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> I'm leaning more strongly to "major impact / selection event / paradigm shift" than extinction. I agree. I teach at a large public research university in Jap

> I'm leaning more strongly to "major impact / selection event / paradigm shift" than extinction. I agree. I teach at a large public research university in Japan, and we're near the end of our first semester teaching all of our classes online. It has gone better than many (any?) of us expected. The university's decision in late March that all of our classes would be taught in real time using videoconferencing, with prerecorded videos and other asynchronous methods only as a supplement, seems to have been correct. Live online classes, it turns out, are often just as interactive and engaging as in-person classes. Some teachers even report that their students participate more actively and thoughtfully in discussions online than they do in the classroom. There are still many unresolved issues, of course, including how to conduct tests fairly; how to enable more informal mingling among students; and, perhaps most difficult, how to teach subjects that require physical equipment or in-person interaction, such as laboratory chemistry, nursing and medicine, performing arts, etc. But the fact that many subjects can be taught satisfactorily online upends one of the fundamental assumptions of higher education: that teachers and students need to be in the same place at the same time to have high-quality interactions. If they haven't already, forward-thinking universities will soon start taking advantage of this opportunity to create well-planned, rigorous degree programs open to anyone in the world who is qualified and has a decent Internet connection. Even if the coronavirus crisis ends and people can travel freely again, such programs should still be able to succeed.

cl3misch 6y ago
That is interesting to hear! How large are the classes you are teaching live? Our class has 100+ students and we decided in the beginning of the semester to focus on multiple, shorter (10-25 min) videos both for lecture and tutorial. There are specific live sessions for questions, but the initial presentation of the content happens in async videos. Although participation in the live sessions is smaller than we hoped, we thought we would not be able to handle a large amount of students during live and interactive lectures. Which then also would have lasted the conventional 90 minutes, much too long according to studies on remote teaching. (searching for the source...) How do you handle that? Did it just work? Funnily enough, when my colleagues and me looked at recent polls from the students, most prefer one single long lecture video. Which totally goes against research findings.
- tkgally 6y ago
  > How large are the classes you are teaching live? My own classes are not very large: I am teaching two undergraduate classes with about 17 students each, and one graduate seminar with nine students. The graduate seminar feels closest to an in-person class; it helps that most of the students leave their cameras on and that I have taught most of them before. For undergraduate classes, we have been asked to let the students leave their cameras off (out of privacy considerations, and because some students have metered Internet access). It's frustrating for me not being able to see the students' faces. I've adapted by having them submit questions and comments through an online form, which I then respond to through Zoom. It's less conversational, but the exchanges seem more deliberate and focused. I hope that next semester, if we are still teaching online, we will be able to ask undergraduates to turn on their cameras most of the time. We don't yet have comprehensive data on students' reactions to online classes. That should be available in a few months. A preliminary survey suggests that most, though not all, prefer live online classes to prerecorded lectures, and that a significant minority prefers online lectures to in-person classes. The ability to ask questions more easily in large online classes is one reported advantage for students, as is the convenience of being able to participate from home without having to commute to campus. (My university is in central Tokyo and not many students live near campus; most would normally be commuting by train, often an hour or more.) The biggest complaint we've heard from students—and it's been heard at other universities in Japan, too—is that the students are feeling overwhelmed by the amount of schoolwork. One reason seems to be that teachers are assigning more homework than usual, perhaps as a way of getting more feedback from students. Another may be that the students, because they cannot see how seriously the other students in the class are studying, are working harder than normal out of fear of being outcompeted. Lockdown fatigue is no doubt another factor. As a result, the administration has asked teachers to be less demanding. There's a lot of trial and error going on with online classes, and I'm sure many improvements still need to be made. But considering how inexperienced we were with online education a few months ago and how little time we had to prepare, things are, as I noted above, going much better than expected.
  - jimhefferon 6y ago
    I'm on the EdTech committee at my school and we had something interesting happen about the question of syncronous vs asyncronous (that is, live classes vs recordings). At the end of the semester we gave a version of the usual student eval. Half of the faculty on the committee had taught sync and reported that their student evals thanked them for doing that and said it was much better. The other half of the faculty did async and said their students thanked them for doing what they did. I did async and my students were clear that it was better for them, that they had other classes where they had to lose time at work to attend, etc., and async was so much better. We saw the same effect in the feedback we got from a survey of all faculty, so it is not just the people on the committee. I perceive that it is like on class evals where there is a tendency to get pretty much the same scores on each item, even on an item such as "Returns quizzes promptly" where you can measure whether that is true, because students really only have one thing to say and there is a tendency to just say the same thing on each item. (My speculation that in this case students recognize that their teachers did a lot of work to turn the course on a dime, and students did a lot of work also, and there was an in-this-together sense that they wanted to express.)
rst 6y ago
Unfortunately, universities in the United States have unique problems. In much of the world, higher education is a largely government-supported thing. However, in the US, over the past fifty years or so, even nominally government-run institutions have become increasingly dependent on student fees (primarily tuition, but also lodging fees) to meet their expenses. If students stay away, or even stay remote, the schools may lose so much cash that they're no longer financially viable. (This in an environment where a number of smaller schools were already on the edge -- in Massachusetts, two reasonably reputable private universities, Wheelock and Mount Ida, were recently forced into mergers, and a third, Hampshire College, is on the ropes.) Here's an overview from a few months ago -- but with recent elevated COVID rates in heavily populated states (Florida, Texas, California) calling the wisdom of reopening in doubt, the worst-case scenarios described here are looking a lot more likely then they were in it was written: https://www.brookings.edu/blog/brown-center-chalkboard/2020/04/21/coronavirus-poses-serious-financial-risks-to-us-universities/ https://www.brookings.edu/blog/brown-center-chalkboard/2020/...

cl3misch 6y ago

That is interesting to hear! How large are the classes you are teaching live? Our class has 100+ students and we decided in the beginning of the semester to focus on multiple, shorter (10-25 min) videos both for lecture and tutorial. There are specific live sessions for questions, but the initial presentation of the content happens in async videos. Although participation in the live sessions is smaller than we hoped, we thought we would not be able to handle a large amount of students during live and interactive lectures. Which then also would have lasted the conventional 90 minutes, much too long according to studies on remote teaching. (searching for the source...) How do you handle that? Did it just work? Funnily enough, when my colleagues and me looked at recent polls from the students, most prefer one single long lecture video. Which totally goes against research findings.

tkgally 6y ago
> How large are the classes you are teaching live? My own classes are not very large: I am teaching two undergraduate classes with about 17 students each, and one graduate seminar with nine students. The graduate seminar feels closest to an in-person class; it helps that most of the students leave their cameras on and that I have taught most of them before. For undergraduate classes, we have been asked to let the students leave their cameras off (out of privacy considerations, and because some students have metered Internet access). It's frustrating for me not being able to see the students' faces. I've adapted by having them submit questions and comments through an online form, which I then respond to through Zoom. It's less conversational, but the exchanges seem more deliberate and focused. I hope that next semester, if we are still teaching online, we will be able to ask undergraduates to turn on their cameras most of the time. We don't yet have comprehensive data on students' reactions to online classes. That should be available in a few months. A preliminary survey suggests that most, though not all, prefer live online classes to prerecorded lectures, and that a significant minority prefers online lectures to in-person classes. The ability to ask questions more easily in large online classes is one reported advantage for students, as is the convenience of being able to participate from home without having to commute to campus. (My university is in central Tokyo and not many students live near campus; most would normally be commuting by train, often an hour or more.) The biggest complaint we've heard from students—and it's been heard at other universities in Japan, too—is that the students are feeling overwhelmed by the amount of schoolwork. One reason seems to be that teachers are assigning more homework than usual, perhaps as a way of getting more feedback from students. Another may be that the students, because they cannot see how seriously the other students in the class are studying, are working harder than normal out of fear of being outcompeted. Lockdown fatigue is no doubt another factor. As a result, the administration has asked teachers to be less demanding. There's a lot of trial and error going on with online classes, and I'm sure many improvements still need to be made. But considering how inexperienced we were with online education a few months ago and how little time we had to prepare, things are, as I noted above, going much better than expected.
- jimhefferon 6y ago
  I'm on the EdTech committee at my school and we had something interesting happen about the question of syncronous vs asyncronous (that is, live classes vs recordings). At the end of the semester we gave a version of the usual student eval. Half of the faculty on the committee had taught sync and reported that their student evals thanked them for doing that and said it was much better. The other half of the faculty did async and said their students thanked them for doing what they did. I did async and my students were clear that it was better for them, that they had other classes where they had to lose time at work to attend, etc., and async was so much better. We saw the same effect in the feedback we got from a survey of all faculty, so it is not just the people on the committee. I perceive that it is like on class evals where there is a tendency to get pretty much the same scores on each item, even on an item such as "Returns quizzes promptly" where you can measure whether that is true, because students really only have one thing to say and there is a tendency to just say the same thing on each item. (My speculation that in this case students recognize that their teachers did a lot of work to turn the course on a dime, and students did a lot of work also, and there was an in-this-together sense that they wanted to express.)

rst 6y ago

Unfortunately, universities in the United States have unique problems. In much of the world, higher education is a largely government-supported thing. However, in the US, over the past fifty years or so, even nominally government-run institutions have become increasingly dependent on student fees (primarily tuition, but also lodging fees) to meet their expenses. If students stay away, or even stay remote, the schools may lose so much cash that they're no longer financially viable. (This in an environment where a number of smaller schools were already on the edge -- in Massachusetts, two reasonably reputable private universities, Wheelock and Mount Ida, were recently forced into mergers, and a third, Hampshire College, is on the ropes.) Here's an overview from a few months ago -- but with recent elevated COVID rates in heavily populated states (Florida, Texas, California) calling the wisdom of reopening in doubt, the worst-case scenarios described here are looking a lot more likely then they were in it was written: https://www.brookings.edu/blog/brown-center-chalkboard/2020/04/21/coronavirus-poses-serious-financial-risks-to-us-universities/ https://www.brookings.edu/blog/brown-center-chalkboard/2020/...