Picture the setting: instead of the regular face to face lecture of 120 students, there are 40 in front of you and the other 80 are remote. How can a lecturer operate under such conditions, satisfying both contexts at the same time?
Well, each student is connected to Zoom, face to face students either through a laptop or a phone, and remote students similarly so. The face to face students have a choice – they can watch and hear the lecturer as normal, or watch and listen through the screen, as the remote student would have to do. If slides are presented, then the face to face student likely has an advantage as they can see the lecturer full size and the content on a larger screen, whereas the remote student sees only a thumbnail of the lecturer in the corner of the presentation.
So, what are some of the advantages of having face to face students being connected via Zoom too – why not just watch and listen as normal?
100% participation in formative assessment – if everyone has a device then you can assess their understanding at stages of the lecture using polls and quizzes. Beginning each lecture with a retrieval quiz is highly beneficial as it brings back into the minds of your students key ideas from past lectures that you know they need to know – helping them retrieve such content actually helps you too as new concepts will be better understood if students can automatically bring past ‘connected’ ideas into their thinking without taxing the working memory. Half way through a lecture is another good time to formatively check for understanding.
Generally asking lots of questions in a lecture is still good practice, but getting everyone involved is near impossible in a regular lecture context – now technology affords this. Getting more data helps you know if what you’re teaching is being understood.
Interactions with peers – when appropriate, students can seek clarification from a peer without disturbing the rest of the lecture room. Of course, this should only be encouraged when there is space in the lecture so students aren’t missing key ideas if talking to a peer. You can manage the chat functions to be open to all or so that students can only message you during content delivery. See here for more Zoom engagement advice.
Interactions with the lecturer – potentially, shy students in the lecture theatre can now ask a question to the lecturer, anonymously if they like, via the chat in Zoom. For some, the pressure of not wanting to appear silly by asking a question is huge, and often such students won’t ask, and then move onto the next section of the lesson without clarity on what was just taught. Now everyone can be heard.
Group work in a lecture – breakout rooms facilitate the option of having students work together to solve problems. At stages in the lecture when chunking is necessary to secure students’ attention, an option may be for students to spend some time to practise what has just been delivered, consider relevant analogies to help strengthen understanding, or collaborate on creative solutions to new problems. Addressing misconceptions or consolidation through practice is probably best done in pairs, whereas groups of 3-5 may be more suited to discussing ideas and analogies rather than practice.
Black screens can be good – the wonderful Dr David Wilson from Adelaide University provided some valuable insight in this area. There may be several legitimate reasons why a student decides to turn their video off. Of course, the best communicators make their expectations explicit and clear from the beginning, and help students with legitimate screen issues arrive at alternative ways to engage in the lecture, but sometimes a student will turn their screen off because it’s easier to engage passively. We all know that active learning is better than passive learning, but in a large lecture theatre, it can be hard to determine who is and who isn’t active, and time consuming trying to address an individual who pretends not to hear you. Now, the black screen at least gives you a chance at instantly seeing who the passive student is and a chance at addressing their decision. If you’ve made it clear that you prefer the screen on, and that those who can’t should communicate why privately to you, then if the student simply still refuses to engage when addressed, it’s easy to write down the Zoom name or student number and address it later with a friendly check-in to see if there is anything you can do to help. If the student has used a fake name, well that’s a fair bit harder, but you’d hope that having established high expectations, continually developed the metacognitive abilities of your students, and done so in a really friendly demeanour, then such a student would be in the minority.
Logistical considerations that may be deemed as disadvantages – it may seem daunting to get all the technology working to facilitate such a learning environment, but it is easier than you might think
| ISSUE | SOLUTION |
| Audio feedback from multiple zooms in the lecture theatre | Students would need to be on mute unless asked a question |
| Teacher’s zoom camera – how can it be placed to emulate a real life view? | Placed so it captures the teacher’s whole body and gesturing as they move around (movement like in a normal lecture). This means that the camera will be at distance and not so you can only see the person’s head. It may require some configuring with the existing setup so that your camera connects to the console displaying your slides or doc camera, but quite often the lecturer will be distant from the console and using a clicker to move through slides. |
| Teacher’s microphone – how would the distanced camera pick up the lecturer’s voice? | Lots of lecture rooms have a microphone that is pinned to the lecturer and operates via bluetooth. A room microphone would pose problems of feedback, but if that is the only option, then face to face zoom participants must always have their mic muted and questions and answers asked in house would need to be repeated by the lecturer for the sake of the remote students – or questions are asked via zoom chat. This is actually not a bad outcome anyway as repeating the question ensures a) everyone heard it, and b) a longer processing time to engage with it. |
| Being able to produce worked examples and use a whiteboard to demonstrate problem solving | use a tablet as the screen share in Zoom where you can draw/write and show your workings. Alternatively, you can use your phone as the screen share and position/suspend it above your working area. |
| Monitoring the chat effectively | I would dedicate a section of the lecture where you stop to check for questions. This is surely just good practice anyway. |
Previously perhaps the promotion of such a learning environment may have been frowned upon as a threat to lectures going ahead at all – why would we need to have a live lecture when it can be watched online, at one’s own convenience. Well, it would seem that the average cohort of lecture audience has always contained a mix of those who like and benefit from the in-person ‘live’ experience and those who prefer the remote alternative. Mixed-mode lectures offer the best of both worlds.
I’m Paul Moss. I’m a learning designer at the University of Adelaide. Follow me on Twitter @edmerger
LEARNING DESIGN by Paul G Moss 