Forbes: Optimizing Concurrent Classrooms: Teaching Students In The Room And Online Simultaneously
date：2020-06-29 09:29author：小编source：Forbesviews：
As students head back to campus, teachers face an unprecedented challenge: managing students in the room and online in the same class at the same time. Four teaching practices can elevate student experiences and outcomes in the “concurrent classroom.”
Let’s start by recognizing the key problem for the concurrent classroom: an inequality of attention. (I’m reserving the term “hybrid” for educational experiences where all students in a class are online and then all students are face-to-face in a classroom together. For example, most executive MBA (eMBA) programs offer a hybrid format. A concurrent classroom, in contrast, has people online and in person in the same class at the same time.) Students physically in the classroom have an obvious advantage: they can interact more fluidly and naturally with the teacher and each other. The juxtaposition prompts online students to feel even more distant and disconnected by comparison, and more likely to succumb to the myriad distractions in their home. Even with clever technologies like screen sharing, tracking cameras, and omnidirectional microphones, attempts at free-flowing conversation between people in the classroom and students on video will encounter poor video resolution, echoing audio with lags and the inevitable but persistent mistakes with the “mute” button. Applying traditional teaching practices from in-person or online classes will fail to deliver high-quality, impactful educational experiences.
Yet the concurrent classroom is unavoidable. The need to maintain social distance on campus reduces team sizes and therefore increases the number of teams per class. Several schools intend to rotate in-person and online students each day. If the coronavirus ebbs and resurges, students – and teachers – might transition repeatedly between in-person and online participation. These realities can be mitigated but not alleviated by flexible administration and cutting-edge technology. The solution requires adaptations to pedagogy. Here are a few suggestions for teachers to optimize student experiences in a concurrent classroom.
1. Talk Less, Smile More (In Class)
Listening to a lecture in person can be boring. Listening to a lecture online can be lethal. By pre-recording the lecture for students to watch before class starts, teachers not only increase the time available in class for interaction, but also give all students – online and offline – the same experience for receiving content. This method is effective for in-person classes. Preliminary findings from an analysis of 20,000 student evaluations revealed that having students watch a pre-recorded video lecture from the teacher before class significantly boosted student satisfaction with the course, the instructor, and the course outcomes. The “flipped” classroom is doubly impactful for online classes, whose students are already conditioned to watching video. This approach is vital in the concurrent classroom. As a rule of thumb, any monologue that persists for more than two slides or five minutes should be pre-recorded.
Some of the extra time in class gained by reducing lecturing can be allocated to intentional frivolity. Asking students to expound upon interesting career details pulled at random from their LinkedIn profiles, to show household items that relate to the topic under discussion, or to share their favorite scenes from movies that relate the course’s subject will introduce personal humanity into the concurrent classroom that might surpass the effect of pre-corona casual conversations in the hallway.
2. Output-oriented Team Breakouts
Learning occurs through active speaking, not through passive listening. In a large classroom, only one student can speak at a time even during engaged debate. Breaking students into teams to accomplish a specific task increases the number of students actively learning, bathing more students in the sun of inspiration and reducing the shadows where quiet or unprepared students might hide.
Well-structured team exercises in physical or virtual breakout rooms should pose a specific question or task, and ask teams to document their thoughts in a PowerPoint slide or text in a Google Doc. A few of these can be selected at random and shared with the entire class as part of the debrief of the exercise. If time is running short in class, these can even be posted to a discussion forum for subsequent reflection and accountability.
Polls have become popular in online classrooms. However, many polling tools restrict audience responses to pre-defined multiple-choice answers. These might engage viewers, but only temporarily and superficially. In contrast, more sophisticated polling tools like PollEverywhere or Mentimeter prompt students to respond with an entire sentence through any internet-connected device. Students in the classroom and online can see these responses in real time in a web browser. These open-ended polls are ideal to solicit opinions, identify clusters of similar and divergent responses, and begin a classroom discussion to actively explore the topic at hand.
3. Alternating Gaze
The additional complexities and chaos of a concurrent classroom require repeated reminders of the session’s roadmap. This can be as simple as an agenda slide inserted into class every 20 minutes. Behind the scenes, this slide also signals the teacher to shift eye contact from those in the classroom to those online and vice versa, alternating attention from one location to another.
This predictably shifting gaze is fruitful for soliciting individual participation in plenary sessions, too. The infamous “cold call” poses a question to an unsuspecting student at random. The technical challenges of a cold call in a concurrent classroom can interrupt the cadence of teaching if the assembly must pause for online students to unmute or in-person students to find a microphone. A system of “tepid calls” announces in advance the handful of students who will be asked questions in the subsequent 20 minutes of class. This roster can alternate between in-person and online students, giving students in either location time to prepare their minds and their technology for a response.
4. Multi-round Asynchronous Presentations
Just as a monologue from a teacher undermines the student experience in a concurrent classroom, so too does a “live” team presentation during class. These presentations also create unequal experiences, where students in the room can use the space more effectively, naturally, and fluidly than can students online. Yet a shift to entirely pre-recorded, asynchronous presentations risks the loss of interaction between speakers and audience for Q&A.
One possible solution uses a combination of easily managed tools to achieve a result that can surpass both in-person or online presentations. Teams pre-record the core of their presentation either with a smartphone for students in the same room or with video conference recording for students online. They post a link to their presentation at the top of a Google Doc. Randomly assigned students in the class are given 24 hours to watch this video and ask questions in the Google Doc. Presenting teams then have 24 hours to respond in writing. Thereafter, the assigned students write a critical but constructive critique of the team’s presentation and clarifications using a template provided by the teacher. These peer reviews can eventually be distributed to the presenting team, giving them additional feedback on their work. (Many learning management systems like Canvas already contain features to facilitate these peer assignments and exchange.) This system retains much of the spirit of a presentation, shows no bias towards online or offline students, and maintains audience interaction albeit in a less spontaneous format.
A Pedagogical Opportunity
The coronavirus required that teachers adapt to an online classroom. We overcame initial struggles to create (mostly) excellent online experiences for our students. We are unlikely to return to entirely in-person classrooms in the near future, and perhaps ever again. Over the next year, we will learn even more about the pedagogical techniques that optimize the experience and learning outcomes in concurrent classrooms for students who are physically in the room and simultaneously online.
This is not just an impending challenge for teachers and students. Large swathes of companies have already agreed to allow employees to work from home when convenient. Concurrent meetings among teammates will encounter these same hurdles and will glean techniques from our successes and failures in the classroom.
This seismic shift to a concurrent classroom gives teachers and scholars the rare opportunity to entirely reimagine the goals and methods of education, teamwork, and community building. We will breathe new energy into an ancient profession for a generation of students that expects and needs more from us.
Let’s start by recognizing the key problem for the concurrent classroom: an inequality of attention. (I’m reserving the term “hybrid” for educational experiences where all students in a class are online and then all students are face-to-face in a classroom together. For example, most executive MBA (eMBA) programs offer a hybrid format. A concurrent classroom, in contrast, has people online and in person in the same class at the same time.) Students physically in the classroom have an obvious advantage: they can interact more fluidly and naturally with the teacher and each other. The juxtaposition prompts online students to feel even more distant and disconnected by comparison, and more likely to succumb to the myriad distractions in their home. Even with clever technologies like screen sharing, tracking cameras, and omnidirectional microphones, attempts at free-flowing conversation between people in the classroom and students on video will encounter poor video resolution, echoing audio with lags and the inevitable but persistent mistakes with the “mute” button. Applying traditional teaching practices from in-person or online classes will fail to deliver high-quality, impactful educational experiences.
Yet the concurrent classroom is unavoidable. The need to maintain social distance on campus reduces team sizes and therefore increases the number of teams per class. Several schools intend to rotate in-person and online students each day. If the coronavirus ebbs and resurges, students – and teachers – might transition repeatedly between in-person and online participation. These realities can be mitigated but not alleviated by flexible administration and cutting-edge technology. The solution requires adaptations to pedagogy. Here are a few suggestions for teachers to optimize student experiences in a concurrent classroom.
1. Talk Less, Smile More (In Class)
Listening to a lecture in person can be boring. Listening to a lecture online can be lethal. By pre-recording the lecture for students to watch before class starts, teachers not only increase the time available in class for interaction, but also give all students – online and offline – the same experience for receiving content. This method is effective for in-person classes. Preliminary findings from an analysis of 20,000 student evaluations revealed that having students watch a pre-recorded video lecture from the teacher before class significantly boosted student satisfaction with the course, the instructor, and the course outcomes. The “flipped” classroom is doubly impactful for online classes, whose students are already conditioned to watching video. This approach is vital in the concurrent classroom. As a rule of thumb, any monologue that persists for more than two slides or five minutes should be pre-recorded.
Some of the extra time in class gained by reducing lecturing can be allocated to intentional frivolity. Asking students to expound upon interesting career details pulled at random from their LinkedIn profiles, to show household items that relate to the topic under discussion, or to share their favorite scenes from movies that relate the course’s subject will introduce personal humanity into the concurrent classroom that might surpass the effect of pre-corona casual conversations in the hallway.
2. Output-oriented Team Breakouts
Learning occurs through active speaking, not through passive listening. In a large classroom, only one student can speak at a time even during engaged debate. Breaking students into teams to accomplish a specific task increases the number of students actively learning, bathing more students in the sun of inspiration and reducing the shadows where quiet or unprepared students might hide.
Well-structured team exercises in physical or virtual breakout rooms should pose a specific question or task, and ask teams to document their thoughts in a PowerPoint slide or text in a Google Doc. A few of these can be selected at random and shared with the entire class as part of the debrief of the exercise. If time is running short in class, these can even be posted to a discussion forum for subsequent reflection and accountability.
Polls have become popular in online classrooms. However, many polling tools restrict audience responses to pre-defined multiple-choice answers. These might engage viewers, but only temporarily and superficially. In contrast, more sophisticated polling tools like PollEverywhere or Mentimeter prompt students to respond with an entire sentence through any internet-connected device. Students in the classroom and online can see these responses in real time in a web browser. These open-ended polls are ideal to solicit opinions, identify clusters of similar and divergent responses, and begin a classroom discussion to actively explore the topic at hand.
3. Alternating Gaze
The additional complexities and chaos of a concurrent classroom require repeated reminders of the session’s roadmap. This can be as simple as an agenda slide inserted into class every 20 minutes. Behind the scenes, this slide also signals the teacher to shift eye contact from those in the classroom to those online and vice versa, alternating attention from one location to another.
This predictably shifting gaze is fruitful for soliciting individual participation in plenary sessions, too. The infamous “cold call” poses a question to an unsuspecting student at random. The technical challenges of a cold call in a concurrent classroom can interrupt the cadence of teaching if the assembly must pause for online students to unmute or in-person students to find a microphone. A system of “tepid calls” announces in advance the handful of students who will be asked questions in the subsequent 20 minutes of class. This roster can alternate between in-person and online students, giving students in either location time to prepare their minds and their technology for a response.
4. Multi-round Asynchronous Presentations
Just as a monologue from a teacher undermines the student experience in a concurrent classroom, so too does a “live” team presentation during class. These presentations also create unequal experiences, where students in the room can use the space more effectively, naturally, and fluidly than can students online. Yet a shift to entirely pre-recorded, asynchronous presentations risks the loss of interaction between speakers and audience for Q&A.
One possible solution uses a combination of easily managed tools to achieve a result that can surpass both in-person or online presentations. Teams pre-record the core of their presentation either with a smartphone for students in the same room or with video conference recording for students online. They post a link to their presentation at the top of a Google Doc. Randomly assigned students in the class are given 24 hours to watch this video and ask questions in the Google Doc. Presenting teams then have 24 hours to respond in writing. Thereafter, the assigned students write a critical but constructive critique of the team’s presentation and clarifications using a template provided by the teacher. These peer reviews can eventually be distributed to the presenting team, giving them additional feedback on their work. (Many learning management systems like Canvas already contain features to facilitate these peer assignments and exchange.) This system retains much of the spirit of a presentation, shows no bias towards online or offline students, and maintains audience interaction albeit in a less spontaneous format.
A Pedagogical Opportunity
The coronavirus required that teachers adapt to an online classroom. We overcame initial struggles to create (mostly) excellent online experiences for our students. We are unlikely to return to entirely in-person classrooms in the near future, and perhaps ever again. Over the next year, we will learn even more about the pedagogical techniques that optimize the experience and learning outcomes in concurrent classrooms for students who are physically in the room and simultaneously online.
This is not just an impending challenge for teachers and students. Large swathes of companies have already agreed to allow employees to work from home when convenient. Concurrent meetings among teammates will encounter these same hurdles and will glean techniques from our successes and failures in the classroom.
This seismic shift to a concurrent classroom gives teachers and scholars the rare opportunity to entirely reimagine the goals and methods of education, teamwork, and community building. We will breathe new energy into an ancient profession for a generation of students that expects and needs more from us.
(Excerpt from Forbes,
https://www.forbes.com/sites/tedladd/2020/06/19/optimizing-concurrent-classrooms-teaching-students-in-the-room-and-online-simultaneously/#28203d033451, June 19, 2020 )
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