Back to normal?
Image by Brian Cragun from Pixabay
Campus is open again for business. In a month from now I start the 2022 edition of my building physics course. It feels a bit strange to return to the physical classroom. I haven’t done a real lecture since early 2020. They say that if you don’t use it, you lose it. We will see in a month whether there’s some truth to that. I have been very active posting vlogs every day since 2019 and I have a feeling that the experience gained it will come in very handy now. Such a weird feeling, I have practiced so hard in front of the camera - around 1000 videos. It will be very interesting to see how that translates into a physical room.
When I was writing the welcome letter to my students today, I was about to write that we are going back to normal this spring. But I changed my mind. I don’t want to go back to normal i.e. the old normal. I want to create a new normal, where we cherry pick the best lessons from the Covid era of distance education and combine it with traditional activities. That’s where I believe we can find true greatness. Distance education is a blessing, when used in the right way.
Before Covid, the universities had a strong focus on classroom education and very little distance learning activities. That all changed overnight and now it’s been completely the other way around for two years. Extremes of anything is seldom good. The best path forward is probably somewhere in between. When I received the course evaluation from my building physics course last year, I was quite surprised by the results. According to most of the students, the laboratory exercise we did was by far the best instance of the course. Many labs were outright cancelled because of Covid but I thought that something is usually better than nothing, so I did my laboratory exercise as a Zoom call. And indeed, it was a greater success than I could imagine. A laboratory exercise on Zoom, who would have guessed that it would be the students´ favorite?! Clearly there is more untapped potential. In the coming two years I intend to dig a bit deeper and see what other learning activities that might translate well to distance learning. Interesting, much interesting!
Another interesting observation is that the students’ have been exceptionally bad at participating in online Zoom lectures. Almost nobody asked even a single question, and no-one had their cameras activated during the Zoom lectures. As a teacher, it felt completely pointless to hold lectures on Zoom that way, so I decided never to do it again. I haven’t really experienced anything like it, it was life-less. Frankly, I consider it a waste of both my time and their time. Therefore, I will go back and use Youtube livestreams instead. They feel a lot more alive and interactive, with none of the hassle that multi camera setups and digital whiteboards on Zoom brings. And the biggest difference perhaps lies with the expectations. On a Youtube livestream, you are not supposed to see the students. They only communicate through the chat. Thus, you get a much better correlation between Expectation and Reality. And an exceptionally powerful technical platform too, as a bonus.
I mentioned that I was surprised that the lab exercise got so high praise. Because it was a mandatory exercise, I told the students that only the ones who had the cameras turned on would be noted as present. The rest would be marked absent and get an extra homework. Consequently, the camera presence was 100% on the lab. We could interact and I instantly noted their facial expressions and could adapt my approach and communication on the fly when I finally could see them. It’s like a troubadour who reads the audience and chooses the songs that are right just that moment. He can’t do that if the audience is quietly hiding! The difference was profound, and it was not the carrot that made it happen. It was the stick. Zoom lectures are better used for learning activities other than lectures. They are basically a monologue anyway, which in my opinion makes Youtube a better choice with their livestream support. The lab exercise is my living proof that Zoom learning activities with active students and breakout rooms, can be a wonderful experience when done right. I look forward very much to experimenting more with various combinations of classroom, Zoom and Youtube learning activities in the coming years.