webinars about what you can use - depending on topic you can draw on a wider variety of material.
Overall when developing online courses I felt at times it shifted to require more of a Producer mentality than purely an Educator one.
Group work has its advantages, but possibly my sample is biased in a different direction than yours - I've always found groups a terrible way to teach programming, at least to complete beginners. Once they have the basics, then group work starts to work a bit better.
For sure, it obviously depends on what the subject is and how a subject is taught. Group work for the sake of it is super annoying. But there is also elements of tech related teaching that with a little work can be taught in slightly different ways without the need for it to be so device heavy. Especially basic concepts. For example we teach the main parts about online surveillance with a very simple 10 minute game that allows people to stand up and physically take parts in some of the elements. They don't need to be anywhere near their devices. When we compare that to when we teach it purely with slides or webinar etc the information retention difference when we measure 1 and 6 months later is massive.
> To do it well, online courses have to be approached completely differently. You have to switch your way of thinking, switch how you apply learning (esp adult) methodologies, switch your time planning and also change your expectations.
I'd like to hear more about what to switch to. What guiding principles have you observed?
The working model of management in at least certain high ranking UK universities is that it takes less time to run an online course than an in-person one, while maintaining the same standards. It's a convenient justification, if one not publicly made, for shrinking the industry's labour pool. So this year not only do many university teachers find themselves fighting the uphill battle of teaching online (or 'mixed', both online and in person), but they do so with fewer hands ready to help out. I despair.
That's ridiculous, I would say in terms of preparation and creation an online course is probably nearly double the time of a physical one at a minimum.
If that is the case, the school breaks even on effort after running the program twice and "profits" thereafter.
The program can also theoretically be shared with the rest of the world.
That assumes that the effort can all be recorded. It is more likely that a lot of the extra time goes into answering student questions in an online forum and adjusting content on the fly based on students’ interests and/or confusion.
Totally. It also assumes that students will pay the UK's vast fees for a course made up entirely of non-interactive video content. And that teachers will grant the university the right to redistribute their videos, which is their IP.
Honestly it feels like it boils down to the assumption that students will keep paying the same amount of money for a degree with a world famous university's branding. It seems to really be that transactional for senior management.
The IP argument is intresting because I've seen at least one Russell Group uni write into its employment T&C that the university owns the IP for any videos produced, retains these rights if the lecturer leaves and is allowed to licence them to third parties.
Traditionally the instructor owns copyright for course material:
“ Few reported cases exist addressing the issue of whether the educational institution or the faculty member owns the copyright to teaching materials prepared by a faculty member. All the reported cases that do exist have either held, or stated in dictum, that the copyright to the materials at issue in those cases belonged to the faculty member, at least in the absence of an explicit agreement to the contrary between the institution and the faculty member. Thus, cases have essentially followed the "teacher exception" to the work for hire rule.”
That is the default, but it depends what your employment contract says. The relationship between a university and its academic staff is not quite a typical employer/employee relationship: academics have much more freedom to choose what to work on, and typically have more ownership of intellectual property they produce.
Lecture delivery is not anywhere close to 100% of teaching a university class. But just focusing on lecture delivery, your argument still doesn't work. Lectures have to change over time, both because you can do better with practice and because the material and real world change.
I will say your view is very common among outsiders. I've heard it so many times from people that think I'm too dumb to notice something so obvious. Unfortunately lecture delivery just isn't a big part of the cost of teaching, and the online format only helps if you phone it in by never changing anything. If you do change something, you have the massive expense of recording the whole lecture all over again.
Yeah, absolutely. It's like people forget that teachers give assignments, answer questions, grade homeworks, run exams, and you know, do an actual job.
> Lecture delivery is not anywhere close to 100% of teaching a university class.
Absolutely true.
> Lectures have to change over time, both because you can do better with practice and because the material and real world change.
This is obviously going to be true for vocation-focused classes, but am I wrong in thinking that this is going to vary from field to field? Once you nail down your Math 101 lectures, do you really need to change them?
Also, this is not a real argument, but I have seen universities where lectures were given by a professor, and Q&A office hours were provided by a TA. I imagine that some universities are thinking that they can have a professor write a lesson plan and record lectures, and then the class can be run in perpetuity by a team of grad students. (Cue laugh track.)
> Once you nail down your Math 101 lectures, do you really need to change them?
This is one of the cases where you could (assuming the students don't change much). I teach macroeconomics. So far in my career some of the bigger events have included the bursting of the 90s tech bubble, 9/11, the Great Recession/financial crisis, the Greek debt crisis, Brexit, the election of Trump, and the pandemic. When I started teaching 20 years ago, the profession had settled on talking about managing long-term economic growth and viewed business cycles as being of secondary importance.
There is some truth to this. For in-person lectures I could just show up to class with a general theme and blather onto the whiteboard, whereas online, all the students want text lecture notes, slides from the lecture, they don't ask questions during lecture, so they are confused, taking time later.
If you spend time editing together a pre-recorded video, it can easily triple the amount of work. Even if you go with the pro-style one take, you need to rehearse and have a good plan in place to make such a video.
> The working model of management in at least certain high ranking UK universities is that it takes less time to run an online course
Sorry I cannot see management believing this at any universities. I think you are mistaken.
Universities are all certainly cutting staff, but this is the current decimation of students and the loss of money, causing this.
Separately, high ranking universities know in class teaching is critical for their survival, it's why they rank high. Without in class teaching they lower themselves to the level of the other universities, they would never move in this direction, especially falsely thinking it takes less staff.
> Sorry I cannot see management believing this at any universities. I think you are mistaken.
Wish I was my friend!
> Universities are all certainly cutting staff, but this is the current decimation of students and the loss of money, causing this.
Actually the student intake in the UK isn't nearly as bad as the initial modelling predicted - the same modelling according to which universities are currently shedding their staff because of. At least domestic BA numbers. International student MA intakes are more of an issue but unlike with BAs, the government hasn't imposed caps on these so there's all the play for.
> Separately, high ranking universities know in class teaching is critical for their survival, it's why they rank high. Without in class teaching they lower themselves to the level of the other universities, they would never move in this direction, especially falsely thinking it takes less staff.
Alas, it's research output not teaching quality which drives income to universities in the UK.
"I'm a classroom teacher and I'm totally not obsolete, here are talking points on effective teaching methods, which only a person like me can perform!"
I don't buy it.
I didn't pay attention in class for most of my school time and that was before any of the more modern distractions existed.
To do well in school, you need to:
1. Capture and memorize factoids that will be on the test
This can be done the roundabout way by taking notes, which does help with memory retention. It's however far more efficient to just copy other more diligent people's notes and memorize those.
2. Understand mechanisms and systems
This requires you to work on your own, try things, figure things out, getting error feedback. Schools are notoriously awful at this, with 20+ kids you just can not spend the time to give meaningful advice, to give enough feedback in a timely manner. You send kids home with homework and they get results a day later or worse. The kids that do really well here usually get help from parents/siblings/externals.
Neither of these require teachers to do any classroom work.
Of course, there's the whole social and daycare aspect of schools which can be beneficial or oppressive, depending on the teachers and environment. Let's just not pretend that actual learning needs a classroom environment, or that it's better in classroom environment, because we don't actually know that yet. Classroom teachers talking their book doesn't help.
A teacher's job, if they're doing it right, is not to provide continual feedback to 20+ kids, but to create a space which focuses them on learning a particular skill or achieving a particular goal. Kids learn best when working with other kids, usually by modeling one another and taking the best bits as they go. It's continual exploration with an expert on hand to help when they get stuck or see some basic skills training.
I think part of the reason teaching is the way it is currently is because if you create that space for kids to work with other kids then anywhere from 20-60% of them will slack off or disrupt others. Not that it doesn't happen with the current system but it's less visible.
Like you say, it's not visible. We are forcing children to sit idle and pretend to listen to the teacher, which is an entirely unnatural thing for to them to do for several hours per day.
I would argue that children would actually learn a lot more social skills by interacting in this "disruptive" and "slacking off" kind of way, especially nowadays where children are otherwise locked up at home by overprotective parents. Those skills are far more valuable than whatever trivia the curriculum is mostly made up of.
Increasing break times I think would have a better effect at improving children's social skills. Perhaps it's a difficult pill for educators to swallow that the most important skill children learn at school doesn't involve them.
I'd disagree. As someone who has been in teaching nearly two decades there is a large contingent of capable teachers who are doing it right. Some do it within the system their school or district has set up and some in spite of it.
> It's however far more efficient to just copy other more diligent people's notes and memorize those.
I did this a lot and while it was the optimal approach for passing tests, my note taking skills are quite poor today. Though I don't know if taking my own notes would have helped improve that or not.
I can agree that Zoom is not the best format for classes, but that doesn't mean classes can't be online and working perfectly.
For me there is so much room to innovate in EduTech!
Why always trying to go back to the past form of tradition instead of being the engine of innovation.
There are plenty of talented people here, that are currently reading HN, so instead of saying please get my physical classmate, ask for change in the cyber world, you should be served well ;)
Yes, articles like this are always full of comments denouncing the current education system and declaring, how much innovation there can be.
One thing I am sure about those making these comments that they never ever had any teaching experience. It is easy to "innovate" when you have no idea about the realities and restrictions of the domain you are "innovating".
I've been teaching in person and had to transition online during COVID-19.
I agree with all of his points that going online can degrade the experience.
but all of this pre-supposes what it means to teach and what it means to learn.
Some comments mention children, but the OP is a Yale law professor. Seems like esp. higher ed needs to be a little more open minded in their thinking going forward given the circumstances.
> it’s important to acknowledge what online learning misses.
It seems to me that by only describing how a zoom meeting is lacking vs. an in person classroom he's missing what an online learning environment is capable of creating.
A lot of his arguments seem to be centered around grabbing and holding someone's attention in a digital environment, which I also empathize with, but I think some things can also be a symptom of an educational system whose purpose is not always actual learning- i.e., is the purpose of grade school educational, or is it day care for working parents? Is the purpose of yale law school learning about law or is it to serve as a gate keeper in the legal profession? etc.
When the whole reason people are sitting there has not much to do with what you're trying to convey, it's no wonder they have trouble paying attention.
That being said, if students are interested and expectations are aligned, some things that I found that some things were actually improved upon in a digital setting: (specifically I teach at a coding bootcamp)
- one-on-one teaching can feel more intimate and effective, (as in a zoom breakout room) since you are not speaking to that student in the classroom where others can overhear or that you don't also have to speak to the whole class at the same time. Sharing someone's screen feels more like you are right there with them.
- the asynchronous nature of doing things online means that people can come more well prepared vs. having to have everyone in sync in a classroom all the times, in real time.
- it's logistically simpler to not ask 30 ( 50? 100?) people to all gather in the same physical location at the same time. I suppose this is obvious, but when you stop to consider this, physically transporting yourself somewhere else is, at best, tangentially related to learning something.
- also obviously, it's easier to convey certain things on a screen than it is in person speaking / on a white-board. Specifically I mean being able to focus in on a diagram or example. On a projector or on a white board you simply become limited by real estate that you get back on a whole screen.
I've been teaching classes online since March. Honestly, even at the best of times it feels like teaching a brick wall.
One of the universities has a rule that everyone must have their cameras on at all times, so you end up teaching classes to seas of blank faces. You get no meaningful feedback this way.
One thing I've used which has been useful is Miro [1]. It is a collaborative whiteboard tool. Being able to get a little bit of output from everyone is wonderful. Even just being able to see people's mouse pointers move makers a huge difference.
One of the pluses has been everyone has suddenly got much better at using the universities online learning system (which existed before). General organisation and admin has been streamlined somewhat.
Re cameras, mine is the opposite: a colleague in a different department was told one cannot require that cameras be one. Most students do not volunteer to turn them on, and very few leave their microphones on. No feedback this way either.
I had to teach online during a weather emergency decades ago(back when you used powerpoint and a RealPlayer product to make movies). No live lectures though- all we had was dial-up so it was all asynchronous.
One thing that it seems to me would be very helpful would be an instantaneous feedback channel where you could have premade questions (say, multiple-choice) and ask students to answer them in real time. This would allow you intersperse formative assessment into your lectures more like what happens live. It would go a long way toward helping the class be interactive. They would have to be graded automatically for large classes, of course.
The author presents a model of learning where the teacher dominates the physical classroom (and, by implication, the students are submissive): he says this explicitly when talking about a "dominating professor".
Online learning doesn't allow for that in the same way, so a teacher dependent on this style of teaching is likely to experience significant discomfort.
Is this really a "Greatest Teaching Technique" though, as the headline suggests? I am highly doubtful. This is more about having control of a classroom, than enabling learning. I find it hard to call this a teaching technique at all.
If you say "Greatest Teaching Technique" to me, I immediately think of the Socratic method. With the understanding that it is more difficult to read body language and physical cues, that still works perfectly great over Zoom.
But, my point is that the article describes teaching more as controlling student behaviour, rather than teaching as communicating knowledge and understanding.
> I don't think the Socratic Method is universally applicable. I'm not sure how one would use it to effectively teach Spanish, or history, or geometry.
It is very obviously a great fit for any kind of mathematics.
Is students have the means to verify that they arrived at the correct answer, and the problems are easy to communicate, all that a teacher really needs to do is to guide the students search, and questions are a great way to do that.
But yeah, the Socratic Method isn't good at all for learning a language. You learn those by speaking, reading, and writing. Not by exploring ideas.
For history it's an interesting thing. A lot of teaching an empirical science is teaching how to ask questions.
From the article, I didn't get a clear sense of what the author means by the "greatest teaching techniques". These are the points that form the narrative structure:
- Physical presence - Reading the room, seeing their faces
- Physical space - Less distactions
- Humor
- Diversity and inclusion
These aren't techniques, they're characteristics of the teaching environment, modes of interaction, demographics.
The first two points seem relevant, that certain techniques of interaction that a teacher develops over a career may be dependent on shared physical space, social dynamics, and personal communication, that are unsuitable for (or impossible with) online teaching.
If we take the Socratic method to mean a general approach of "leading students, through questions, to do their own thinking about a specific objective" - I'd agree that there's little to no limitations imposed by the technologies used for online teaching/learning.
The take-away for me is that educators are learning to adapt and perhaps invent teaching techniques that are effective in this new environment of online/virtual shared presence and space.
I'd say the author's point about "Diversity and inclusion" is only that white men can in general dominate a physical classroom with less effort.
He doesn't even attempt to say what this might mean about online teaching, other than making clear his assumption that teaching is mostly about dominating the space.
> let me say a word about diversity and inclusion.
Blind person here. On line learning is the best thing that can happen to diversity and inclusion, particularly when disabled people are concerned. For me, being in an environment free of students constantly shouting over my speech synth made a huge difference. I could adjust the volume of the teacher, or even mute them for a while, when I really needed to focus on the speech. Being able to request the name of the person talking, or hear who joins/leaves/raises hand is really useful too. I imagine the difference is even bigger for blind teachers, as they normally don't know who raises the hand or talks, and that's very important to them. Other disabilities benefit too, wheelchair users were very relieved they didn't have to move / be moved through inaccessible buildings etc.
There are a lot of accessibility implications to on line learning, most of them positive. Personally, I wish I could just stay that way forever.
This is really interesting. What's been your experience of platforms like Zoom and MS Teams for your learning - are they built to afford genuine accessibility?
Zoom is excellent in that regard. They're doing an amazing job at accessibility. There's so much hate towards them, but, if accessibility is concerned, there's no better option. Google Meet is not that bad either. Haven't had much experience with MS Teams, but sorta kinda usable is what people are saying. Skype works pretty great. Discord is... kind of okay on pc, horrible on iOS, though that's improving very quickly.
At the other end of the spectrum, you have students with ADHD who frequently have more trouble concentrating in remote classes. I don't think the accessibility calculus is as simple as you're making it out to be.
I'm diagnosed with ADHD (ADD). The live person speaking and often gesturing while talking is much easier to focus on and fill in the frequent gaps where focus drifts. Something about the talking with minor stops and pauses gives more frequent opportunity to regain focus control and begin contiguous focus briefly before repeating. I was able to successfully get through schooling and college isolating classes with teachers that talked through concepts but failed frequently at classes focused on books and static mediums.
With online, it's brutal trying to retain focus at a monitor and reading while retaining. The focus drifts in and out unconsciously so you can read an entire page of text before realizing you retained literally none.
For text based learning I often need to dedicate a large amount of time "re-reading" material in advance to improve retention during the live discussion part if it lacks enough depth. Calculus was the critical crux of my educational path.
>> There are a lot of accessibility implications to on line learning, most of them positive. Personally, I wish I could just stay that way forever.
It's obvious that your quality of education has improved and makes sense that you'd want to kleep it that way. It would be great if we could support people in your situation without greatly diminishing the experience of a huge component of attendees though: all those with learning, attention and focus issues. The stats are truely mind boggling with how many kids struggle to control their behaviour in a virtual classroom.
Question: why DON'T you stay remote? Most of the time the last thing we want to do is isolate people in different situations but it sounds like this would be preferable for you. It would seem to be quite easy to support too.
There are practical difficulties in having some students in the classroom and some students online: it's hard for a single instructor to split attention that way, unless they have some help (e.g., a student assistant) in the classroom. It would be more effective if universities had more dedicated online versions of courses. This had already been happening before the pandemic and would probably be accelerated post-pandemic for a variety of reasons.
I would think it's even worse than that. Do the same teaching aids/rhetorical devices work out for face-to-face, small group, auditorium, remote people? It doesn't seem like they do. I've cringed through a few different videos of someone who developed a presentation for 50 people and then was blindsided by a room full of 400 and their material didn't quite work.
Your presentation is deeply affected by the kind of audience you're aimed at.
Oh absolutely, there are many differences between in person and online, and (as you said) the size of the audience definitely matters. Part of the job of instructors is to work the crowd, and in that sense it is not different from any other kind of performance. Setting matters.
I guess I was making a point in reaction to the many "hybrid" in person / online courses being offered by universities, for the fall and possibly beyond. Hybrid is actually harder than either 100% in person or 100% online.
At my school our professors actually did this split very well. They had a chime sound when an online hand was raised, they always prioritized those students, and they had good tech to display their screens both in the classroom and online.
With the right tech and competent teachers, it’s completely doable in my experience.
Oh, I completely agree with that. One of the issues, especially at large public universities, is that many faculty members who are perfectly effective in person have difficulties with the technology. Asking them to split attention on top of an already stressful situation is hard, and training only gets one so far. So the online experience is hard to make consistent across courses and even sections of the same course.
Normally-abled person, with a hearing impaired family member checking in.
My secret weapon in French class in school was a tape deck with treble/bass controls. A big chunk of the work was transcription of recorded material. Rewind, play, pause, play, rewind, fiddling with the nobs to deal with the static on my copy of a copy of the tape. You can't do that with live content. You can with prerecorded materials (IF the designers think of it).
There are a lot of videos with people who take too long to get to the point and I have to increase the speed to stay focused. Slowing things down for any sensory impairment I presume helps other people.
When my family member was a kid he did not want to use the audio assistive devices in classes because he was self-conscious. It's a production. There are resources to be 'checked out' and 'checked in' every day. I don't think I'd be as comfortable using most of the tools I use if I had an audience.
He spends a lot of time online because -everybody- suffers to an extent from his limitation online. The cocktail party effect, the ability to filter one conversation out from many, fails for everyone, not just people with hearing aids. So people have to learn not to talk over each other if they want anyone to hear them, which means his listening comprehension goes way up.
You touched on an important benefit to working from home that I hadn't really thought about until now, which is that the quiet people at my workplace are now able to be heard much more easily.
I work with several quiet people, and when we used to have a meeting outdoors or in a large area, I often wouldn't be able to hear what they were saying.
Now, we all have headphones and microphones, and I can hear what everyone has to say without asking them to repeat themselves. It's improved communication tremendously, and I'm sure they're feeling more heard now as well.
As a college educator for 22 years in technology/compsci, I definitely agree with many of the early points in this article surrounding the benefits of the physical classroom.
However, I strongly disagree with the comments regarding distraction and focus for online and blended learning environments.
In my field, online is not a distraction per se, but something that is necessary for app development (think StackOverflow and IDE documentation!). It reinforces what I'm demonstrating and lecturing about, and encourages students to research and think outside of the box. For example, I actually expect students to Google topics and documentation while I'm teaching online, and this process is both motivating for students and key to being successful in my field.
We do High School CompSci without the internet (for our intro course). I do see the internet as a distraction at this level. Forcing young students to think through the logic of a problem and come up with their own solution (no matter how crazy or inefficient it is) has a lot of downstream critical thinking benefits.
While I agree that classroom teaching has advantages, and am not trying to argue the points from the article... online learning is not limited to just what happens on video calls. That would be like saying that daily standup meetings are not the best environment to code in. Of course not. That isn't the point. They are about giving new information and coordinating, then letting go off to do their work. Online learning is the same - give info, coordinate, then students go off and do their work. It cannot be compared directly to 6 hours in a classroom because they are fundamentally different methods of working. They both have pros and cons.
This is an odd opinion piece to have made it to HN front page. It's essentially a collection of unsubstantiated claims that would likely have no impact to policy even if they were demonstrably true because the driving factor is human safety and not efficacy or ease of teaching.
Remote teaching may be harder, require more work, and have pitfalls that are quickly overcome in person. Much more useful would be a collection of ways to mitigate them, rather than an airing of grievances.
Maybe I'm being too hard on this, and it's just a good serving up of the real conversation. So, what are other folks doing to overcome the difficulties outlined in the article?
Reading the room, avoiding distraction, using humor, and inability to establish command.
On the last note, I will say that I believe it's a red herring. The most soft spoken person, who clearly has a passion to share their subject, will be easily gifted this by a willing audience. Even over Zoom.
I spent the last semester teaching online. As a teacher it was not as fun. Also its a lot harder because you have to always be prepared for technical issues. What I found was that small class sizes are key. Additionally multiple monitors is a huge aid when teaching online.
I see the challenge is that in addition to traditional methods of effective pedagogy, a teacher for today must also be adept at running a broadcast studio in order to be effective.
I teach mathematics at a large R1 state university. His comments echo my experience. Online is really different, both for the instructor AND for the student. Most instructors don't know how to teach online, and most students (even very good ones) don't know how to learn online.
- Reading the room: students, by default, turn off all their cameras and microphones, despite my request (we cannot require this) that they turn them on if there are no privacy, bandwidth, or other issues. Whereas in a classroom, a student can signal confusion merely by frowning or half-raising a hand, I now need to ask a prepared question or give them a real pause.
- Avoiding distraction: there is not much one can do. The things one can use to hold attention in a live in-person lecture -- telling bad math jokes, etc -- don't translate easily. In particular, if you can't see or hear your audience, it can be a little dangerous to try to be funny.
- Establishing command: did not have this problem. I would in any case say this differently: the issue is building rapport with students. Since we switched to online in March, I had half a semester to get to know my students (small class, 20 or so) which really helped.
None of this says online is a non-starter, but it should be organized very differently. One can do recorded lectures and live structured problem sessions (i.e., flip the classroom), or give students more preparatory activity to do, etc. Many of these are sound things to do in a live in-person classroom anyway; online is just not so forgiving and exposes many of the flaws of the traditional lecture format. And students need to be taught how to learn in this environment from the get-go.
Finally, I'll say that the technology has a ways to go. It would be really great if multiple people could talk over each other as if they were in the same room. If video degraded more gracefully (because many students do not have stable enough connections at home) while maintaining audio. If various apps with white boards gave students the ability to "see" your previous boards. (A couple programs do this, e.g., MS Teams, but AFAIK not Zoom.)
And he didn't mention the nightmare that is assessment. I taught a small class to a group of bright, emotionally mature juniors and seniors. Teaching first year students is a completely different story. This is something we're working hard on, with a summer to prepare instead of just a week (our transition happened over spring break). But it's not easy.
Edit: I suppose one way to summarize the above is to say that all the issues can be addressed, but online makes the energy barrier higher (or friction greater, whatever analogy you like) for both instructors and students.
These are great points. Running meetings (industry example) over Zoom is very different from running them in person, and for many of the same reasons that you point out.
This is going to sound like a plug, but I took a LifeLabs course on Meetings Mastery, and one small part of it was a discussion of how to engage with people over Zoom. Some examples were using the chat to ask questions that merit chat responses, asking people to "+1" in the chat when they agree with something (maybe students could "?" when they are getting lost), and using polls and breakout rooms.
As someone who's been frustrated by adapting to the remote environment from a meetings perspective, I can relate. But at least the people in my meetings are mature enough (or compensated well enough) that they will keep cameras on, stay engaged in the discussion, etc.
Those are nice points; I quite agree there are things one can do to engage people over Zoom etc. But it's less spontaneous and takes more prior planning. Also, many students simply do not want to ask a question in front of their peers, online or in person. When in person, there are other cues I can use to detect student confusion -- frowns, someone trying to decide if they should raise their hand, a barely audible "um..." -- but online all of that is gone.
VR Apps (Alt Space and others) can solve most of this issues right now. The soon coming generation of VR googles actually read your face expressions and replicates them online. IMHO, At the current pace of development, in less than a year, this will be the new reality.
> that would likely have no impact to policy even if they were demonstrably true because the driving factor is human safety and not efficacy or ease of teaching.
Why would it have "no impact to policy"?
Let's imagine for a moment that we discovered remote learning was 100% ineffective for everyone. Students came out of remote learning programs with no more knowledge than they did going in. Should we:
A) Continue with remote learning anyway, because in-person classes are unsafe.
B) Stop remote learning, and accept that students will have to put their educations on hold for a year, despite all the implications that will have.
Personally, I think option B is the obvious choice. There’s no point in doing anything if students don’t benefit.
Okay, now let's say that remote learning was only 50% effective, or 60%. Is option A now the right answer? Putting everyone’s education on hold is going to have lots of dire consequences—but, is it worse than educating them inadequately? What does that mean for the next generation of high schoolers entering college, or college students entering the workforce?
Alternately, perhaps the correct conclusion is that we really, really do need to reopen schools this fall. Why is so much of the country currently focused on reopening hair salons and outdoor restaurants while keeping schools closed? Maybe it should be the other way around—maybe schools are the most essential service, and we need to reopen them ASAP at the expense of other kinds of businesses.
I think you'd agree that any claim it's 100% ineffective is a straw man, and was just for purposes of the example.
FWICT, most policy is being set with a baked-in assumption that remote learning is somewhat less effective than in-person learning. As I said, I don't see what the article does to add to that discussion, although it does possibly queue up a discussion on how we could make it better.
The advocacy for 100% remote is motivated by the fact that there's the need to stay away from groups for an unknown amount of time. It's not short sighted, it's necessary.
Oh, I don't disagree at all. The reason I don't think it belongs on HN is because "It's essentially a collection of unsubstantiated claims that would likely have no impact to policy even if they were demonstrably true because the driving factor is human safety and not efficacy or ease of teaching."
That has nothing to do with whether or not I agree with those claims, although in this particular case, it just so happens that I do.
> Remote teaching may be harder, require more work, and have pitfalls that are quickly overcome in person.
I'm not sure there's any reason to believe any of these things. What we do know is that we've trained almost every teacher to teach and learn in classrooms, and that using techniques developed in classrooms to teach remotely don't work well.
We've barely spent any time at all developing techniques for remote learning, and we're already throwing up our hands.
Well, we need to operate from a baseline of where we are today. In a vacuum where we have been developing remote teaching techniques for just as long as in-person, you're right that perhaps remote teaching would be _even more effective_, but we simply have no way of knowing.
Per the rest of my comment, I agree that rather than complain about the situation, we should be identifying ways to mitigate or exploit the situation to improve learning.
I teach in college. In my opinion physical presence beats online teaching hands down for all but a few use cases.
In my experience the last three months a minority of students thrive by online teaching, another (slightly bigger) minority stumbles and falls, and the rest struggles.
As a teacher I feel way less effective as well.
I do not think there is a technical solution to this. If online teaching becomes the norm I will leave the profession.
The main problem with online is the mental agility of the student - smartness. Some are auto didactic - capable of self teaching. Some are not, we can not all be an Archimedes or an Isaac Newton.
Online teaching needs to develop a high degree of parallelism. Let us say they break the topic down to a large number of short modules. Each one needs to be shown and explained and then the uptake tested. If student fails test 1, he needs to be taken through a different module on the same topic, explained and uptake tested. Repeat until the parallels are exhausted and the fails assessed to determine the composition of the way the student fails. Once assessed, the student needs to enter a new set of modules with greater detail in the explanatory detail.
This will need an exhaustive degree of preparation, but it needs to be done. Once done on all topics you will have a huge massively parallel data base that is capable of teaching a wide range of people. On route, one needs to assess all manner of supportive skills - keyboarding - is that student capable of reading and entering the responses the program will demand of him? If not, that student needs some preparatory modules to deal with all the test and numeracy issues he faces.
In human teaching, this is done via very personally demanding instruction in person.
The program needs to be able to rapidly select from all the modules in it's repertoire.
Ideally, such a system can handle all the way from a child to a graduate student. Assessing all the way and presenting and reviewing, remoduling etc all the way.
Students vary widely, some are highly intelligent (but as yet are untaught), some are not so smart.
AN ideal system will also test for what I call 'physical IQ' - the capacity for detailed physical tasks, such as fencing or basketball or any sport. They may be brilliant at physical tasks, not so good at physics or programming.
Modern computers are capable of this. It is a demanding task to program them, but once done, it can be deployed millions of times amond millions of students.
I hesitate to call it an 'AI', it is just a capable parallel high speed machine.
Trying to replicate a classroom online is the primary mistake I think people are making. Why should there be a teacher delivering scripted lectures to students at a scheduled time at all. Trying to do classes over zoom is a terrible idea.
Why not just put all the kids on individualized learning plans, have the teachers act as tutors and counselors and graders, and let the kids go at their own pace, with staff following their progress closely and making sure they're getting their work done on time, clearing up learning impediments, etc. Then you can have the kids that need one-on-one help getting that time, and the kids that can do self-directed learning being free to go as fast as they want to.
I think generalizing all ages is a bad idea. In fact kids grow and learn so fast that almost each age needs a different approach, and I don't mean a 5% difference.
Another thing is that we tend to underestimate how much kids learn 'between the lines'. What is acceptable, what is valuable.
Lastly I'm convinced individualised learning is a fallacy. We technocrats like personalisation, but in my opinion that is only good for adults.
I want to recommend books and talks from Katharine Birbalsingh for an entirely contrarian, but very successful take on elevating underprivileged children.
I get the impression that the author needs to think a bit further outside the box.
Simply taking the classroom model and trying to perfectly replicate it in Zoom won't work. Of course. But online learning opens up a whole host of new possibilities that in-person learning is equally unable to replicate.
I earned my most recent degree online, from a fully online program, and really appreciated some of the thought they put into creating an online learning experience. One of the key changes was moving toward pre-recorded lectures. This yielded all sorts of fruit. It meant that I, the student, could listen to lectures at a time that worked best for me, rather than being tied to a classroom schedule. Not able to concentrate right now? Fine, take a break and try again later. Morning person? Never have to struggle to stay awake during late afternoon lectures ever again. Evening person? Same for morning lectures. Lecturer's voice dulcet tones and musical prosody make you drowsy, or hard of hearing, or classes not taught in your first language? You, my friend, are going to love the new Transcripts feature.
It also greatly reduced the time we needed to spend in classroom sessions, which, in turn, increased our access to personalized instruction by freeing up space in the instructors' schedules for small group and one-on-one meetings with students.
I, personally, didn't have difficulty focusing on class during class. I don't know that my classmates did, either. My suspicion is that those studies about students not paying attention were looking at typical online classes, which do consist of the traditional "classroom lectures, only on a screen" model. In which case, I am not at all surprised. Traditional classroom lectures tend to be boring as hell. A live classroom environment creating psychological cues that discourage distraction behavior doesn't fix that problem, it just makes it less apparent to the lecturer. Moreover, with asynchronous, recorded lectures, when my attention wanders (as all attentions will), its no big deal, all I have to do is rewind 30 seconds. In the classroom, if the lecturer says something critical while you were zoned out, too bad, you missed it.
The real problem here is that the pandemic has taken teachers who worked under the traditional model, and rudely thrust them into a completely new working environment that requires a radially different approach to the job, and has left them them zero time to adapt. But even a baby you didn't ask for shouldn't be thrown out with the bathwater.
Just like shoehorning traditional office work into a remote setting doesn't work, you just end up with various forms of online butt-in-seat monitoring while losing all the benefits of asynchronicity, perhaps remote learning needs to be fundamentally rethought for the new medium. What would a remote-first learning experience look like? Probably more like a Khan Academy course than a real-time lecture, with the student-teacher time dedicated 100% to helping and interacting with students instead of going through new material.
I don't teach, but I wonder why people use Zoom and not BigBlueButton, which at least was made for the job. It also presumably doesn't have whatever the privacy implications are with Zoom that students have to accept.
I think this is true, and i agree. However, institutions of (higher) learning have transformed into giant scams and money sucking administrative monsters, whose function is gatekeeping rather than education. As a response to this trend, online education is an excellent antidote for a fraction of the cost.
I agree that learning over a video call is no substitute for in-person instruction, but I wouldn't give too much praise to the way we currently teach. Different people have different learning styles, and curriculum is rarely designed for that. I think teaching others does more for mastery than standard studying, but it rarely finds its way into classrooms in a meaningful way. Universities are even worse. Professors often have no interest in teaching. Even when they have an interest, the lecture format seriously sells education short. Compare a how high school seniors are taught vs. college freshmen; they're pretty different, but the kids are almost the same; I'd bet money that the college instruction is less effective. I guess a video call is just college instruction on steroids. Sink or swim--it's all on you.
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[ 4.4 ms ] story [ 173 ms ] threadTeaching virtually is doable, and still valuable, but it's definitely a degraded experience.
Just saying. I am tired of my Uni (at which I work) trying to convince us that the students are as happy with online courses as with live ones.
A p2p model where students teach other students just below their baseline would be an awesome way to make studying more fullfilling/enjoyable
I think there are problems with he system though, as you can't rely on the teaching capacities of an 11 year old child, even if they are quite gifted in that particular subject matter. I think doing group work with a mix of older and younger children would help a lot though, but it is still probably best if the concepts are first introduced by an adult who has at least some pedagocical training.
I wonder if video lessons of traditional in-class teaching will ever be effective long distance to younger pupils. And shorter online interactive lessons - duolingo/khan academy etc. or something else is required.
Online learning (in its current state) requires lots of motivation and discipline. These are skills learned from tight feedback loops which historically happen in-person. If kids fail to pick this up early, they will be even less inclined to online learning. As a parent of a young kid, I'm very concerned that we're going to learn this lesson after it's far too late.
The slapdash system we cobbled together on the fly while trying to figure out if we were dying doesn't hold up against the decades old, well tested and vetted in class educational experience? It would be problematic if it did, wouldn't it? It would mean we were completely wrong about the best way to educate.
The biggest note I see from this is that maybe it's not a great idea to force children to sit still and "learn" for 8 hours a day. If the only way for that technique to work is to have them physically controllable, something might not be working.
To do it well, online courses have to be approached completely differently. You have to switch your way of thinking, switch how you apply learning (esp adult) methodologies, switch your time planning and also change your expectations. For example adults mostly learn and enjoy learning best through facilitation where possible, stuff like group work. That's very hard to do well with current online tools. Also attention spans are very different.
Even small things like physical movement. In the training room you the educator can move around and in most sessions you can integrate opportunities to get the people you are training to stand up and move around for a bit (for example get a group to look at a problem and address it on the wall). You can't do that when someone is looking at a screen. Plus it's tricky to encourage people to feel able to spontaneously contribute or throw in a question etc on web. It's obviously also harder for more than one person to speak. Plus the way that people tend to be zeroed in on the educator means they are less likely to have positive engagement that spins off from what someone else is saying. E.g picking up follow up questions, asking their classmate how to do something or putting forward their own theory on something.
There are some advantages to using webinars about what you can use - depending on topic you can draw on a wider variety of material.
Overall when developing online courses I felt at times it shifted to require more of a Producer mentality than purely an Educator one.
Thanks for sharing that.
Maybe I just sucked at it.
I'd like to hear more about what to switch to. What guiding principles have you observed?
Honestly it feels like it boils down to the assumption that students will keep paying the same amount of money for a degree with a world famous university's branding. It seems to really be that transactional for senior management.
“ Few reported cases exist addressing the issue of whether the educational institution or the faculty member owns the copyright to teaching materials prepared by a faculty member. All the reported cases that do exist have either held, or stated in dictum, that the copyright to the materials at issue in those cases belonged to the faculty member, at least in the absence of an explicit agreement to the contrary between the institution and the faculty member. Thus, cases have essentially followed the "teacher exception" to the work for hire rule.”
https://digitalcommons.law.byu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?artic...
This article gives a good introduction: Copyright ownership of e-learning and teaching materials: Policy approaches taken by UK universities https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10639-017-9583-4
I will say your view is very common among outsiders. I've heard it so many times from people that think I'm too dumb to notice something so obvious. Unfortunately lecture delivery just isn't a big part of the cost of teaching, and the online format only helps if you phone it in by never changing anything. If you do change something, you have the massive expense of recording the whole lecture all over again.
Absolutely true.
> Lectures have to change over time, both because you can do better with practice and because the material and real world change.
This is obviously going to be true for vocation-focused classes, but am I wrong in thinking that this is going to vary from field to field? Once you nail down your Math 101 lectures, do you really need to change them?
Also, this is not a real argument, but I have seen universities where lectures were given by a professor, and Q&A office hours were provided by a TA. I imagine that some universities are thinking that they can have a professor write a lesson plan and record lectures, and then the class can be run in perpetuity by a team of grad students. (Cue laugh track.)
This is one of the cases where you could (assuming the students don't change much). I teach macroeconomics. So far in my career some of the bigger events have included the bursting of the 90s tech bubble, 9/11, the Great Recession/financial crisis, the Greek debt crisis, Brexit, the election of Trump, and the pandemic. When I started teaching 20 years ago, the profession had settled on talking about managing long-term economic growth and viewed business cycles as being of secondary importance.
If you spend time editing together a pre-recorded video, it can easily triple the amount of work. Even if you go with the pro-style one take, you need to rehearse and have a good plan in place to make such a video.
Sorry I cannot see management believing this at any universities. I think you are mistaken.
Universities are all certainly cutting staff, but this is the current decimation of students and the loss of money, causing this.
Separately, high ranking universities know in class teaching is critical for their survival, it's why they rank high. Without in class teaching they lower themselves to the level of the other universities, they would never move in this direction, especially falsely thinking it takes less staff.
Wish I was my friend!
> Universities are all certainly cutting staff, but this is the current decimation of students and the loss of money, causing this.
Actually the student intake in the UK isn't nearly as bad as the initial modelling predicted - the same modelling according to which universities are currently shedding their staff because of. At least domestic BA numbers. International student MA intakes are more of an issue but unlike with BAs, the government hasn't imposed caps on these so there's all the play for.
> Separately, high ranking universities know in class teaching is critical for their survival, it's why they rank high. Without in class teaching they lower themselves to the level of the other universities, they would never move in this direction, especially falsely thinking it takes less staff.
Alas, it's research output not teaching quality which drives income to universities in the UK.
I don't buy it.
I didn't pay attention in class for most of my school time and that was before any of the more modern distractions existed.
To do well in school, you need to:
1. Capture and memorize factoids that will be on the test
This can be done the roundabout way by taking notes, which does help with memory retention. It's however far more efficient to just copy other more diligent people's notes and memorize those.
2. Understand mechanisms and systems
This requires you to work on your own, try things, figure things out, getting error feedback. Schools are notoriously awful at this, with 20+ kids you just can not spend the time to give meaningful advice, to give enough feedback in a timely manner. You send kids home with homework and they get results a day later or worse. The kids that do really well here usually get help from parents/siblings/externals.
Neither of these require teachers to do any classroom work.
Of course, there's the whole social and daycare aspect of schools which can be beneficial or oppressive, depending on the teachers and environment. Let's just not pretend that actual learning needs a classroom environment, or that it's better in classroom environment, because we don't actually know that yet. Classroom teachers talking their book doesn't help.
For 1 you need preproduced material: Wikipedia, Khan academy, Anki cards. Teachers only act as gatekeepers here.
For 2 you need interactive toys like a Logo Turtle or Minecraft. Teachers act as coaches.
I would argue that children would actually learn a lot more social skills by interacting in this "disruptive" and "slacking off" kind of way, especially nowadays where children are otherwise locked up at home by overprotective parents. Those skills are far more valuable than whatever trivia the curriculum is mostly made up of.
I did this a lot and while it was the optimal approach for passing tests, my note taking skills are quite poor today. Though I don't know if taking my own notes would have helped improve that or not.
For me there is so much room to innovate in EduTech!
Why always trying to go back to the past form of tradition instead of being the engine of innovation.
There are plenty of talented people here, that are currently reading HN, so instead of saying please get my physical classmate, ask for change in the cyber world, you should be served well ;)
I agree with all of his points that going online can degrade the experience.
but all of this pre-supposes what it means to teach and what it means to learn.
Some comments mention children, but the OP is a Yale law professor. Seems like esp. higher ed needs to be a little more open minded in their thinking going forward given the circumstances.
> it’s important to acknowledge what online learning misses.
It seems to me that by only describing how a zoom meeting is lacking vs. an in person classroom he's missing what an online learning environment is capable of creating.
A lot of his arguments seem to be centered around grabbing and holding someone's attention in a digital environment, which I also empathize with, but I think some things can also be a symptom of an educational system whose purpose is not always actual learning- i.e., is the purpose of grade school educational, or is it day care for working parents? Is the purpose of yale law school learning about law or is it to serve as a gate keeper in the legal profession? etc.
When the whole reason people are sitting there has not much to do with what you're trying to convey, it's no wonder they have trouble paying attention.
That being said, if students are interested and expectations are aligned, some things that I found that some things were actually improved upon in a digital setting: (specifically I teach at a coding bootcamp)
- one-on-one teaching can feel more intimate and effective, (as in a zoom breakout room) since you are not speaking to that student in the classroom where others can overhear or that you don't also have to speak to the whole class at the same time. Sharing someone's screen feels more like you are right there with them.
- the asynchronous nature of doing things online means that people can come more well prepared vs. having to have everyone in sync in a classroom all the times, in real time.
- it's logistically simpler to not ask 30 ( 50? 100?) people to all gather in the same physical location at the same time. I suppose this is obvious, but when you stop to consider this, physically transporting yourself somewhere else is, at best, tangentially related to learning something.
- also obviously, it's easier to convey certain things on a screen than it is in person speaking / on a white-board. Specifically I mean being able to focus in on a diagram or example. On a projector or on a white board you simply become limited by real estate that you get back on a whole screen.
(edit: formatting)
One of the universities has a rule that everyone must have their cameras on at all times, so you end up teaching classes to seas of blank faces. You get no meaningful feedback this way.
One thing I've used which has been useful is Miro [1]. It is a collaborative whiteboard tool. Being able to get a little bit of output from everyone is wonderful. Even just being able to see people's mouse pointers move makers a huge difference.
One of the pluses has been everyone has suddenly got much better at using the universities online learning system (which existed before). General organisation and admin has been streamlined somewhat.
[1] https://miro.com/
One thing that it seems to me would be very helpful would be an instantaneous feedback channel where you could have premade questions (say, multiple-choice) and ask students to answer them in real time. This would allow you intersperse formative assessment into your lectures more like what happens live. It would go a long way toward helping the class be interactive. They would have to be graded automatically for large classes, of course.
Online learning doesn't allow for that in the same way, so a teacher dependent on this style of teaching is likely to experience significant discomfort.
Is this really a "Greatest Teaching Technique" though, as the headline suggests? I am highly doubtful. This is more about having control of a classroom, than enabling learning. I find it hard to call this a teaching technique at all.
If you say "Greatest Teaching Technique" to me, I immediately think of the Socratic method. With the understanding that it is more difficult to read body language and physical cues, that still works perfectly great over Zoom.
But, my point is that the article describes teaching more as controlling student behaviour, rather than teaching as communicating knowledge and understanding.
Doesn't seem hard. Socrates himself used the method to teach geometry: http://www.socraticmethod.net/essays/meno_geometry/meno_geom....
Is students have the means to verify that they arrived at the correct answer, and the problems are easy to communicate, all that a teacher really needs to do is to guide the students search, and questions are a great way to do that.
But yeah, the Socratic Method isn't good at all for learning a language. You learn those by speaking, reading, and writing. Not by exploring ideas.
For history it's an interesting thing. A lot of teaching an empirical science is teaching how to ask questions.
- Physical presence - Reading the room, seeing their faces
- Physical space - Less distactions
- Humor
- Diversity and inclusion
These aren't techniques, they're characteristics of the teaching environment, modes of interaction, demographics.
The first two points seem relevant, that certain techniques of interaction that a teacher develops over a career may be dependent on shared physical space, social dynamics, and personal communication, that are unsuitable for (or impossible with) online teaching.
If we take the Socratic method to mean a general approach of "leading students, through questions, to do their own thinking about a specific objective" - I'd agree that there's little to no limitations imposed by the technologies used for online teaching/learning.
The take-away for me is that educators are learning to adapt and perhaps invent teaching techniques that are effective in this new environment of online/virtual shared presence and space.
He doesn't even attempt to say what this might mean about online teaching, other than making clear his assumption that teaching is mostly about dominating the space.
Blind person here. On line learning is the best thing that can happen to diversity and inclusion, particularly when disabled people are concerned. For me, being in an environment free of students constantly shouting over my speech synth made a huge difference. I could adjust the volume of the teacher, or even mute them for a while, when I really needed to focus on the speech. Being able to request the name of the person talking, or hear who joins/leaves/raises hand is really useful too. I imagine the difference is even bigger for blind teachers, as they normally don't know who raises the hand or talks, and that's very important to them. Other disabilities benefit too, wheelchair users were very relieved they didn't have to move / be moved through inaccessible buildings etc.
There are a lot of accessibility implications to on line learning, most of them positive. Personally, I wish I could just stay that way forever.
With online, it's brutal trying to retain focus at a monitor and reading while retaining. The focus drifts in and out unconsciously so you can read an entire page of text before realizing you retained literally none.
For text based learning I often need to dedicate a large amount of time "re-reading" material in advance to improve retention during the live discussion part if it lacks enough depth. Calculus was the critical crux of my educational path.
It's obvious that your quality of education has improved and makes sense that you'd want to kleep it that way. It would be great if we could support people in your situation without greatly diminishing the experience of a huge component of attendees though: all those with learning, attention and focus issues. The stats are truely mind boggling with how many kids struggle to control their behaviour in a virtual classroom.
Question: why DON'T you stay remote? Most of the time the last thing we want to do is isolate people in different situations but it sounds like this would be preferable for you. It would seem to be quite easy to support too.
Edit: fix grammar + clarify.
Your presentation is deeply affected by the kind of audience you're aimed at.
I guess I was making a point in reaction to the many "hybrid" in person / online courses being offered by universities, for the fall and possibly beyond. Hybrid is actually harder than either 100% in person or 100% online.
With the right tech and competent teachers, it’s completely doable in my experience.
My secret weapon in French class in school was a tape deck with treble/bass controls. A big chunk of the work was transcription of recorded material. Rewind, play, pause, play, rewind, fiddling with the nobs to deal with the static on my copy of a copy of the tape. You can't do that with live content. You can with prerecorded materials (IF the designers think of it).
There are a lot of videos with people who take too long to get to the point and I have to increase the speed to stay focused. Slowing things down for any sensory impairment I presume helps other people.
When my family member was a kid he did not want to use the audio assistive devices in classes because he was self-conscious. It's a production. There are resources to be 'checked out' and 'checked in' every day. I don't think I'd be as comfortable using most of the tools I use if I had an audience.
He spends a lot of time online because -everybody- suffers to an extent from his limitation online. The cocktail party effect, the ability to filter one conversation out from many, fails for everyone, not just people with hearing aids. So people have to learn not to talk over each other if they want anyone to hear them, which means his listening comprehension goes way up.
I work with several quiet people, and when we used to have a meeting outdoors or in a large area, I often wouldn't be able to hear what they were saying.
Now, we all have headphones and microphones, and I can hear what everyone has to say without asking them to repeat themselves. It's improved communication tremendously, and I'm sure they're feeling more heard now as well.
However, I strongly disagree with the comments regarding distraction and focus for online and blended learning environments.
In my field, online is not a distraction per se, but something that is necessary for app development (think StackOverflow and IDE documentation!). It reinforces what I'm demonstrating and lecturing about, and encourages students to research and think outside of the box. For example, I actually expect students to Google topics and documentation while I'm teaching online, and this process is both motivating for students and key to being successful in my field.
Remote teaching may be harder, require more work, and have pitfalls that are quickly overcome in person. Much more useful would be a collection of ways to mitigate them, rather than an airing of grievances.
Maybe I'm being too hard on this, and it's just a good serving up of the real conversation. So, what are other folks doing to overcome the difficulties outlined in the article?
Reading the room, avoiding distraction, using humor, and inability to establish command.
On the last note, I will say that I believe it's a red herring. The most soft spoken person, who clearly has a passion to share their subject, will be easily gifted this by a willing audience. Even over Zoom.
- Reading the room: students, by default, turn off all their cameras and microphones, despite my request (we cannot require this) that they turn them on if there are no privacy, bandwidth, or other issues. Whereas in a classroom, a student can signal confusion merely by frowning or half-raising a hand, I now need to ask a prepared question or give them a real pause.
- Avoiding distraction: there is not much one can do. The things one can use to hold attention in a live in-person lecture -- telling bad math jokes, etc -- don't translate easily. In particular, if you can't see or hear your audience, it can be a little dangerous to try to be funny.
- Establishing command: did not have this problem. I would in any case say this differently: the issue is building rapport with students. Since we switched to online in March, I had half a semester to get to know my students (small class, 20 or so) which really helped.
None of this says online is a non-starter, but it should be organized very differently. One can do recorded lectures and live structured problem sessions (i.e., flip the classroom), or give students more preparatory activity to do, etc. Many of these are sound things to do in a live in-person classroom anyway; online is just not so forgiving and exposes many of the flaws of the traditional lecture format. And students need to be taught how to learn in this environment from the get-go.
Finally, I'll say that the technology has a ways to go. It would be really great if multiple people could talk over each other as if they were in the same room. If video degraded more gracefully (because many students do not have stable enough connections at home) while maintaining audio. If various apps with white boards gave students the ability to "see" your previous boards. (A couple programs do this, e.g., MS Teams, but AFAIK not Zoom.)
And he didn't mention the nightmare that is assessment. I taught a small class to a group of bright, emotionally mature juniors and seniors. Teaching first year students is a completely different story. This is something we're working hard on, with a summer to prepare instead of just a week (our transition happened over spring break). But it's not easy.
Edit: I suppose one way to summarize the above is to say that all the issues can be addressed, but online makes the energy barrier higher (or friction greater, whatever analogy you like) for both instructors and students.
This is going to sound like a plug, but I took a LifeLabs course on Meetings Mastery, and one small part of it was a discussion of how to engage with people over Zoom. Some examples were using the chat to ask questions that merit chat responses, asking people to "+1" in the chat when they agree with something (maybe students could "?" when they are getting lost), and using polls and breakout rooms.
As someone who's been frustrated by adapting to the remote environment from a meetings perspective, I can relate. But at least the people in my meetings are mature enough (or compensated well enough) that they will keep cameras on, stay engaged in the discussion, etc.
Why would it have "no impact to policy"?
Let's imagine for a moment that we discovered remote learning was 100% ineffective for everyone. Students came out of remote learning programs with no more knowledge than they did going in. Should we:
A) Continue with remote learning anyway, because in-person classes are unsafe.
B) Stop remote learning, and accept that students will have to put their educations on hold for a year, despite all the implications that will have.
Personally, I think option B is the obvious choice. There’s no point in doing anything if students don’t benefit.
Okay, now let's say that remote learning was only 50% effective, or 60%. Is option A now the right answer? Putting everyone’s education on hold is going to have lots of dire consequences—but, is it worse than educating them inadequately? What does that mean for the next generation of high schoolers entering college, or college students entering the workforce?
Alternately, perhaps the correct conclusion is that we really, really do need to reopen schools this fall. Why is so much of the country currently focused on reopening hair salons and outdoor restaurants while keeping schools closed? Maybe it should be the other way around—maybe schools are the most essential service, and we need to reopen them ASAP at the expense of other kinds of businesses.
FWICT, most policy is being set with a baked-in assumption that remote learning is somewhat less effective than in-person learning. As I said, I don't see what the article does to add to that discussion, although it does possibly queue up a discussion on how we could make it better.
Personally, it seems blatantly obvious that Zoom cannot replace face-to-face interactions whether in a work setting or in an educational setting.
The people advocating "100% remote and video calls for everything" are either just really short sighted or have some other motive going on.
That has nothing to do with whether or not I agree with those claims, although in this particular case, it just so happens that I do.
I'm not sure there's any reason to believe any of these things. What we do know is that we've trained almost every teacher to teach and learn in classrooms, and that using techniques developed in classrooms to teach remotely don't work well.
We've barely spent any time at all developing techniques for remote learning, and we're already throwing up our hands.
Per the rest of my comment, I agree that rather than complain about the situation, we should be identifying ways to mitigate or exploit the situation to improve learning.
As a teacher I feel way less effective as well.
I do not think there is a technical solution to this. If online teaching becomes the norm I will leave the profession.
Another thing is that we tend to underestimate how much kids learn 'between the lines'. What is acceptable, what is valuable.
Lastly I'm convinced individualised learning is a fallacy. We technocrats like personalisation, but in my opinion that is only good for adults.
I want to recommend books and talks from Katharine Birbalsingh for an entirely contrarian, but very successful take on elevating underprivileged children.
Simply taking the classroom model and trying to perfectly replicate it in Zoom won't work. Of course. But online learning opens up a whole host of new possibilities that in-person learning is equally unable to replicate.
I earned my most recent degree online, from a fully online program, and really appreciated some of the thought they put into creating an online learning experience. One of the key changes was moving toward pre-recorded lectures. This yielded all sorts of fruit. It meant that I, the student, could listen to lectures at a time that worked best for me, rather than being tied to a classroom schedule. Not able to concentrate right now? Fine, take a break and try again later. Morning person? Never have to struggle to stay awake during late afternoon lectures ever again. Evening person? Same for morning lectures. Lecturer's voice dulcet tones and musical prosody make you drowsy, or hard of hearing, or classes not taught in your first language? You, my friend, are going to love the new Transcripts feature.
It also greatly reduced the time we needed to spend in classroom sessions, which, in turn, increased our access to personalized instruction by freeing up space in the instructors' schedules for small group and one-on-one meetings with students.
I, personally, didn't have difficulty focusing on class during class. I don't know that my classmates did, either. My suspicion is that those studies about students not paying attention were looking at typical online classes, which do consist of the traditional "classroom lectures, only on a screen" model. In which case, I am not at all surprised. Traditional classroom lectures tend to be boring as hell. A live classroom environment creating psychological cues that discourage distraction behavior doesn't fix that problem, it just makes it less apparent to the lecturer. Moreover, with asynchronous, recorded lectures, when my attention wanders (as all attentions will), its no big deal, all I have to do is rewind 30 seconds. In the classroom, if the lecturer says something critical while you were zoned out, too bad, you missed it.
The real problem here is that the pandemic has taken teachers who worked under the traditional model, and rudely thrust them into a completely new working environment that requires a radially different approach to the job, and has left them them zero time to adapt. But even a baby you didn't ask for shouldn't be thrown out with the bathwater.
I believe those teaching skills will eventually have to move to remote. The teachers who adapt fastest will be the most successful.
Any good examples for great remote teachers (beyond great presentation)?