Bringing Current News Into A Physics Lesson

I chat often with my colleagues from the English and other departments. I often envy them because many of their assignments have the ability to incorporate the hot topics of the day. They often assign tasks such as essay writing that involves subject matter that are relevant for the current times, such as writing about Black Lives Matter movement, the pandemic, etc.

While I always want to do the same, it is less obvious and not so straight-forward in bringing the same thing into a physics lesson. I had managed to incorporate some over the years (direct observation of blackhole in an IR image while we were studying EM waves as an example). But to incorporate topic-of-the-day to match the topic of the lesson is not that easy.

But this time, I managed to do it, and it was a doozy. We were about to dive into the topic of magnetism and electromagnetic field when I stumbled upon a goldmine. It is the claim that the COVID vaccine can cause one to become magnetized!

Now, my class is still being done remotely, so I make extensive use of the discussion forum as one means of student engagement. When the subject of magnetism comes up, the topic of discussion that I created was for the student to read a couple of news reports on this claim being made. The task is not to either belittle or make fun the claim or the people who made them. Rather, it is to rationally examine the claim and use well-established scientific facts to analyze the validity of such a claim. The students had to do this based on what they have learned about magnetic field, the type of magnetism in a material, and what type of materials are attracted to a magnet.

They were encouraged to make their own at-home observation. Everyone had refrigerator magnets, and I asked them to try and stick various items to the magnet, especially the ones that had been used in the testimony reported in the news article. A student also had the bright idea to use a compass that she had and see if the compass needle changes direction if she brought it against her skin (she's fully vaccinated) or her parents' skin. She cleverly argued that if something has a strong enough magnetic field to attract a spoon, it should cause a noticeable deflection in the compass needed.

This ended up being a lively discussion topic in the discussion forum, with students posting pictures, videos, etc. either one something they found, or something they did. It forced them to sift through what they read in the news to find the details that they can analyze and compare with what they learned about magnetism. They studied the validity of the claim only from the scientific point of view without passing any judgement on politics or personal beliefs.

The whole thing went better than I expected. The students were engaged because this was a current and relevant topic, and they get to see first hand how something that they just learned was actually useful enough to be used to analyze a news item. They get to see that a physics topic is not just something esoteric with little direct practical use in everyday life.

Oh, I should also mention that this is an algebra-based General Physics course that is tailored to life-science/pre-med/biology/kinesiology major. Many of the students are quite familiar with the human body and biological functions, so their discussion included several possible explanations on why something would or would not stick to a human skin without any consideration about magnetism.

It is on days like these that I get great joy in being a teacher.

Zz.

Context Interactions & Physics Faculty’s Professional Development

This is a rather fascinating study of two different physics faculty members at two different schools. I haven't finished reading it carefully yet, but I thought I'd post the link here and let you read along with me.

Abstract: This paper investigates the interactions between context and professional development of physics instructors in a case study of two physics faculty. A phenomenological-case study approach was used to analyze two physics faculty at different institutions over a year and a half using three semi-structured interviews each. The data enabled the identification of relevant context elements; and the impact of these elements on physics faculty's professional development was explored by adapting Bell and Gilbert's framework for teacher development. The analysis shows that both case study subjects used their physics expertise and growing understanding of their context to develop their physics teaching. However, this process of development was enacted differently given the nature of their context, highlighting instructors' strengths in navigating their local context to improve their physics teaching. The results show the subtleties of how context has a salient, complex, and evolving role in moderating faculty's professional development. By taking a faculty-centric approach, this paper broadens the community's awareness of the ways physics instructors develop their physics teaching. This work contributes to a relatively new lens by which the physics community views, discusses, and supports the professional development of physics faculty. 

What the authors call "context" appears to be broadly defined as "... the different entities that influence their professional development .. " which could include the institution, the department, other faculty members, workshops and other faculty development efforts, etc. 

The study focused on two faculty members, and followed them via a series of interviews. In particular, they seem to focus on each faculty member's teaching practices and philosophy, and how they evolve and how they are able to execute their teaching ideas.

Like I said, I'm still in the middle of reading this, but I freely admit that I see bits and pieces of myself in here, especially in the struggle to implement some of the active-learning concepts into my classes, more so during the remote-learning phase due to the pandemic. 

Z.

Muon g-2 Results Signify New Physics? Maybe Not.

The big news of the week that got all the media coverage is the result that came out of Fermilab's Muon g-2 experiment that confirmed an earlier result from Brookhaven more than a dozen years ago. Fermilab even announced it like.

However, as with any scientific discovery or announcement, one has to take a deep breath and let the process works itself out before we put our stamp of validity to it. This is because there is a theoretical calculation that has also been published along with this result that basically recalculates what the Standard Model predicts as the magnetic moment of a muon, and they found that the new calculation produces a result consistent with the experiment. In other words, there is no new physics if this calculation is verified, because the old Standard Model does, in fact, predicted this new result.

One of the major difficulties in physics is that in many situations, we do not have a simple equation that we can plug-and-chug to get numbers out. In fact, this is why predicting the weather is difficult, because the non-linear differential equations that need to be solved to get the number out can only be done numerically, i.e. it has to be done via some numerical algorithm.

This is made worse when there are a gazillion interactions involved in a system. So one ends up making simplifying models or adopt calculational techniques to allow us to get to some numerical answers. We benchmark the technique to known values and known systems to make sure that it gives accurate and sensible answers, but as we push the boundary even more, there is no guarantee that that calculational technique will work all the time.

The author of the theoretical paper used a calculational technique called lattice QCD. This is a known calculational model that has been described in simple terms in the link I provided above. It appears that using this method, the Standard Model does provide a value for the muon magnetic moment that is consistent with the experiment. If this is true, then it means that the old calculation of the magnetic moment was incorrect in the first place, and that there is discrepancy between what the Standard model predicts, and what the experiment measures.

While this is good news for the Standard Model and is another evidences of why it is an amazing theory, those who are looking for new physics beyond the Standard Model will obviously not be jumping for joy. But that isn't the issue here and not what I want to highlight. Rather, it is the constant reminder that in science, and especially in such exotic areas of physics, every discovery or new ideas must not be overblown or overhyped, because those require multiple verification over a period of time. It is not a situation for instant gratification. A lot of hard work is still to come because we have seen way too many times where something that was touted turned out to not be valid.

This announcement received a lot of media coverage. I just hope that this is a valid "new physics" and not just something that turned out to be what the old theory did predict.

Zz.

Getting My COVID Vaccine This Week

Being under 65 years of age, and with no major health issues (knock on wood), I was not eligible to receive the COVID vaccine in my area during the first 2 waves of its distribution.

But suddenly, it was announced by our state that starting Monday (today), higher-education workers will be included in the expanded criteria to receive the next vaccine distribution. So, after scrambling to find an appointment, I will get my first shot of the Pfizer vaccine this coming Friday, and then the second one later in April. All I can say is : PHEW!

There is certainly a push by the school to get things back to almost normal, in the sense that many of the classes are starting to be offered in person or in a blended/hybrid modality. Certainly classes that have a significant laboratory component are the ones that will probably start to be offered in person. I definitely would prefer to have the vaccine before I have to come in to the campus, so getting the vaccine now is a major peace-of-mind aspect of this whole thing.

It is certainly looking more certain that I may have to ditch my Zoom pants on most days and have to start dressing up again when I teach my classes this Fall! 😀😁

Zz.

Tripple-Layer Mask Blocks Secondary Atomization of Cough Droplets

I had already posted several physics papers on the efficacy of masks, even single-layer ones, in reducing the airborne aerosol. Now comes another paper that deals with how cough droplets actually can break up into smaller-sized droplets that may pass through single and double-layered masks, especially when moving at such high speed from a cough.

It turns out that having a mask with 3 layers or more might be the most effective here (I wonder at how many layers will we will of suffocation? :)) The new research is to be published in Science, and you can get the paper at the link to read to your heart's content.

A review of this paper can be found here. It is fascinating to read that expertise in the study of jet engines are being leveraged in studying the dynamics of this problem. But do you think people who don't believe in wearing masks to reduce the virus transmission will buy any of this? They believe in smartphones and jet engines, don't they?

Z.

English And The Language Of Physics

I love reading articles like this where the history of how things become the way they are now is revealed.

This Symmetry article tells the story of how English became the language of physics and why it became dominant in the publication of physics articles and journals. It has almost nothing to do with science, but everything to do with politics, social upheaval, and world events. If Germany didn't have the Nazi coming into power, we probably would be doing physics in German, or if the Soviet Union didn't close off the interactions of non-Soviet scientists, we'd be sharing ideas in Russian as well.

Zz.

Impact of COVID-19 Pandemic On Physicists

We, physicists, are people too (shocking, I know!). The impact of isolation, stay-at-home and work-from-home orders, and the cancellation of experimental work, in-person conferences, workshops and others do have academic, emotional, and psychological impacts on this group of people

This Physics Today article looks at such an impact on the physic community, and how they are dealing with it.

How are YOU dealing with it? Are you back on campus, in your lab, or in your office? Or are you still working from home?

Z.

Combining The Best Of Both Worlds

This is a fascinating and important advancement in the physics of light sources. It seems that it has been shown experimentally how one can get the short, intense light pulses that one gets from a FEL source, and combine it with the repetition that one gets from a synchrotron light source.

Now a Sino-German team has shown that a pattern of pulses can be generated in a synchrotron radiation source that combines the advantages of both systems. The synchrotron source delivers short, intense microbunches of electrons that produce radiation pulses having a laser-like character (as with FELs), but which can also follow each other closely in sequence (as with synchrotron light sources). 

Another review of this work, from Nature where it was published, can be found here.

While this is an important step, it really is a proof-of-principle experiment, and it requires a bit more experimental work to show that this can be viable.

Although this paper represents a crucial step towards generating high-power, small-bandwidth light pulses in a particle accelerator, steady-state microbunching has not yet been demonstrated. Deng et al. have shown that, after one turn in the synchrotron, the microbunched beam can produce coherent radiation. The next challenge is to prove that this scheme can achieve such a feat over many turns. This will be difficult to accomplish experimentally for at least three reasons.

But if this can be demonstrated, a lot of things that are done at a FEL can be performed even more at an "ordinary" synchrotron light source, a facility that is a lot more plentiful.

An important point that I want to point out here is that, these are all "tools" that allow us to study things. Without these tools, we have no ability to experimentally detect, see, or measure things. It enables us to do things that we could not do before. So the advancement in science, technology, medicine, etc, depend on not only having these tools, but also the continual improvement of these tools. Advancement in science requires all of these things to occur to able to explore more difficult and complex ideas and scenarios.

This advancement in accelerator-based light source has nothing to do with high-energy physics. In fact, if you look at the type of applications that are being mentioned, there's nothing about particle physics at all!

.....on an accelerator that could extend the capabilities of these machines even further, potentially yielding applications in a next-generation chip-etching technology called extreme-ultraviolet lithography and an advanced imaging method known as angle-resolved photoemission spectroscopy.

So once again, this is my continuing attempt at trying to make people aware that "accelerators" do not automatically mean "particle collider" or "high energy physics". In fact, the majority of particle accelerators in this world are not involved in high energy physics experiments.

Zz.

Wonders of Physics Competition

I mentioned about this more than 10 years ago in this thread. I went to UW-Madison and attended the early incarnation of this lecture-room demonstration that became a huge hit with the public. I also had Clint Sprott as an instructor in one of my courses.

Due to COVID-19, the Wonders of Physics show couldn't be held, and probably not in the near future either. To their credit, they are creating a contest instead, where you can submit a 2-minute video of an original demonstration of a physics concept.

So maybe one of you are creative enough to enter this contest. :)

Zz.

When Flipped Classroom Flopped?

I've mentioned about flipped classroom before, and that I use this format in a couple of my classes during the remote environment. This article goes the other way and pointed out when and why flipped classroom can flop and be rather ineffective.

I must say that the way this was described, it doesn't quite match what I am doing. While the students do have to watch videos and/or read something before they come to the first class of the week, they have pre-lecture quizzes that tests on whether they did watch the videos or read the material, and had a general understanding of the important ideas. These are graded and become part of their overall course grades. So there is incentive for them to go over the pre-lecture stuff.

Secondly, I don't just quickly dump them into breakout room right at the beginning. We meet twice a week and these are very long class sessions (3 hours) that often comprise of the subject matter and hands-on demos or labs (virtual labs). So I get to go over the important highlights of the subject, do a few examples, shoot off a few polls, give them a few online apps or simulations, and only then do I send them to breakout rooms to work on solving problems. In fact, in many instances, their breakout session is where they get to do their online virtual experiments and get to discuss what they are doing with one another.

I may have mentioned this before, but I did my own end-of-semester survey, and the overwhelming majority of my students liked the pre-lecture material and found them useful. So for me, the version of flipped classroom that I run appears to not be a flop.

Zz.

Physics Labs At Home

I've made several posts on various virtual experiments that may be done in conjunction with the standard physics courses. While many of these are adequate, nothing beats an actual, physical experiment that requires actual observation and measurement in person.

This paper lists a few experiments that a student may be able to do at home using items that a student may find at home. Since almost everyone having smart phones, there are certainly many activities that can be done using such devices. I've asked my students to use their smartphones to install sky-viewing app to be able to track planets, stars, and other celestial bodies. We have also used various apps that made used of the accelerometer in the phone to measure acceleration. I also have an app called "Gauges" (iOS) that allows you to use your smartphone to be an altimeter, speedometer, barometer, accelerometer (of course), magnometer, and to measure sound level and luminance. I am in the middle of designing a few "in class" (and now, it is "at home") activities using these capabilities.

While virtual experiment is fine for the present unusual situation, I still believe that this is not the same as actually doing the measurement itself and physically performing the experiment. So I'm trying to find activities that a student may be able to do him/herself, or in collaboration with another student if he/she does not have all the necessary equipment. I want to incorporate this as part of the lesson rather than an actual "experiment", so that the student can see the phenomenon that they are studying or about to study.

Have you designed simple at-home physics experiments for your students?

Zz.

General Physics Experiments Done Remotely

Oooh, yes please!

The problem that I have with online/remote physics courses is that we had to resort to a lot of "simulations" applications to do our "experiments". This is not what an experiment is supposed to be, because there has to be a components of errors and equipment issues that are involved in doing any physical measurement. So these simulations do not reflect reality.

The closest that I've seen so far is the one offered by Pivot Interactives, where you see a series of videos of actual experiments being done, and you get to measure what the person doing the experiment actually measure. It includes all the experimental uncertainties, quirkiness, etc. that the students have to also consider.

But here's another step further that gets the students even closer to being there and doing the actual experiment. I came across this article on UC Santa Barbara's effort to put their Sophomore-level quantum physics course online whereby the students can operate the equipment remotely and perform the actual experiments without being in the lab.

The automization of the quantum mechanical labs allows for students in the Physics 5L class to interact remotely with equipment using an online portal connected to the apparati set up in the lab, according to Fygenson. 

The online portal models the equipment setup, with buttons and knobs in the same order as where they would be on the actual equipment. Students can observe what happens in the lab using cameras aimed at the machines, Fygenson said. So far, the automated lab has been used in Summer 2020 and Fall 2020 and will be used again in Spring 2021.

That's brilliant! But that also involves a lot of money and effort to connect all of those equipment so that they can be operated remotely. Not many schools have that kind of resources and expertise.

I did a quick search and found an earlier report on this with an accompanying video. This gives you a better idea of how this is all done. It looks like from the video, the experiment being demonstrated as an example is the diffraction grating spectroscope looking at emission lines from various sources. This would be a very nice experiment to be done remotely.

Both articles indicated that they are sharing access with other schools, but did not indicate what one should do to get such access. I suppose I will have to contact one of the people listed at the end and see if I can have my students do at least that spectroscope experiment.

Anyone else have done something similar, or have used this?

Zz.

E&M Lab Manual for Virtual Classes

This appeared on arXiv on Christmas day. It is a series of lab manual for intro E&M virtual experiment suitable for online courses.

The pdf document itself contains the just the lab instruction. Most of the virtual experiments made use of the applications found in PhET. It is in the abstract that we get a bit of an explanation. The authors claim that:

Student learning outcomes (understand, apply, analyze and evaluate) were studied with detailed lab reports and end of the semester lab-based written exam which confirmed the virtual lab class was as effective as the in-person physical lab class. 

Unfortunately, they provided no evidence or data to support this, at least not in the document.

In my lessons, I try to incorporate the "experiment" as part of the lecture itself. So I had students perform one part of the virtual experiment, and then we discuss the outcome before they write down their observations. Then we move on to the next topic or examples before we come back to doing more of the simulation or measurement. So in many cases, the students encounter both the theory and the observation at almost the same time. The exception being when we did Lenz's and Faraday's law, where I actually gave the students the equipment and instruction, and let them discover for themselves the induced current and how the induced current behave with changing magnetic fields. So they observed the phenomenon first before they learned about the theory.

In any case, this set of lab instruction might be useful to be adapted to my remote classes. We'll see how that goes this coming Spring.

Zz.

Happy Holidays and a Better 2021

It has been a crazy year! I think I've posted the least amount of posts in this blog this year than any other year since I started this eons ago. There have been just way too much distraction and pressure coming from all the workload and learning new stuff that I had to just to be an effective instructor. It doesn't help that I think my teaching workload felt like it doubled for remote classes. I'm doing almost twice as much for remote courses than I do for in-person classes. It's crazy!

And I'm sure that students similarly felt a different set of burden and pressure with remote courses. The course feedback that I've received, even though overall they were positive, clearly reflected the frustrations the students have with remote learning and the way different remote courses were ran.

Looking into 2021, I know that we will be totally remote once again for Spring 2021. While I was more prepared to face Fall 2020, I am even more well-prepared for Spring 2021. I know the adjustments that I need to make, and I know things that I need to change. I will also be trying new stuff. Remote labs are something that I continue to struggle with. Honestly, I prefer the official online courses' approach to labs where they send kits to students, and we designed experiments for the students to do at home. However, these courses that I've been teaching are not online courses, but rather face-to-face (f2f) courses that had been forced to be delivered remotely due to the pandemic. So we have no kits. We rely on online simulation as "labs".

But in Spring 2021, I am going to adopt the lab environment of Pivot Interactives. A couple of our faculty members used it extensively this past semester, and they had good things to say about it. I've given it a test drive, and I can see how this may be as close to an actual experiment as it can get without actually physically doing it. Any of you out there use Pivot Interactives? What do you think of it?

Anyhow, with the possibility of the vaccine looming on the horizon for everyone sometime in 2021, there is a glimmer of hope that things will start moving back to "normal", whatever that may look like. So if you are celebrating the holidays at this time of the year, I wish you a wonderful holiday season and a significantly better 20201. Thank you for reading this blog and letting me indulge in spewing my thoughts into the ethereal world of the internet.

Zz.

Flipping Your Remote Classroom

I wrote just a few days ago about my effort in continuing my flipped classroom when we went into the remote mode (as opposed to being in an online class mode which is totally run asynchronously). I then ran across this article out of UC-Berkeley about doing the exact same thing.

It definitely seems consistent that for a flipped classroom, there should be a synchronous part, otherwise it doesn't make any sense. And it is nice to see the different variations of a remote flipped classroom, which gives me more ideas on how I can further tweak my own classes.

Do you run a remote flipped classroom? How do you do it?

Zz.

Intro Physics for Life Sciences

I came across this article out of Michigan State University, about the issue of teaching intro physics to life science majors. I find it rather interesting (amusing?) that this is still an issue being discussed at many large universities when smaller universities and community colleges have long focused on designing such courses for these life sciences/pre-med majors.

Without naming names, I know of 3 major universities in the Chicago area that do NOT have special intro physics courses for such majors. They lump them with the same group of students majoring in physics, chemistry and engineering. So not only are they required to know calculus in those calculus-based intro physics courses, but also they are competing with students whose major are more closely aligned with physics. It is why many of these life-science majors often opted to pay for these courses at city colleges and community colleges and get their transfer credits.

I had written something on this two years ago about teaching physics to life-science/pre-med majors. I am more convinced than ever, just as stated in the article, that you cannot teach this as you normally would to physical science/engineering students. It helps that the course was designed for life-science majors (we used text that are full of examples out of biology, medicine, etc.), but the course objectives and learning outcomes are generic and not specific to these majors. At the curriculum level, there is still a disconnect between the students' need and the official objectives of the course. As an instructor, I am bound by the course objectives and learning outcomes, but of course, I have leeway in implementing those. That means that I try to emphasize more on the topics that are more relevant to their needs and more applicable to life sciences than others. As the article pointed out, while planetary motion and central force problems are part of physics (and part of the course objectives), I do not emphasize it as much as I would in a calc-based physics class.

There can be more refinement and improvement in the design of courses for these students, making them even more relevant to their area of studies. This can only lead to a win-win situation, where the students will actually see the value and connection between physics and biology/medicine, and we can motivate the students more easily on the importance of physics in their fields. I see nothing wrong with that at all.

Zz.

Flipped Classroom Under Remote Learning

In my normal face-to-face (f2f) classes, I ran them as flipped classroom. I had the students watch videos and/or read short items related to the material for that week and have them do a short quiz on what they had viewed or read. All these before they attend the first class for that week. By they time they got to class, they should have a good idea of what the material is about.

In class, I went over the salient point of the material, and did a few examples. I also did polls on the topic to gauge how much they had understood the material. When those are done, I gave them a list of problems where they will work in groups to solve them.

Fast forward to the present day, where we have gone online with our classes. The school where I'm at tried to distinguish courses that were already designed to be online courses, versus courses that were f2f classes, but were forced to go online due to COVID. The school called those latter courses as "remote", to distinguish them from "online". While there was no mandate to do so, they recommend that remote courses be taught with large synchronous component, preferably live during the published class time. In other words, try to make it as close to f2f session as possible via the synchronous sessions.

All of my classes so far have been "remote" classes, although I have signed up to teach an online course next semester since I am now qualified to teach online classes after all that training that I went through during the summer. And for all of them, I have kept the flipped classroom model. The students had to watch videos or read the material, and did the short quiz, all before our first synchronous session of the week. During our synchronous session, I covered the major points of the material, did a few examples, did polls, and then I assigned then to breakout rooms to work on various problems.

It worked similar to the f2f format except that I couldn't see what they were working on. In a regular f2f class, I could see their work since they use a whiteboard slate to do their work, and I could hear them discussing the problem with one another. In the remote format, I could only jump from one breakout room to the next, but I couldn't see what they had done. They would tell me if they had problems, but other than that, I could only rely on what they tell me. It was not as informative as I wanted to.

But the students seemed to think that this was effective. I had my own survey at the end of the semester, and a few of the questions were directly related to the flipped format, especially on what I called the "prelecture" items (videos/reading material, and the quick quiz). An overwhelming majority of students from this past semester (Fall 2020) seemed to like having the prelectures and found them to be useful! A smaller majority of students (but still a majority) found the polls and the breakout room exercises to be useful.

I think that this is one of those pre-COVID teaching methodology that may work rather well in the remote setting IF there is a regular synchronous component that resembles a class session. It makes no sense if the class is purely asynchronous, since most of the material are online already and there are no "lectures" for there to be "prelectures". But for the "remote" modality that the school has defined, the prelectures work in almost the same way as in a f2f class, and from the feedback that I received, the students seem to find them useful. I may have to work some more on making the polls and breakout room activities more beneficial to them, but in some respect, parts of it may be out of my control since those also depend on the participation of the members of their group.

In the end, I'm pretty happy to know that some resemblance of the flipped classroom model appears to be effective in the remote classes with regularly-scheduled synchronous sessions. Since Spring 2021 promises to be more of the same, it is something that I'm going to keep on doing, with a few refinements here and there.

Zz.

Forcing A Square Peg Through A Round Hole

 Many of us survived another semester of remote or online learning. Phew!

Unlike Spring 2020, Fall 2020 remote learning wasn't as problematic and disastrous, mainly because many of us were expecting it, and knew what to expect. In my case, I mentioned earlier that I spent the entire summer getting trained as an online instructor, mainly because I want to learn about some of the best-practice method of teaching online. I honestly do not want to be an online instructor because I much prefer the standard face-to-face (f2f) instruction modality. But the reality right now is that many classes are being taught remotely, and I need to have the knowledge and skill to deliver lessons that way.

Having chatted (via Zoom) with a few colleagues from my dept. during a number of online meeting, I was shocked (or maybe I shouldn't have) at how many of my fellow faculty members think that remote lessons are simply the same as f2f lessons, but delivered remotely or online. I've even had one instructor telling me that he was trying to make his remote classes to mimic his f2f classes as closely as he can!

Regardless of how logical or effective that is, let's look at what are the facts here. Remote classes are already significantly DIFFERENT than f2f classes in a number of elements: locations, in-person contacts, immediate and direct response, and on-site actions. In other words, remote/online lessons are a completely different beast than f2f lessons. So what is the rational for treating them to be the same thing?

The one very clear message that I received during the several workshops and training I did over the summer is that if you treat remote lessons the same way as f2f lessons, your classes will SUCK! Even the layout of the learning management system (LMS) page has to be redesigned to make it more obvious and easier to navigate, because this is where the students will have to go to to find stuff. Items need to be there at their fingertips because no one is around for them to ask to get immediate feedback.

One issue that was brought up during my conversation with my colleagues is the issue of student engagement. Instructors were lamenting that their students often do not turn on their cameras during their synchronous sessions, often do not actively participate during those sessions, etc. They consider this as lack of engagements and want to know how to increase the sense of "community" and participation.

I told them that maybe what they are using to gauge student engagement is rather limited to what they are familiar with in f2f classes. For online/remote learning, student involvement includes more than just participation during synchronous session. It can also mean participation in asynchronous activities. This is where group projects, discussion forums, etc.. count as student engagement. In the effort to make their remote classes as close to f2f classes, many instructors forego other viable means of online student engagement activities, simply because they were either not aware of such means, or they do not see the importance or significance of such means. But these other means have been shown in many studies to be effective, if done properly, to engage students and keep them interested in the subject matter. These other means may not have been necessary in f2f environment, but we are not there now. It is now a different beast, and it requires different means to achieve the same goal.

For many of us who did have the online instruction training, we learned quite a few valuable lessons and philosophy in using online and remote tools in delivering instructions. In fact, most of us think that we will continue using many of these online tools even when we go back to fully f2f classes. I would certainly like to continue having Zoom office hours, because it gives quite a flexibility in scheduling meetings with students at various times even when I'm not on campus. I also now have sufficient tools to be able to show a "pen and paper" solution online when students need help. And I know that my LMS page is significantly improved compared to when I had it for my f2f classes. There are a lot of things that I will continue to do even when we go back to "normal".

But the moral of the story here is that instructors need to be aware that remote classes is NOT the same as f2f classes delivered remotely. They can't be the same. Forcing it to be is trying to force a square peg into a round hole, and then wondering why it doesn't go through.

Zz.

The Sad Ending of Aricebo Observatory

It was less than a month ago, on a Nov. 19, 2020 report, that the National Science Foundation announced the closure of the famed Aricebo Observatory in Puerto Rico due to structural and safety problems. Unfortunately, on Dec. 1, 2020, the collapse of the central structure happened, with dramatic footage released by the observatory.

While the famed telescope is gone, it will live forever in many footage from movies and tv shows. This is in addition to the numerous scientific discoveries that it has made throughout its operation.

Zz.

Students Experiences with Emergency Remote Teaching

With COVID cases going back up in many places, including here in the US, many schools are still sticking to remote and online classes. Even those that opened their campuses are now starting to fall back to such modality of learning.

At some point, there needs to be an assessment on how students are dealing with all of this, and the degree that it has impacted their learning process. The migration from regular face-to-face (f2f) classes to emergency remote classes due to the pandemic is a highly unusual case and requires quite a bit of investigation.

This is one such study, conducted on physics students at the University of Colorado-Boulder. It surveyed the students perception of how the lesson was delivered during this past Spring 2020 when all schools in the US shut down in March and changed to online learning.

Having gone through it as an instructor, I know that it wasn't easy for everyone involved. In many cases, a lot of the quality of instruction certainly suffered to a certain extent. So it should be informative to learn the students' perspective on this, and it may be useful as a guide, considering that there is a strong possibility that many of us will continue with remote learning this coming Spring 2021.

As for me, I feel significantly better prepared. I spent the past Summer 2020 getting trained as an online instructor, even though I intend to stick to just f2f courses if and when we do get back to "normal". But learning the "best practice" method in online lesson delivery was extremely helpful. But the best part was that these training courses and workshops are themselves online courses, done asynchronously like most online courses. So I got to experience first-hand what it feels like to be an online student, to feel sometime the confusion on where to find things and what to do next. The fact that you are on your own means that even the design of the learning management page can be a factor, that things need to be arranged in such a manner that things that are important need to be front and center, and easy to find. So I think that I learned almost as much about teaching online from just being an online student myself as from the course's material and lesson.

Spring 2021 will continue to be in the remote-learning format. But I think I'm getting the hang of this. I know that I no longer feel that I'm bumbling in the dark. I still need to refine many of the stuff that I do and execute, but things no longer feel daunting. I know that I'm working almost twice as hard preparing for these online lessons (we have synchronous sessions during the scheduled class time) when compared to the old f2f classes. But now, I feel that I know what to expect and I'm well-prepared for it.

Zz.