The Greatest Teaching Techniques Don't Compute over Zoom
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Blind person here. On line learning is the best thing that can happen to diversity and inclusion, particularly when disabled people are concerned. For me, being in an environment free of students constantly shouting over my speech synth made a huge difference. I could adjust the volume of the teacher, or even mute them for a while, when I really needed to focus on the speech. Being able to request the name of the person talking, or hear who joins/leaves/raises hand is really useful too. I imagine the difference is even bigger for blind teachers, as they normally don't know who raises the hand or talks, and that's very important to them. Other disabilities benefit too, wheelchair users were very relieved they didn't have to move / be moved through inaccessible buildings etc.
There are a lot of accessibility implications to on line learning, most of them positive. Personally, I wish I could just stay that way forever.
With online, it's brutal trying to retain focus at a monitor and reading while retaining. The focus drifts in and out unconsciously so you can read an entire page of text before realizing you retained literally none.
For text based learning I often need to dedicate a large amount of time "re-reading" material in advance to improve retention during the live discussion part if it lacks enough depth. Calculus was the critical crux of my educational path.
It's obvious that your quality of education has improved and makes sense that you'd want to kleep it that way. It would be great if we could support people in your situation without greatly diminishing the experience of a huge component of attendees though: all those with learning, attention and focus issues. The stats are truely mind boggling with how many kids struggle to control their behaviour in a virtual classroom.
Question: why DON'T you stay remote? Most of the time the last thing we want to do is isolate people in different situations but it sounds like this would be preferable for you. It would seem to be quite easy to support too.
Edit: fix grammar + clarify.
Your presentation is deeply affected by the kind of audience you're aimed at.
I guess I was making a point in reaction to the many "hybrid" in person / online courses being offered by universities, for the fall and possibly beyond. Hybrid is actually harder than either 100% in person or 100% online.
With the right tech and competent teachers, it’s completely doable in my experience.
My secret weapon in French class in school was a tape deck with treble/bass controls. A big chunk of the work was transcription of recorded material. Rewind, play, pause, play, rewind, fiddling with the nobs to deal with the static on my copy of a copy of the tape. You can't do that with live content. You can with prerecorded materials (IF the designers think of it).
There are a lot of videos with people who take too long to get to the point and I have to increase the speed to stay focused. Slowing things down for any sensory impairment I presume helps other people.
When my family member was a kid he did not want to use the audio assistive devices in classes because he was self-conscious. It's a production. There are resources to be 'checked out' and 'checked in' every day. I don't think I'd be as comfortable using most of the tools I use if I had an audience.
He spends a lot of time online because -everybody- suffers to an extent from his limitation online. The cocktail party effect, the ability to filter one conversation out from many, fails for everyone, not just people with hearing aids. So people have to learn not to talk over each other if they want anyone to hear them, which means his listening comprehension goes way up.
I work with several quiet people, and when we used to have a meeting outdoors or in a large area, I often wouldn't be able to hear what they were saying.
Now, we all have headphones and microphones, and I can hear what everyone has to say without asking them to repeat themselves. It's improved communication tremendously, and I'm sure they're feeling more heard now as well.
Remote teaching may be harder, require more work, and have pitfalls that are quickly overcome in person. Much more useful would be a collection of ways to mitigate them, rather than an airing of grievances.
Maybe I'm being too hard on this, and it's just a good serving up of the real conversation. So, what are other folks doing to overcome the difficulties outlined in the article?
Reading the room, avoiding distraction, using humor, and inability to establish command.
On the last note, I will say that I believe it's a red herring. The most soft spoken person, who clearly has a passion to share their subject, will be easily gifted this by a willing audience. Even over Zoom.
- Reading the room: students, by default, turn off all their cameras and microphones, despite my request (we cannot require this) that they turn them on if there are no privacy, bandwidth, or other issues. Whereas in a classroom, a student can signal confusion merely by frowning or half-raising a hand, I now need to ask a prepared question or give them a real pause.
- Avoiding distraction: there is not much one can do. The things one can use to hold attention in a live in-person lecture -- telling bad math jokes, etc -- don't translate easily. In particular, if you can't see or hear your audience, it can be a little dangerous to try to be funny.
- Establishing command: did not have this problem. I would in any case say this differently: the issue is building rapport with students. Since we switched to online in March, I had half a semester to get to know my students (small class, 20 or so) which really helped.
None of this says online is a non-starter, but it should be organized very differently. One can do recorded lectures and live structured problem sessions (i.e., flip the classroom), or give students more preparatory activity to do, etc. Many of these are sound things to do in a live in-person classroom anyway; online is just not so forgiving and exposes many of the flaws of the traditional lecture format. And students need to be taught how to learn in this environment from the get-go.
Finally, I'll say that the technology has a ways to go. It would be really great if multiple people could talk over each other as if they were in the same room. If video degraded more gracefully (because many students do not have stable enough connections at home) while maintaining audio. If various apps with white boards gave students the ability to "see" your previous boards. (A couple programs do this, e.g., MS Teams, but AFAIK not Zoom.)
And he didn't mention the nightmare that is assessment. I taught a small class to a group of bright, emotionally mature juniors and seniors. Teaching first year students is a completely different story. This is something we're working hard on, with a summer to prepare instead of just a week (our transition happened over spring break). But it's not easy.
Edit: I suppose one way to summarize the above is to say that all the issues can be addressed, but online makes the energy barrier higher (or friction greater, whatever analogy you like) for both instructors and students.
This is going to sound like a plug, but I took a LifeLabs course on Meetings Mastery, and one small part of it was a discussion of how to engage with people over Zoom. Some examples were using the chat to ask questions that merit chat responses, asking people to "+1" in the chat when they agree with something (maybe students could "?" when they are getting lost), and using polls and breakout rooms.
As someone who's been frustrated by adapting to the remote environment from a meetings perspective, I can relate. But at least the people in my meetings are mature enough (or compensated well enough) that they will keep cameras on, stay engaged in the discussion, etc.
Why would it have "no impact to policy"?
Let's imagine for a moment that we discovered remote learning was 100% ineffective for everyone. Students came out of remote learning programs with no more knowledge than they did going in. Should we:
A) Continue with remote learning anyway, because in-person classes are unsafe.
B) Stop remote learning, and accept that students will have to put their educations on hold for a year, despite all the implications that will have.
Personally, I think option B is the obvious choice. There’s no point in doing anything if students don’t benefit.
Okay, now let's say that remote learning was only 50% effective, or 60%. Is option A now the right answer? Putting everyone’s education on hold is going to have lots of dire consequences—but, is it worse than educating them inadequately? What does that mean for the next generation of high schoolers entering college, or college students entering the workforce?
Alternately, perhaps the correct conclusion is that we really, really do need to reopen schools this fall. Why is so much of the country currently focused on reopening hair salons and outdoor restaurants while keeping schools closed? Maybe it should be the other way around—maybe schools are the most essential service, and we need to reopen them ASAP at the expense of other kinds of businesses.
FWICT, most policy is being set with a baked-in assumption that remote learning is somewhat less effective than in-person learning. As I said, I don't see what the article does to add to that discussion, although it does possibly queue up a discussion on how we could make it better.
Personally, it seems blatantly obvious that Zoom cannot replace face-to-face interactions whether in a work setting or in an educational setting.
The people advocating "100% remote and video calls for everything" are either just really short sighted or have some other motive going on.
That has nothing to do with whether or not I agree with those claims, although in this particular case, it just so happens that I do.
I'm not sure there's any reason to believe any of these things. What we do know is that we've trained almost every teacher to teach and learn in classrooms, and that using techniques developed in classrooms to teach remotely don't work well.
We've barely spent any time at all developing techniques for remote learning, and we're already throwing up our hands.
Per the rest of my comment, I agree that rather than complain about the situation, we should be identifying ways to mitigate or exploit the situation to improve learning.
One of the universities has a rule that everyone must have their cameras on at all times, so you end up teaching classes to seas of blank faces. You get no meaningful feedback this way.
One thing I've used which has been useful is Miro [1]. It is a collaborative whiteboard tool. Being able to get a little bit of output from everyone is wonderful. Even just being able to see people's mouse pointers move makers a huge difference.
One of the pluses has been everyone has suddenly got much better at using the universities online learning system (which existed before). General organisation and admin has been streamlined somewhat.
One thing that it seems to me would be very helpful would be an instantaneous feedback channel where you could have premade questions (say, multiple-choice) and ask students to answer them in real time. This would allow you intersperse formative assessment into your lectures more like what happens live. It would go a long way toward helping the class be interactive. They would have to be graded automatically for large classes, of course.
To do it well, online courses have to be approached completely differently. You have to switch your way of thinking, switch how you apply learning (esp adult) methodologies, switch your time planning and also change your expectations. For example adults mostly learn and enjoy learning best through facilitation where possible, stuff like group work. That's very hard to do well with current online tools. Also attention spans are very different.
Even small things like physical movement. In the training room you the educator can move around and in most sessions you can integrate opportunities to get the people you are training to stand up and move around for a bit (for example get a group to look at a problem and address it on the wall). You can't do that when someone is looking at a screen. Plus it's tricky to encourage people to feel able to spontaneously contribute or throw in a question etc on web. It's obviously also harder for more than one person to speak. Plus the way that people tend to be zeroed in on the educator means they are less likely to have positive engagement that spins off from what someone else is saying. E.g picking up follow up questions, asking their classmate how to do something or putting forward their own theory on something.
There are some advantages to using webinars about what you can use - depending on topic you can draw on a wider variety of material.
Overall when developing online courses I felt at times it shifted to require more of a Producer mentality than purely an Educator one.
Thanks for sharing that.
Maybe I just sucked at it.
I'd like to hear more about what to switch to. What guiding principles have you observed?
I wonder if video lessons of traditional in-class teaching will ever be effective long distance to younger pupils. And shorter online interactive lessons - duolingo/khan academy etc. or something else is required.
Online learning (in its current state) requires lots of motivation and discipline. These are skills learned from tight feedback loops which historically happen in-person. If kids fail to pick this up early, they will be even less inclined to online learning. As a parent of a young kid, I'm very concerned that we're going to learn this lesson after it's far too late.
Honestly it feels like it boils down to the assumption that students will keep paying the same amount of money for a degree with a world famous university's branding. It seems to really be that transactional for senior management.
“ Few reported cases exist addressing the issue of whether the educational institution or the faculty member owns the copyright to teaching materials prepared by a faculty member. All the reported cases that do exist have either held, or stated in dictum, that the copyright to the materials at issue in those cases belonged to the faculty member, at least in the absence of an explicit agreement to the contrary between the institution and the faculty member. Thus, cases have essentially followed the "teacher exception" to the work for hire rule.”
https://digitalcommons.law.byu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?artic...
This article gives a good introduction: Copyright ownership of e-learning and teaching materials: Policy approaches taken by UK universities https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10639-017-9583-4
I will say your view is very common among outsiders. I've heard it so many times from people that think I'm too dumb to notice something so obvious. Unfortunately lecture delivery just isn't a big part of the cost of teaching, and the online format only helps if you phone it in by never changing anything. If you do change something, you have the massive expense of recording the whole lecture all over again.
Absolutely true.
> Lectures have to change over time, both because you can do better with practice and because the material and real world change.
This is obviously going to be true for vocation-focused classes, but am I wrong in thinking that this is going to vary from field to field? Once you nail down your Math 101 lectures, do you really need to change them?
Also, this is not a real argument, but I have seen universities where lectures were given by a professor, and Q&A office hours were provided by a TA. I imagine that some universities are thinking that they can have a professor write a lesson plan and record lectures, and then the class can be run in perpetuity by a team of grad students. (Cue laugh track.)
This is one of the cases where you could (assuming the students don't change much). I teach macroeconomics. So far in my career some of the bigger events have included the bursting of the 90s tech bubble, 9/11, the Great Recession/financial crisis, the Greek debt crisis, Brexit, the election of Trump, and the pandemic. When I started teaching 20 years ago, the profession had settled on talking about managing long-term economic growth and viewed business cycles as being of secondary importance.
If you spend time editing together a pre-recorded video, it can easily triple the amount of work. Even if you go with the pro-style one take, you need to rehearse and have a good plan in place to make such a video.
Sorry I cannot see management believing this at any universities. I think you are mistaken.
Universities are all certainly cutting staff, but this is the current decimation of students and the loss of money, causing this.
Separately, high ranking universities know in class teaching is critical for their survival, it's why they rank high. Without in class teaching they lower themselves to the level of the other universities, they would never move in this direction, especially falsely thinking it takes less staff.
Wish I was my friend!
> Universities are all certainly cutting staff, but this is the current decimation of students and the loss of money, causing this.
Actually the student intake in the UK isn't nearly as bad as the initial modelling predicted - the same modelling according to which universities are currently shedding their staff because of. At least domestic BA numbers. International student MA intakes are more of an issue but unlike with BAs, the government hasn't imposed caps on these so there's all the play for.
> Separately, high ranking universities know in class teaching is critical for their survival, it's why they rank high. Without in class teaching they lower themselves to the level of the other universities, they would never move in this direction, especially falsely thinking it takes less staff.
Alas, it's research output not teaching quality which drives income to universities in the UK.
Online learning doesn't allow for that in the same way, so a teacher dependent on this style of teaching is likely to experience significant discomfort.
Is this really a "Greatest Teaching Technique" though, as the headline suggests? I am highly doubtful. This is more about having control of a classroom, than enabling learning. I find it hard to call this a teaching technique at all.
If you say "Greatest Teaching Technique" to me, I immediately think of the Socratic method. With the understanding that it is more difficult to read body language and physical cues, that still works perfectly great over Zoom.
But, my point is that the article describes teaching more as controlling student behaviour, rather than teaching as communicating knowledge and understanding.
Doesn't seem hard. Socrates himself used the method to teach geometry: http://www.socraticmethod.net/essays/meno_geometry/meno_geom....
Is students have the means to verify that they arrived at the correct answer, and the problems are easy to communicate, all that a teacher really needs to do is to guide the students search, and questions are a great way to do that.
But yeah, the Socratic Method isn't good at all for learning a language. You learn those by speaking, reading, and writing. Not by exploring ideas.
For history it's an interesting thing. A lot of teaching an empirical science is teaching how to ask questions.
- Physical presence - Reading the room, seeing their faces
- Physical space - Less distactions
- Humor
- Diversity and inclusion
These aren't techniques, they're characteristics of the teaching environment, modes of interaction, demographics.
The first two points seem relevant, that certain techniques of interaction that a teacher develops over a career may be dependent on shared physical space, social dynamics, and personal communication, that are unsuitable for (or impossible with) online teaching.
If we take the Socratic method to mean a general approach of "leading students, through questions, to do their own thinking about a specific objective" - I'd agree that there's little to no limitations imposed by the technologies used for online teaching/learning.
The take-away for me is that educators are learning to adapt and perhaps invent teaching techniques that are effective in this new environment of online/virtual shared presence and space.
He doesn't even attempt to say what this might mean about online teaching, other than making clear his assumption that teaching is mostly about dominating the space.
As a teacher I feel way less effective as well.
I do not think there is a technical solution to this. If online teaching becomes the norm I will leave the profession.
Another thing is that we tend to underestimate how much kids learn 'between the lines'. What is acceptable, what is valuable.
Lastly I'm convinced individualised learning is a fallacy. We technocrats like personalisation, but in my opinion that is only good for adults.
I want to recommend books and talks from Katharine Birbalsingh for an entirely contrarian, but very successful take on elevating underprivileged children.
Simply taking the classroom model and trying to perfectly replicate it in Zoom won't work. Of course. But online learning opens up a whole host of new possibilities that in-person learning is equally unable to replicate.
I earned my most recent degree online, from a fully online program, and really appreciated some of the thought they put into creating an online learning experience. One of the key changes was moving toward pre-recorded lectures. This yielded all sorts of fruit. It meant that I, the student, could listen to lectures at a time that worked best for me, rather than being tied to a classroom schedule. Not able to concentrate right now? Fine, take a break and try again later. Morning person? Never have to struggle to stay awake during late afternoon lectures ever again. Evening person? Same for morning lectures. Lecturer's voice dulcet tones and musical prosody make you drowsy, or hard of hearing, or classes not taught in your first language? You, my friend, are going to love the new Transcripts feature.
It also greatly reduced the time we needed to spend in classroom sessions, which, in turn, increased our access to personalized instruction by freeing up space in the instructors' schedules for small group and one-on-one meetings with students.
I, personally, didn't have difficulty focusing on class during class. I don't know that my classmates did, either. My suspicion is that those studies about students not paying attention were looking at typical online classes, which do consist of the traditional "classroom lectures, only on a screen" model. In which case, I am not at all surprised. Traditional classroom lectures tend to be boring as hell. A live classroom environment creating psychological cues that discourage distraction behavior doesn't fix that problem, it just makes it less apparent to the lecturer. Moreover, with asynchronous, recorded lectures, when my attention wanders (as all attentions will), its no big deal, all I have to do is rewind 30 seconds. In the classroom, if the lecturer says something critical while you were zoned out, too bad, you missed it.
The real problem here is that the pandemic has taken teachers who worked under the traditional model, and rudely thrust them into a completely new working environment that requires a radially different approach to the job, and has left them them zero time to adapt. But even a baby you didn't ask for shouldn't be thrown out with the bathwater.
Just saying. I am tired of my Uni (at which I work) trying to convince us that the students are as happy with online courses as with live ones.
A p2p model where students teach other students just below their baseline would be an awesome way to make studying more fullfilling/enjoyable
I think there are problems with he system though, as you can't rely on the teaching capacities of an 11 year old child, even if they are quite gifted in that particular subject matter. I think doing group work with a mix of older and younger children would help a lot though, but it is still probably best if the concepts are first introduced by an adult who has at least some pedagocical training.
Teaching virtually is doable, and still valuable, but it's definitely a degraded experience.
However, I strongly disagree with the comments regarding distraction and focus for online and blended learning environments.
In my field, online is not a distraction per se, but something that is necessary for app development (think StackOverflow and IDE documentation!). It reinforces what I'm demonstrating and lecturing about, and encourages students to research and think outside of the box. For example, I actually expect students to Google topics and documentation while I'm teaching online, and this process is both motivating for students and key to being successful in my field.
I believe those teaching skills will eventually have to move to remote. The teachers who adapt fastest will be the most successful.
Any good examples for great remote teachers (beyond great presentation)?
The slapdash system we cobbled together on the fly while trying to figure out if we were dying doesn't hold up against the decades old, well tested and vetted in class educational experience? It would be problematic if it did, wouldn't it? It would mean we were completely wrong about the best way to educate.
The biggest note I see from this is that maybe it's not a great idea to force children to sit still and "learn" for 8 hours a day. If the only way for that technique to work is to have them physically controllable, something might not be working.
I don't buy it.
I didn't pay attention in class for most of my school time and that was before any of the more modern distractions existed.
To do well in school, you need to:
1. Capture and memorize factoids that will be on the test
This can be done the roundabout way by taking notes, which does help with memory retention. It's however far more efficient to just copy other more diligent people's notes and memorize those.
2. Understand mechanisms and systems
This requires you to work on your own, try things, figure things out, getting error feedback. Schools are notoriously awful at this, with 20+ kids you just can not spend the time to give meaningful advice, to give enough feedback in a timely manner. You send kids home with homework and they get results a day later or worse. The kids that do really well here usually get help from parents/siblings/externals.
Neither of these require teachers to do any classroom work.
Of course, there's the whole social and daycare aspect of schools which can be beneficial or oppressive, depending on the teachers and environment. Let's just not pretend that actual learning needs a classroom environment, or that it's better in classroom environment, because we don't actually know that yet. Classroom teachers talking their book doesn't help.
For 1 you need preproduced material: Wikipedia, Khan academy, Anki cards. Teachers only act as gatekeepers here.
For 2 you need interactive toys like a Logo Turtle or Minecraft. Teachers act as coaches.
I would argue that children would actually learn a lot more social skills by interacting in this "disruptive" and "slacking off" kind of way, especially nowadays where children are otherwise locked up at home by overprotective parents. Those skills are far more valuable than whatever trivia the curriculum is mostly made up of.
I did this a lot and while it was the optimal approach for passing tests, my note taking skills are quite poor today. Though I don't know if taking my own notes would have helped improve that or not.
I agree with all of his points that going online can degrade the experience.
but all of this pre-supposes what it means to teach and what it means to learn.
Some comments mention children, but the OP is a Yale law professor. Seems like esp. higher ed needs to be a little more open minded in their thinking going forward given the circumstances.
> it’s important to acknowledge what online learning misses.
It seems to me that by only describing how a zoom meeting is lacking vs. an in person classroom he's missing what an online learning environment is capable of creating.
A lot of his arguments seem to be centered around grabbing and holding someone's attention in a digital environment, which I also empathize with, but I think some things can also be a symptom of an educational system whose purpose is not always actual learning- i.e., is the purpose of grade school educational, or is it day care for working parents? Is the purpose of yale law school learning about law or is it to serve as a gate keeper in the legal profession? etc.
When the whole reason people are sitting there has not much to do with what you're trying to convey, it's no wonder they have trouble paying attention.
That being said, if students are interested and expectations are aligned, some things that I found that some things were actually improved upon in a digital setting: (specifically I teach at a coding bootcamp)
- one-on-one teaching can feel more intimate and effective, (as in a zoom breakout room) since you are not speaking to that student in the classroom where others can overhear or that you don't also have to speak to the whole class at the same time. Sharing someone's screen feels more like you are right there with them.
- the asynchronous nature of doing things online means that people can come more well prepared vs. having to have everyone in sync in a classroom all the times, in real time.
- it's logistically simpler to not ask 30 ( 50? 100?) people to all gather in the same physical location at the same time. I suppose this is obvious, but when you stop to consider this, physically transporting yourself somewhere else is, at best, tangentially related to learning something.
- also obviously, it's easier to convey certain things on a screen than it is in person speaking / on a white-board. Specifically I mean being able to focus in on a diagram or example. On a projector or on a white board you simply become limited by real estate that you get back on a whole screen.
(edit: formatting)
For me there is so much room to innovate in EduTech!
Why always trying to go back to the past form of tradition instead of being the engine of innovation.
There are plenty of talented people here, that are currently reading HN, so instead of saying please get my physical classmate, ask for change in the cyber world, you should be served well ;)