On the assumption that some or all of my teaching will be done remotely in the fall 2020 semester, I've been thinking about how to do it better. Here's some preliminary thoughts and some questions for further reflection. Feedback from recent or current law students especially welcome. (Note that I sent the bulk of this post by email to the students I taught remotely in Advanced Corporation Law last spring and to the students who I taught in person last fall in Mergers & Acquisitions. I figure the former can tell me what needs improvement from a pedagogic style perspective and the latter can anticipate how to adapt that course to the remote setting. After all, why not go to the proverbial horses' mouth?)
Preliminary Notes
- I teach exclusively using lecture. A comprehensive PowerPoint presentation accompanies each lecture, although the text on the slides is a pretty bare-bones outline.
- My remote learning base is my home office, which is equipped with a Mac with built-in camera and microphone. Any software or hardware must be Mac-compatible.
- I am familiar with using Zoom to share my desktop so that students can see me, the PowerPoint presentation, the Zoom chat room, and perhaps one other open window at a time.
- My students uniformly turn off their video and mute their audio, so I cannot see their faces and can only hear them when they unmute to ask a question.
- I will lay down a set of class rules about issues like muting microphones, raising one’s hand, and so on at the start of the semester with periodic reminders.
Questions
- Attendance during the remote learning in the spring 2020 semester was low; about 50%. While part of that may have been attributable to various pandemic-related factors, it is also possible that some students—knowing the sessions were recorded and posted to the law school intraweb—may have decided to view the lectures asynchronously.
- Is that cause for concern?
- Do I need to do anything to make sure the lectures are accessible for students with hearing or visual difficulties?
- One common suggestion I have seen for enlivening remote learning lectures is to have a second speaker break in for a short presentation.
- Would colleagues be willing to do that?
- Good idea?
Learning Goals
- The lighting in my office is very unsatisfactory.
- Find someone knowledgeable to assess and recommend lighting, camera, and microphone setups.
- Are there alternatives to Zoom?
- Find out if it is possible to connect an iPad to the Mac to use as a whiteboard.
- If not, is there a pen-based alternative whiteboard application/technology?
- There is data suggesting that the typical college student’s attention span in class is about ten minutes. I recall seeing data—but cannot now find it—suggesting that the typical attention span of university students in remote learning is about 7 minutes.
- Note that part of the popularity of TED talks may be the 18 minute limit, which ensures they do not tax the participants’ attention span.
- Find ways of breaking remote lectures into segments of no more than 10 minutes, with some alternative activity in the breaks.
- I have wanted for some time to include some sort of student feedback during a lecture. (I have planned for years to learn how to use clickers in our classrooms and am ashamed to admit I have let it slide.) Pop ungraded quizzes might be a good way of checking student comprehension and also a segment break activity.
- Having some sort of feedback is especially important because one cannot see the students’ faces and thus cannot assess their attention level.
- Learn how to use Zoom’s poll function.
- Can Zoom’s poll function be incorporated into a PowerPoint presentation?
- Find out if there are alternatives to Zoom’s poll function that might be a superior way of having students “answer” questions.
- One possibility I am considering is assigning a few students ahead of each class to each give a 5-minute presentation on a topic relevant to the lecture that day.
- How to deal with students learning asynchronously?
- PowerPoint presentations tend to be static.
- Find out if there is software available that could be used to create animations (easily) and then embed them in a PowerPoint deck (easily)?
- If so, learn how to use it.
- In my fall class (Mergers & Acquisitions), there is a great deal of attention paid to looking at specific Word documents (such as merger contracts) and parsing them.
- Is there a better way of showing them than Word or a PDF viewer?
- If so, learn how to use it.
- Some websites recommend building in time pre-class for social chatter and community building.
- Our schedule does not currently contemplate allowing that.
