Teaching Online

Moving to online teaching does not have to mean losing rich peer-to-peer discussions between you and your students or between students. Video conferencing software, such as Zoom, allows instructors to send students into breakout rooms for small-group discussions. It can be challenging, however, for students to remember the task and for instructors to monitor how the discussions are progressing.

Some tips:

• In Zoom, you can show or hide participant’s name or profile picture on the Zoom Room display if their video is turned off. This can help with visual overload of just seeing black participant screens in the gallery view.
• Ensure you have a PowerPoint slide or other document that explains the task for students prior to moving them into breakout rooms, tells them the time limit, and encourage them to select roles for each person in the breakout rooms (e.g. who will report back to the large group, who will take notes, who will share their screen, etc.)
• Inform specific teams they will be called on first once you all come back to the main room.
• Everyone can use virtual backgrounds for your webcam video though some people have reported that Zoom requires a green screen. Consider whether using a virtual background or other background images is appropriate – sometimes, depending on what you are wearing, parts of your body seem to disappear into the background due to color conflicts.
• Request that people identify themselves when they use their microphones.
• Note that students seem to prefer using the chat function rather than using their microphones to speak up. If you do not have someone helping you monitor the chat, this can add some extra time to your delivery.
  • Request assistance from IT, fellow faculty, coordinators, etc. to help you deliver your session. It’s hard enough to focus on just the teaching, but to have to monitor the chat and help people with technical problems will get overwhelming very quickly.
• PowerPoint presentations default to full screen mode that obscures Zoom windows. You can set your PowerPoint to “windowed” mode by going to Slide Show-> Set Up Slide Show ->Browse by an individual (window).

Small Group Teaching and Learning:

• challenge students to think for themselves,
• help students to organise and structure their thoughts and ideas,
• encourage students to vocalise and discuss their views and understandings,
• design learning activities and tasks that require students to actively engage,
• give students feedback on what they are doing well and how they can improve.

Video resources:

• Using Zoom for Small Group Teaching: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=arIDQBALrEw (start about 2:55)
• Small Group Learning: Recipes for Success: https://teaching.usask.ca/articles/small-group-learning.php

For core cases and TBLs, there is an element of small-group teaching and learning.

Core Cases can be delivered synchronously via:

• Blackboard Collaborate (limit to 20 breakout rooms)
• Zoom (has been our preferred method and new feature as of December 2020: co-hosts can now manage breakout rooms)
• WebEx (breakout rooms not possible)

It has been shown in Phase 1 that there is a strong importance of incorporating small group work and a variety of learning modalities, otherwise it is too easy for students to “check out” during the virtual session.  Students also prefer the random groups rather than pre-assigned to TBL groups (for non-TBLs).

It’s good to have at least a couple of activities where the students break out into smaller discussion groups. The timing must be planned well in advance and as the instructor, you should be mindful of the time allotted because it takes extra time to go in and out of the breakout groups.

When using web-conferencing software like Zoom for large group facilitation (whether it is for lecture or more interactive lesson), it can be challenging to ‘see’ everyone who has joined. Students do not tend to use their webcams unless asked (there are multiple valid reasons for this) and the participant list in Zoom can be quite long if the entire class has joined your session.

Some tips:

• In Zoom, you can show or hide participant’s name or profile picture on the Zoom Room display if their video is turned off. This can help with visual overload of just seeing black participant screens in the gallery view.
• Ensure you have a PowerPoint slide or other document that explains the task for students if you are incorporating any interactivity.
• Inform specific people they will be called on first if you are incorporating any interactivity.
• Everyone can use virtual backgrounds for their webcam video though some people have reported that Zoom requires a green screen. Consider whether using a virtual background or other background images is appropriate – sometimes, depending on what you are wearing, parts of your body seem to disappear into the background due to color conflicts.
• Request that people identify themselves when they use their microphones.
• Note that students seem to prefer using the chat function rather than using their microphones to speak up. If you do not have someone helping you monitor the chat, this can add some extra time to your delivery.
  • Request assistance from IT, fellow faculty, coordinators, etc. to help you deliver your session. It’s hard enough to focus on just the teaching, but to have to monitor the chat and help people with technical problems will get overwhelming very quickly.
• PowerPoint presentations default to full screen mode that obscures Zoom windows. You can set your PowerPoint to “windowed” mode by going to Slide Show-> Set Up Slide Show ->Browse by an individual (window).

Kahoot! has made their pro features available (as of 3/18/2020) for the remainder of the academic year. They have also created a guide for distance learning: https://kahoot.com/schools/distance-learning/.

Poll Everywhere is used regularly at UICOM. You can still use Poll Everywhere in an online environment. Note that if you are using Zoom, you will need to share your entire desktop if your polls are embedded in a PowerPoint slide deck rather than just sharing the PowerPoint application. You can also run Poll Everywhere on your phone via the website or app. This method skips the issues with embedded poll slides.

In Zoom, you can pre-create polling questions in the program itself. You can even do this on-the-fly during a Zoom session. See the Zoom FAQ for details.

Lecture can be delivered synchronously via:

• Blackboard Collaborate
• Zoom (preferred method)
• WebEx

Lecture can be delivered asynchronously via:

• Recording in Echo360 Universal Capture
• Recording via PowerPoint (narrated PPT slide deck)
• Recording via any of the options listed above for synchronous delivery.

Block overview and weekly overviews: record faculty videos for students.