Actual studying in a digital classroom is troublesome

Enlarge /. A virtual classroom setup.

Chris Lee

"Distance learning is shit. It's a stroke of luck and it's not the future of education."

This is how my wife, a high school English teacher with many years of experience, spoke. And she is right. I teach at a university and in view of COVID-19 we also switched to virtual lessons. Even before the current crisis, I made extensive use of digital tools in the classroom. However, virtual instruction is a poor substitute for actual personal instruction. Let me take you on a tour of a future that we should all avoid. (However, it's not all doom and darkness; we've also discovered some hidden gems.)

The problem is that teaching is an intimate activity: students give the teacher a degree of control and trust that this person will help them master a new topic. It doesn't matter how big the class is, this intimacy remains unchanged for the teacher. The lessons are personal. Yes, from the student's perspective, an individual lesson is more personal than a lecture for 500 students. However, anonymity and security in large classes does not mean that teachers do not see and change their approach through instant feedback from their classes.

Teaching is an achievement. Everything that comes between the teacher and the student reduces the connection between the two. In this sense, all forms of technology affect the intimacy of teaching and consequently impair performance. The counterpoint is that technology, including the humble whiteboard, is trying to balance the limits of being human, and that's often a worthwhile effort.

Set your permissions

Video technology, virtual whiteboards and everything else simply do not allow a connection. And if you put it at such a short notice, you can imagine the chaos. For example, my daughter receives virtual lessons through Google Meets, but the meeting permissions are never properly set (I'm not sure Google Meets has the flexibility at all). Children can mute the teacher for everyone without the teacher noticing. They can choose their own nicknames – with predictable results – and throw each other out of the class. In other words, class management has a number of different problems that require different skills and, above all, planning.

I can also see and hear the teachers – I listened – who are struggling with the lack of instant feedback. How do you know if the students understand what you just said? How do you know they are still in the room? Short answer: The teacher often doesn't know.

Donna, my wife, uses Microsoft Teams, which I am also more familiar with. In order for the lesson to really work, it found that you need very strict rules of conduct – all microphones are muted until requested. Most cameras are generally turned off to keep bandwidth under control. It sets the digital permissions for each meeting so that the potential for disruptions is minimized. She has set up a label: Questions go into the chat, mute only by invitation. If she misses a question, you can pause.

Shortly after class started, Donna received an email from her school: "We strongly advise you not to turn on your camera." The school administrators were concerned that their teachers in Bestiality: A Beginner & # 39; s Guide could not be stars, and I cannot say that I blame them. The other side of the coin, however, is that teaching without video makes the connection between teacher and student even worse. Donna decided to leave her camera on, damn the consequences. The feedback: The students also appreciate this bad connection.

Interestingly, her students behaved very well. They clearly don't like the environment, but they make the best of it.

Digital silver stripe

It wasn't all bad either. The unexpected advantage was the team environment. Teams offers a classroom-specific setup with a notebook based on OneNote. The notebook has an area for teaching materials that is read-only for students. Donna puts all of the teaching materials there. There is a collaborative area where everyone can play. Common tasks can be done there.

OneNote also has individual student notebooks that the teacher can see and comment on. Donna can see progress and provide instant feedback. She found that students start work faster than in a real classroom. In fact, she is so impressed with the facility that she thinks about forming classroom teams in the future – provided that teams are still available in her school for the next school year.

Teams also offer methods for digitally creating, executing, and submitting tasks. Neither I nor Donna have had the opportunity to use it yet, but it looks at least as flexible as dedicated (and expensive) electronic learning environments (* cough * blackboard * cough *). I will definitely use it in the future.

Looking for the perfect board

My own experiences were of course different. First, I'm teaching subjects that contain equations, and I really need to be able to draw diagrams. I immediately bought an iPad with a pencil. Yes, other solutions are available – our department has all equipped them with Wacom tablets – but I have a lot of software licenses for iPad software and experience with the device. It was worth the extra cost.

I spent three or four days examining whiteboard solutions. For example, OneNote allows you to draw notes that appear later in the classroom notebook, and the usage options were quite limited. Microsoft also has its own whiteboard. I was very excited to discover that I could draw rainbow colored unicorns and less excited to discover that what I was drawing was not what was being broadcast. I was downright depressed when I opened the functional cabinet and found it empty. In the end I bought a subscription to Explain Everything. Explaining everything allows me to send my whiteboard (I'm using it in blackboard mode) to the students, but they don't have access to the board itself.

Teams can be set to record the entire lesson, which means that my smiling face is captured along with the blackboard. The recording can then be streamed directly from the class chat, which is very nice.

Teams also handle multiple devices remarkably well by intelligently muting one device and treating one as an assistant to the other. However, this seamless control also misleads you. In one of my lessons, the teams caught the wrong screen: my smiling face explained things that were not visible.

A very poorly given lesson on why an EM drive cannot work. It also shows some of the limitations of using the Explain Everything app on an iPad alone. I particularly like the perfect synchronization of audio and video.

Move slowly and still break things

With "Explain everything" you can also share a board independently as a view or share it, so that the students can access the material regardless of the team environment. In addition, you can easily add media to the board. This includes images, video, audio. Whatever you choose, Explain Everything puts it on the board.

Enlarge /. An eye diagram that is very poorly explained.

Chris Lee

Through the combination of "explain everything with teams" I found that the chalk and conversation style classes went reasonably well. I had to keep an eye on the chat to make sure I answered questions (not easy) and be reminded to slow down – I usually use the confusion on the faces of the students as a reminder. The board seemed to freeze on the broadcast screen a few times, but not on my iPad. This is one of my biggest fears of chalk and speech: if it goes wrong, how would you know and how would you fix it?

Digital technologies also collide. I use an environment called NearPod to create self-study lessons. Usually the students work through the material in class and I go around to see how things go. I discuss the material with individuals, have class-wide discussions, and give mini-explanations. This turns out to be almost impossible in a virtual class. I can't see what the students are doing. Of course, I can look at the NearPod report, but it's not the same thing. Instead, every feedback must be initiated by the student. It was impossible for me to assess how the lessons went.

Similarly, we run hands-on courses on teams. Aside from the obvious issues – I can't look around their setup to make debugging easier for them – even screen sharing has strange issues. I found it really difficult to show the students what needed to be changed in their code (the students learn LabView, a graphical coding environment). Once you have control over a student's screen, the accuracy is low and the delay too long to point and click on tiny lines or indicate exactly what needs to be changed. In a word, it was terrible.

No place for people

Virtual lessons are surprisingly energy-saving. If you do your work properly in class, there will be positive feedback. You give a lot of energy, but you also get a lot back from the students. In a virtual environment, it doesn't matter how much you give, you get nothing back. Even the silence – you have to sit at your computer for a few hours to give the lessons – devours your energy and mood. There is no positive attitude to this: removing the most pleasant part of the lesson makes it a terrible job.

Things go terribly wrong for the students too, especially for the shy students. These are students who don't ask for help. I pick them up in class. I help them and they grow out of their bowls. It's all gone now.

What is the verdict? My youngest, who is accused of driving a body under the influence of hormones, reacted about as positively as you might expect: "I damn hate it again." My students are also quite open to their opinions. I also loathe the virtual aspect. We all accept the need under the circumstances, but I expect students' forgiveness will decrease exponentially. On a positive note, the tools I discovered may continue to be used as a complement to personal instruction for many years to come.