Transition to Online Teaching

The June 2020 issue of Physics Today has an article on various physics instructors' effort in dealing with the migration to online teaching in physics courses. I notice a few similar issues I had to deal with, such as this:

During in-person lectures, says Greco, the instructor would pose a question every 10 minutes or so. The students would discuss the question with their neighbors for a few minutes and then submit their answers. “If most of them get the right answer, I move on,” says Greco. “If not, I adjust the live lecture.” That doesn’t work as well online: Student discussion is harder to facilitate and web-based interactions are much slower. In person, he adds, “you can tell if someone is paying attention, but that’s hard to do virtually.”

I use "clickers" in class to do a quick snapshot if the students understood the concept that was presented. And certainly, student-to-student discussion is a part of it especially if the first round of in-class question didn't produce a correct response. This can't be done during a Zoom session even though it has a Poll feature. Student discussion was almost non-existent, and we had to revert back to almost passive learning, which killed me since I'm a strong advocate for active learning.

I did resorted to giving them at-home projects as part of the material where they used simulations and virtual experiments to investigate something that was relevant to the topic of that week. But it isn't the same, obviously.

The other similar thing that I read was this:

Other instructors chose to teach asynchronously, sometimes in a flipped mode, with students watching lectures before attending virtual discussions. Some instructors, including Dubson, embed questions in their video lectures such that students can’t continue until they commit to an answer. “This allows us to require that they think,” he says.

Luckily, all my classes have these "pre-lecture" videos or documents that the students had to view or read, and then answer a few questions. These were meant to introduce to them the concepts related to the topic of that week before the come to class. So I was already doing the "flipped" mode. When we went totally remote, I expanded the pre-lecture videos and material so that the students had a bit more to view because now it became a major source of the material.

It's nice to read that many other instructors were doing the same thing, and that we could all learn from one another on how to do this better next time.

Zz.

Goodbye Spring Semester 2020

It's been close to a week since I submitted the final grades for my students. I'm still giving my sigh of relief that the crazy semester is finally over, and I'm sure the students felt the same way too.

For someone who has had a bit of training on how to run blended or hybrid classes, it was still a huge challenge to modify an existing on-site classes to run 100% online. And as someone who is a strong advocate of active learning, it is an even bigger disappointment that all the meticulous planning and in-class activities along this line of learning had to be thrown out of the window. But as they say, life happens while you're making plans!

After this whole debacle, I'm taking the entire summer off. I was planning on going to Hawaii at the end of May and fulfill one of the items on my bucket list, which is to view a sunrise or sunset on Mauna Kea. But of course, all of that had to be cancelled.

Still, I won't be just sitting on my rear end doing nothing throughout the summer. This whole pandemic thing has force me to get more official training on the best-practice way to run online classes and lessons, especially for a course that requires labs, etc. I've signed up for several accredited training courses, with the hope of improving my online lessons and presentations. I'm very much interested in the best ways to minimize online cheating during exams, etc., because I consider that to be a major issue and why I am skeptical of the skill and understanding of students taking online classes. Other faculty members who had taken such courses mentioned that it also helped with their in-person classes, so it definitely sounds like a positive thing to do. We shall see.

I've also realized that I've been consuming more than my usual amount of wine during this stay-at-home order. Not sure if that's good or bad.... :)😁

Zz.