I’m guessing that several of you find yourself in a position of having to offer teaching to a mix of students in person and online. Maybe, like me, you have to do that as part of your university’s delivery model; maybe you’re just a nice person trying to help students cope with the shifting sands of Covid restrictions.
Whatever your reason, I’m also going to assume you find it difficult to make those two groups interact seamlessly.
Certainly, if you’ve ever tried to open up a Zoom call while in class and get everyone to participate on a level footing, you’ll know it doesn’t work.
For that reason, I’ve spent a lot of time during the summer creating parallel tracks for my classes: shared pre-recording video lectures for all, then separate activities for those in-class and those online.
But it’s not been as simple as that.
The online students – a minority at present – want to have as much interaction as they can. So I’ve been trying some different things.
Firstly, I’ve been broadcasting most of my in-class sessions on Zoom, so the onliners can listen into the discussion. I say they can ask questions on the chat, but mostly it’s been one-way traffic. Where we’ve had activities, they often form their own group to try it out, aided by the need for the in-classers to use Teams to build joint documents.
Secondly, I’ve tried to ensure feedback to online students makes connections across all content, so any useful insights from class get shared with everyone. I record short (5 min) clips of video and post to our VLE each week, so there’s a bit more character to it than just some bullet-points.
Thirdly, my negotiation course is running a big, semester-long joint activity online. I’ve got all the students enrolled on the course to create and run a renegotiation of the WHO’s founding treaty, using Teams as a common platform and giving them a semi-structured reason to be in constant contact. That’s still quite early on, but they seem to be working pretty well, with the onliners all mixed up with inclassers within groups. I’ll write this up later in the semester.
Finally, I’ve been trying some other ways to make connections.
Last week I got my inclassers to produce a couple of collaborative documents; one each for the Trump and Biden campaigns about how to tackle a disputed vote in Ohio. Within class it was a good way for them to learn about how to prepare for interacting with others: the class was split in half, prepped one document, then swapped over to rework the other one.
I then sent the documents to the onliners, to add into their activity, relating to Trump-Senate interactions in the case of a disputed vote nationwide. They’d already written a first draft, but then were asked to revisit it in the light of the inclassers’ work.
This seemed to work pretty well, in terms of moving text through several stages and getting some appreciation of what others are doing.*
Of course, that was a one-off, and still I worry about keeping the links clear between the two tracks as we continue through the autumn.
But that might be the general take-home from all this: if we keep chipping away at it, maybe we’ll find something that works better. And that’s a pretty good ambition to have.
*- This reminds me of an idea I discussed some years ago about a shared chain of simulations: we never got that off the ground, but maybe we should come back to it some time soon.