10 ms·

The Greatest Teaching Techniques Don't Compute over Zoom

133 points by hyperluz 6y ago

dehrmann 6y ago
I agree that learning over a video call is no substitute for in-person instruction, but I wouldn't give too much praise to the way we currently teach. Different people have different learning styles, and curriculum is rarely designed for that. I think teaching others does more for mastery than standard studying, but it rarely finds its way into classrooms in a meaningful way. Universities are even worse. Professors often have no interest in teaching. Even when they have an interest, the lecture format seriously sells education short. Compare a how high school seniors are taught vs. college freshmen; they're pretty different, but the kids are almost the same; I'd bet money that the college instruction is less effective. I guess a video call is just college instruction on steroids. Sink or swim--it's all on you.
Peritract 6y ago
Teaching online is like flying blind; you have so much less information than you do in person, and can't read body language, get an immediate overview, check in on students in the thousand tiny ways that come without thinking in person. Teaching virtually is doable, and still valuable, but it's definitely a degraded experience.
acmecorps 6y ago
I think we all know that this is true, that online courses have subpar experience compared to physically being in the classrooms especially with younger kids. The question is, how can we make an online classroom experience be as good as it can get and also scales up?
- pfortuny 6y ago
  Maybe we can just accept that physical presence is different from virtual one and that it is impossible to make the latter "as good as" the former. 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.
- heisenzombie 6y ago
  Does “scaling up” have to be part of it? Maybe teaching is better done with small groups, and being online doesn’t change that. Could the time-shifting and decentralisation of online learning reduce class sizes instead of increasing them?
  - agustif 6y ago
    You could certainly scale-up the product/solution and at the same time, try to optimize/reduce the number of students per teacher. A p2p model where students teach other students just below their baseline would be an awesome way to make studying more fullfilling/enjoyable
    - tsimionescu 6y ago
      For what it's worth, that used to be a very common model of teaching, especially in early school (and it still is pretty common at university level, with TAs). It would be common for fourth-graders to teach first graders, as I understand it, especially in rural schools where there were very few teachers available. 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.
- polytely 6y ago
  Probably lessons in VR Chat but the seems kind of expensive.
  - Robotbeat 6y ago
    A $400 Oculus Quest is cheaper than almost any laptop I can find. (Can pair a Bluetooth keyboard, too.)
- qznc 6y ago
  A "classroom" is already wrong. We want a "learning" experience and a "socializing" experience.
helsinkiandrew 6y ago
My 14 year old son, didn't take to online learning at all well (we're in Finland - the school already used google classroom and a lot of online technologies and had all the resources and training they needed). It seemed to be the lack of attention both ways - the teacher can't really see how well the students are understanding the information and the students are perhaps taking less in (maybe the youtube/snapchat use has dulled their perception of video lessons) and are less inclined to ask for help. 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.
- dan_quixote 6y ago
  Unless we solve this early, the problem you describe could be terrifically self-perpetuating. 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.
lvturner 6y ago
I think back to number of classes I slept through in high school and have to wonder if the problem is strictly confined to online teaching...
helixhelix 6y ago
On the flipside, this serves as a demonstration for what is good teaching practice. The classes that suspiciously see no change go to show you can't scribble on a whiteboard and call it a day.
huffmsa 6y ago
I think it's a bit disingenuous to call the rushed switch to online learning during a pandemic a failed or sub-par experiment, as I've seen in the WSJ. 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.
secfirstmd 6y ago
So I've taught a few thousand activists/journalists in security over the years in person and a couple of hundred over remote webinars. I've also built online self paced courses. My takeaway is that the biggest mistake educators make (and I was guilty of this at early stages) is trying to directly shift things like lessons plans from the physical to the online world. One way lecture style stuff which is kind of outdated (or occasionally just lazy) for many use cases in a physical classroom really fails for a lot of stuff when put online. 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.
- maitredusoi 6y ago
  >I felt at times it shifted to require more of a Producer mentality than purely an Educator one. Thanks for sharing that.
- red_admiral 6y ago
  Group work has its advantages, but possibly my sample is biased in a different direction than yours - I've always found groups a terrible way to teach programming, at least to complete beginners. Once they have the basics, then group work starts to work a bit better.
nanna 6y ago
The working model of management in at least certain high ranking UK universities is that it takes less time to run an online course than an in-person one, while maintaining the same standards. It's a convenient justification, if one not publicly made, for shrinking the industry's labour pool. So this year not only do many university teachers find themselves fighting the uphill battle of teaching online (or 'mixed', both online and in person), but they do so with fewer hands ready to help out. I despair.
- secfirstmd 6y ago
  That's ridiculous, I would say in terms of preparation and creation an online course is probably nearly double the time of a physical one at a minimum.
  - say_it_as_it_is 6y ago
    If that is the case, the school breaks even on effort after running the program twice and "profits" thereafter. The program can also theoretically be shared with the rest of the world.
    - willj 6y ago
      That assumes that the effort can all be recorded. It is more likely that a lot of the extra time goes into answering student questions in an online forum and adjusting content on the fly based on students’ interests and/or confusion.
      - nanna 6y ago
        Totally. It also assumes that students will pay the UK's vast fees for a course made up entirely of non-interactive video content. And that teachers will grant the university the right to redistribute their videos, which is their IP. 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.
gridlockd 6y ago
"I'm a classroom teacher and I'm totally not obsolete, here are talking points on effective teaching methods, which only a person like me can perform!" 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.
- qznc 6y ago
  Fully agree. 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.
- kilroy_jones 6y ago
  A teacher's job, if they're doing it right, is not to provide continual feedback to 20+ kids, but to create a space which focuses them on learning a particular skill or achieving a particular goal. Kids learn best when working with other kids, usually by modeling one another and taking the best bits as they go. It's continual exploration with an expert on hand to help when they get stuck or see some basic skills training.
  - rgblambda 6y ago
maitredusoi 6y ago
I can agree that Zoom is not the best format for classes, but that doesn't mean classes can't be online and working perfectly. 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 ;)
- kilroy_jones 6y ago
  The article isn't saying that classes can't be online, just that the medium doesn't work as well when employing certain teaching techniques.
- rimliu 6y ago
  Yes, articles like this are always full of comments denouncing the current education system and declaring, how much innovation there can be. One thing I am sure about those making these comments that they never ever had any teaching experience. It is easy to "innovate" when you have no idea about the realities and restrictions of the domain you are "innovating".
awongh 6y ago
I've been teaching in person and had to transition online during COVID-19. 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)
laurieg 6y ago
I've been teaching classes online since March. Honestly, even at the best of times it feels like teaching a brick wall. 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. [1] https://miro.com/ https://miro.com/
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- kkylin 6y ago
  Re cameras, mine is the opposite: a colleague in a different department was told one cannot require that cameras be one. Most students do not volunteer to turn them on, and very few leave their microphones on. No feedback this way either.
- dhimes 6y ago
  I had to teach online during a weather emergency decades ago(back when you used powerpoint and a RealPlayer product to make movies). No live lectures though- all we had was dial-up so it was all asynchronous. 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.
learnstats2 6y ago
The author presents a model of learning where the teacher dominates the physical classroom (and, by implication, the students are submissive): he says this explicitly when talking about a "dominating professor". 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.
- pavel_lishin 6y ago
  I don't think the Socratic Method is universally applicable. I'm not sure how one would use it to effectively teach Spanish, or history, or geometry.
  - learnstats2 6y ago
    I disagree. But, my point is that the article describes teaching more as controlling student behaviour, rather than teaching as communicating knowledge and understanding.
  - jbullock35 6y ago
    > I don't think the Socratic Method is universally applicable. I'm not sure how one would use it to effectively teach Spanish, or history, or geometry. Doesn't seem hard. Socrates himself used the method to teach geometry: http://www.socraticmethod.net/essays/meno_geometry/meno_geometry.html http://www.socraticmethod.net/essays/meno_geometry/meno_geom....
  - marcosdumay 6y ago
    It is very obviously a great fit for any kind of mathematics. 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.
miki123211 6y ago
> let me say a word about diversity and inclusion. 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.
- dorkwood 6y ago
  You touched on an important benefit to working from home that I hadn't really thought about until now, which is that the quiet people at my workplace are now able to be heard much more easily. 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.
- nanna 6y ago
  This is really interesting. What's been your experience of platforms like Zoom and MS Teams for your learning - are they built to afford genuine accessibility?
  - miki123211 6y ago
    Zoom is excellent in that regard. They're doing an amazing job at accessibility. There's so much hate towards them, but, if accessibility is concerned, there's no better option. Google Meet is not that bad either. Haven't had much experience with MS Teams, but sorta kinda usable is what people are saying. Skype works pretty great. Discord is... kind of okay on pc, horrible on iOS, though that's improving very quickly.
jasoneckert 6y ago
As a college educator for 22 years in technology/compsci, I definitely agree with many of the early points in this article surrounding the benefits of the physical classroom. 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.
- neap24 6y ago
  We do High School CompSci without the internet (for our intro course). I do see the internet as a distraction at this level. Forcing young students to think through the logic of a problem and come up with their own solution (no matter how crazy or inefficient it is) has a lot of downstream critical thinking benefits.
codingdave 6y ago
While I agree that classroom teaching has advantages, and am not trying to argue the points from the article... online learning is not limited to just what happens on video calls. That would be like saying that daily standup meetings are not the best environment to code in. Of course not. That isn't the point. They are about giving new information and coordinating, then letting go off to do their work. Online learning is the same - give info, coordinate, then students go off and do their work. It cannot be compared directly to 6 hours in a classroom because they are fundamentally different methods of working. They both have pros and cons.
darkerside 6y ago
This is an odd opinion piece to have made it to HN front page. It's essentially a collection of unsubstantiated claims that would likely have no impact to policy even if they were demonstrably true because the driving factor is human safety and not efficacy or ease of teaching. 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.
- accurrent 6y ago
  I spent the last semester teaching online. As a teacher it was not as fun. Also its a lot harder because you have to always be prepared for technical issues. What I found was that small class sizes are key. Additionally multiple monitors is a huge aid when teaching online.
  - alchemism 6y ago
    I see the challenge is that in addition to traditional methods of effective pedagogy, a teacher for today must also be adept at running a broadcast studio in order to be effective.
- kkylin 6y ago
  I teach mathematics at a large R1 state university. His comments echo my experience. Online is really different, both for the instructor AND for the student. Most instructors don't know how to teach online, and most students (even very good ones) don't know how to learn online. - 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.
raarts 6y ago
I teach in college. In my opinion physical presence beats online teaching hands down for all but a few use cases. In my experience the last three months a minority of students thrive by online teaching, another (slightly bigger) minority stumbles and falls, and the rest struggles. 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.
- aurizon 6y ago
  The main problem with online is the mental agility of the student - smartness. Some are auto didactic - capable of self teaching. Some are not, we can not all be an Archimedes or an Isaac Newton. Online teaching needs to develop a high degree of parallelism. Let us say they break the topic down to a large number of short modules. Each one needs to be shown and explained and then the uptake tested. If student fails test 1, he needs to be taken through a different module on the same topic, explained and uptake tested. Repeat until the parallels are exhausted and the fails assessed to determine the composition of the way the student fails. Once assessed, the student needs to enter a new set of modules with greater detail in the explanatory detail. This will need an exhaustive degree of preparation, but it needs to be done. Once done on all topics you will have a huge massively parallel data base that is capable of teaching a wide range of people. On route, one needs to assess all manner of supportive skills - keyboarding - is that student capable of reading and entering the responses the program will demand of him? If not, that student needs some preparatory modules to deal with all the test and numeracy issues he faces. In human teaching, this is done via very personally demanding instruction in person. The program needs to be able to rapidly select from all the modules in it's repertoire. Ideally, such a system can handle all the way from a child to a graduate student. Assessing all the way and presenting and reviewing, remoduling etc all the way. Students vary widely, some are highly intelligent (but as yet are untaught), some are not so smart. AN ideal system will also test for what I call 'physical IQ' - the capacity for detailed physical tasks, such as fencing or basketball or any sport. They may be brilliant at physical tasks, not so good at physics or programming. Modern computers are capable of this. It is a demanding task to program them, but once done, it can be deployed millions of times amond millions of students. I hesitate to call it an 'AI', it is just a capable parallel high speed machine.
mumblemumble 6y ago
I get the impression that the author needs to think a bit further outside the box. 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.
Androider 6y ago
Just like shoehorning traditional office work into a remote setting doesn't work, you just end up with various forms of online butt-in-seat monitoring while losing all the benefits of asynchronicity, perhaps remote learning needs to be fundamentally rethought for the new medium. What would a remote-first learning experience look like? Probably more like a Khan Academy course than a real-time lecture, with the student-teacher time dedicated 100% to helping and interacting with students instead of going through new material.
tjrider 6y ago
Sadly I haven't had many teachers as described in this article in my university career. 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)?
gnufx 6y ago
I don't teach, but I wonder why people use Zoom and not BigBlueButton, which at least was made for the job. It also presumably doesn't have whatever the privacy implications are with Zoom that students have to accept.
javier123454321 6y ago
I think this is true, and i agree. However, institutions of (higher) learning have transformed into giant scams and money sucking administrative monsters, whose function is gatekeeping rather than education. As a response to this trend, online education is an excellent antidote for a fraction of the cost.

133 points by hyperluz 6y ago

I agree that learning over a video call is no substitute for in-person instruction, but I wouldn't give too much praise to the way we currently teach. Different people have different learning styles, and curriculum is rarely designed for that. I think teaching others does more for mastery than standard studying, but it rarely finds its way into classrooms in a meaningful way. Universities are even worse. Professors often have no interest in teaching. Even when they have an interest, the lecture format seriously sells education short. Compare a how high school seniors are taught vs. college freshmen; they're pretty different, but the kids are almost the same; I'd bet money that the college instruction is less effective. I guess a video call is just college instruction on steroids. Sink or swim--it's all on you.

Peritract 6y ago

Teaching online is like flying blind; you have so much less information than you do in person, and can't read body language, get an immediate overview, check in on students in the thousand tiny ways that come without thinking in person. Teaching virtually is doable, and still valuable, but it's definitely a degraded experience.

acmecorps 6y ago

I think we all know that this is true, that online courses have subpar experience compared to physically being in the classrooms especially with younger kids. The question is, how can we make an online classroom experience be as good as it can get and also scales up?

pfortuny 6y ago
Maybe we can just accept that physical presence is different from virtual one and that it is impossible to make the latter "as good as" the former. 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.
heisenzombie 6y ago
Does “scaling up” have to be part of it? Maybe teaching is better done with small groups, and being online doesn’t change that. Could the time-shifting and decentralisation of online learning reduce class sizes instead of increasing them?
- agustif 6y ago
  You could certainly scale-up the product/solution and at the same time, try to optimize/reduce the number of students per teacher. A p2p model where students teach other students just below their baseline would be an awesome way to make studying more fullfilling/enjoyable
  - tsimionescu 6y ago
    For what it's worth, that used to be a very common model of teaching, especially in early school (and it still is pretty common at university level, with TAs). It would be common for fourth-graders to teach first graders, as I understand it, especially in rural schools where there were very few teachers available. 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.
polytely 6y ago
Probably lessons in VR Chat but the seems kind of expensive.
- Robotbeat 6y ago
  A $400 Oculus Quest is cheaper than almost any laptop I can find. (Can pair a Bluetooth keyboard, too.)
qznc 6y ago
A "classroom" is already wrong. We want a "learning" experience and a "socializing" experience.

helsinkiandrew 6y ago

My 14 year old son, didn't take to online learning at all well (we're in Finland - the school already used google classroom and a lot of online technologies and had all the resources and training they needed). It seemed to be the lack of attention both ways - the teacher can't really see how well the students are understanding the information and the students are perhaps taking less in (maybe the youtube/snapchat use has dulled their perception of video lessons) and are less inclined to ask for help. 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.

dan_quixote 6y ago
Unless we solve this early, the problem you describe could be terrifically self-perpetuating. 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.

lvturner 6y ago

I think back to number of classes I slept through in high school and have to wonder if the problem is strictly confined to online teaching...

helixhelix 6y ago

On the flipside, this serves as a demonstration for what is good teaching practice. The classes that suspiciously see no change go to show you can't scribble on a whiteboard and call it a day.

huffmsa 6y ago

I think it's a bit disingenuous to call the rushed switch to online learning during a pandemic a failed or sub-par experiment, as I've seen in the WSJ. 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.

secfirstmd 6y ago

So I've taught a few thousand activists/journalists in security over the years in person and a couple of hundred over remote webinars. I've also built online self paced courses. My takeaway is that the biggest mistake educators make (and I was guilty of this at early stages) is trying to directly shift things like lessons plans from the physical to the online world. One way lecture style stuff which is kind of outdated (or occasionally just lazy) for many use cases in a physical classroom really fails for a lot of stuff when put online. 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.

maitredusoi 6y ago
>I felt at times it shifted to require more of a Producer mentality than purely an Educator one. Thanks for sharing that.
red_admiral 6y ago
Group work has its advantages, but possibly my sample is biased in a different direction than yours - I've always found groups a terrible way to teach programming, at least to complete beginners. Once they have the basics, then group work starts to work a bit better.

nanna 6y ago

The working model of management in at least certain high ranking UK universities is that it takes less time to run an online course than an in-person one, while maintaining the same standards. It's a convenient justification, if one not publicly made, for shrinking the industry's labour pool. So this year not only do many university teachers find themselves fighting the uphill battle of teaching online (or 'mixed', both online and in person), but they do so with fewer hands ready to help out. I despair.

secfirstmd 6y ago
That's ridiculous, I would say in terms of preparation and creation an online course is probably nearly double the time of a physical one at a minimum.
- say_it_as_it_is 6y ago
  If that is the case, the school breaks even on effort after running the program twice and "profits" thereafter. The program can also theoretically be shared with the rest of the world.
  - willj 6y ago
    That assumes that the effort can all be recorded. It is more likely that a lot of the extra time goes into answering student questions in an online forum and adjusting content on the fly based on students’ interests and/or confusion.
    - nanna 6y ago
      Totally. It also assumes that students will pay the UK's vast fees for a course made up entirely of non-interactive video content. And that teachers will grant the university the right to redistribute their videos, which is their IP. 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.

gridlockd 6y ago

"I'm a classroom teacher and I'm totally not obsolete, here are talking points on effective teaching methods, which only a person like me can perform!" 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.

qznc 6y ago
Fully agree. 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.
kilroy_jones 6y ago
A teacher's job, if they're doing it right, is not to provide continual feedback to 20+ kids, but to create a space which focuses them on learning a particular skill or achieving a particular goal. Kids learn best when working with other kids, usually by modeling one another and taking the best bits as they go. It's continual exploration with an expert on hand to help when they get stuck or see some basic skills training.
- rgblambda 6y ago

maitredusoi 6y ago

I can agree that Zoom is not the best format for classes, but that doesn't mean classes can't be online and working perfectly. 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 ;)

kilroy_jones 6y ago
The article isn't saying that classes can't be online, just that the medium doesn't work as well when employing certain teaching techniques.
rimliu 6y ago
Yes, articles like this are always full of comments denouncing the current education system and declaring, how much innovation there can be. One thing I am sure about those making these comments that they never ever had any teaching experience. It is easy to "innovate" when you have no idea about the realities and restrictions of the domain you are "innovating".

awongh 6y ago

I've been teaching in person and had to transition online during COVID-19. 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)

laurieg 6y ago

I've been teaching classes online since March. Honestly, even at the best of times it feels like teaching a brick wall. 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. [1] https://miro.com/ https://miro.com/

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
kkylin 6y ago
Re cameras, mine is the opposite: a colleague in a different department was told one cannot require that cameras be one. Most students do not volunteer to turn them on, and very few leave their microphones on. No feedback this way either.
dhimes 6y ago
I had to teach online during a weather emergency decades ago(back when you used powerpoint and a RealPlayer product to make movies). No live lectures though- all we had was dial-up so it was all asynchronous. 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.

learnstats2 6y ago

The author presents a model of learning where the teacher dominates the physical classroom (and, by implication, the students are submissive): he says this explicitly when talking about a "dominating professor". 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.

pavel_lishin 6y ago
I don't think the Socratic Method is universally applicable. I'm not sure how one would use it to effectively teach Spanish, or history, or geometry.
- learnstats2 6y ago
  I disagree. But, my point is that the article describes teaching more as controlling student behaviour, rather than teaching as communicating knowledge and understanding.
- jbullock35 6y ago
  > I don't think the Socratic Method is universally applicable. I'm not sure how one would use it to effectively teach Spanish, or history, or geometry. Doesn't seem hard. Socrates himself used the method to teach geometry: http://www.socraticmethod.net/essays/meno_geometry/meno_geometry.html http://www.socraticmethod.net/essays/meno_geometry/meno_geom....
- marcosdumay 6y ago
  It is very obviously a great fit for any kind of mathematics. 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.

miki123211 6y ago

> let me say a word about diversity and inclusion. 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.

dorkwood 6y ago
You touched on an important benefit to working from home that I hadn't really thought about until now, which is that the quiet people at my workplace are now able to be heard much more easily. 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.
nanna 6y ago
This is really interesting. What's been your experience of platforms like Zoom and MS Teams for your learning - are they built to afford genuine accessibility?
- miki123211 6y ago
  Zoom is excellent in that regard. They're doing an amazing job at accessibility. There's so much hate towards them, but, if accessibility is concerned, there's no better option. Google Meet is not that bad either. Haven't had much experience with MS Teams, but sorta kinda usable is what people are saying. Skype works pretty great. Discord is... kind of okay on pc, horrible on iOS, though that's improving very quickly.

jasoneckert 6y ago

As a college educator for 22 years in technology/compsci, I definitely agree with many of the early points in this article surrounding the benefits of the physical classroom. 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.

neap24 6y ago
We do High School CompSci without the internet (for our intro course). I do see the internet as a distraction at this level. Forcing young students to think through the logic of a problem and come up with their own solution (no matter how crazy or inefficient it is) has a lot of downstream critical thinking benefits.

codingdave 6y ago

While I agree that classroom teaching has advantages, and am not trying to argue the points from the article... online learning is not limited to just what happens on video calls. That would be like saying that daily standup meetings are not the best environment to code in. Of course not. That isn't the point. They are about giving new information and coordinating, then letting go off to do their work. Online learning is the same - give info, coordinate, then students go off and do their work. It cannot be compared directly to 6 hours in a classroom because they are fundamentally different methods of working. They both have pros and cons.

darkerside 6y ago

This is an odd opinion piece to have made it to HN front page. It's essentially a collection of unsubstantiated claims that would likely have no impact to policy even if they were demonstrably true because the driving factor is human safety and not efficacy or ease of teaching. 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.

accurrent 6y ago
I spent the last semester teaching online. As a teacher it was not as fun. Also its a lot harder because you have to always be prepared for technical issues. What I found was that small class sizes are key. Additionally multiple monitors is a huge aid when teaching online.
- alchemism 6y ago
  I see the challenge is that in addition to traditional methods of effective pedagogy, a teacher for today must also be adept at running a broadcast studio in order to be effective.
kkylin 6y ago
I teach mathematics at a large R1 state university. His comments echo my experience. Online is really different, both for the instructor AND for the student. Most instructors don't know how to teach online, and most students (even very good ones) don't know how to learn online. - 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.

raarts 6y ago

I teach in college. In my opinion physical presence beats online teaching hands down for all but a few use cases. In my experience the last three months a minority of students thrive by online teaching, another (slightly bigger) minority stumbles and falls, and the rest struggles. 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.

aurizon 6y ago
The main problem with online is the mental agility of the student - smartness. Some are auto didactic - capable of self teaching. Some are not, we can not all be an Archimedes or an Isaac Newton. Online teaching needs to develop a high degree of parallelism. Let us say they break the topic down to a large number of short modules. Each one needs to be shown and explained and then the uptake tested. If student fails test 1, he needs to be taken through a different module on the same topic, explained and uptake tested. Repeat until the parallels are exhausted and the fails assessed to determine the composition of the way the student fails. Once assessed, the student needs to enter a new set of modules with greater detail in the explanatory detail. This will need an exhaustive degree of preparation, but it needs to be done. Once done on all topics you will have a huge massively parallel data base that is capable of teaching a wide range of people. On route, one needs to assess all manner of supportive skills - keyboarding - is that student capable of reading and entering the responses the program will demand of him? If not, that student needs some preparatory modules to deal with all the test and numeracy issues he faces. In human teaching, this is done via very personally demanding instruction in person. The program needs to be able to rapidly select from all the modules in it's repertoire. Ideally, such a system can handle all the way from a child to a graduate student. Assessing all the way and presenting and reviewing, remoduling etc all the way. Students vary widely, some are highly intelligent (but as yet are untaught), some are not so smart. AN ideal system will also test for what I call 'physical IQ' - the capacity for detailed physical tasks, such as fencing or basketball or any sport. They may be brilliant at physical tasks, not so good at physics or programming. Modern computers are capable of this. It is a demanding task to program them, but once done, it can be deployed millions of times amond millions of students. I hesitate to call it an 'AI', it is just a capable parallel high speed machine.

mumblemumble 6y ago

I get the impression that the author needs to think a bit further outside the box. 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.

Androider 6y ago

Just like shoehorning traditional office work into a remote setting doesn't work, you just end up with various forms of online butt-in-seat monitoring while losing all the benefits of asynchronicity, perhaps remote learning needs to be fundamentally rethought for the new medium. What would a remote-first learning experience look like? Probably more like a Khan Academy course than a real-time lecture, with the student-teacher time dedicated 100% to helping and interacting with students instead of going through new material.

tjrider 6y ago

Sadly I haven't had many teachers as described in this article in my university career. 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)?

gnufx 6y ago

I don't teach, but I wonder why people use Zoom and not BigBlueButton, which at least was made for the job. It also presumably doesn't have whatever the privacy implications are with Zoom that students have to accept.

javier123454321 6y ago

I think this is true, and i agree. However, institutions of (higher) learning have transformed into giant scams and money sucking administrative monsters, whose function is gatekeeping rather than education. As a response to this trend, online education is an excellent antidote for a fraction of the cost.