How I’m lecturing during emergency remote teaching

Alfred Thompson (whom most of my readers already know) has a recent blog post requesting: Please blog about your emergency remote teaching (see post here). Alfred is right. We ought to be talking about what we’re doing and sharing our practices, so we get better at it. Reflecting and sharing our teaching practices is a terrific way to improve CS teaching, which Josh Tenenberg and Sally Fincher told us about in their Disciplinary Commons. 

My CACM Blog Post this month is on our contingency plan that we created to give students an “out” in case they become ill or just can’t continue with the class — see post here. I encourage all my readers who are CS teachers to create such a contingency plan and make it explicit to your students.

I am writing to tell you what I’m doing in my lectures with my co-instructor Sai R. Gouravajhala. I can’t argue that this is a “best” practice. This stuff is hard. Eugene Wallingford has been blogging about his emergency remote teaching practice (see post here). The Chronicle of Higher Education recently ran an article about how difficult it is to teach via online video like Zoom or BlueJeans (see article here). We’re all being forced into this situation with little preparation. We just deal with it based on our goals for our teaching practice.

For me, keeping peer instruction was my top priority. I use the recommended peer instruction (PI) protocol from Eric Mazur’s group at Harvard, as was taught to me by Beth Simon, Leo Porter, and Cynthia Lee (see http://peerinstruction4cs.com/): I pose a question for everybody, then I encourage class discussion, then I pose the question again and ask for consensus answers. I use participation in that second question (typically gathered via app or clicker device) towards a participation grade in the class — not correct/incorrect, just participating. 

My plan was to do all of this in a synchronous lecture with Google Forms, based on a great recommendation from Chinmay Kulkarni. I would have a Google Form that everyone answered, then I’d encourage discussion. Students are working on team projects, and we have a campus license for Microsoft Teams, so I encouraged students to set that up before lecture and discuss with their teams. On a second Google Form with the same question, I also collect their email addresses. I wrote a script to give them participation credit if I get their email address at least once during the class PI questions.

Then the day before my first lecture, I was convinced on Twitter by David Feldon and Justin Reich that I should provide an asynchronous option (see thread here). I know that I have students who are back home overseas and are not in my timezone. They need to be able to watch the video at another time. I now know that I have students with little Internet access. So, I do all the same things, but I record the lecture and I leave the Google Forms open for 24 hours after the last class. The links to the Google Forms are in the posted slides and in the recorded lectures. To fill out the PI questions for participation, they would have to at least look at that the lecture.

I’m so glad that I did. As I tweeted, I had 188 responses to the PI questions after the lectures ended. 24 hours later, I had 233 responses. About 20% of my students didn’t get the synchronous lecture, but still got some opportunity to learn through the asynchronous component. The numbers have been similar for every lecture since that first.

I lecture, but typically only for 10-15 minutes between questions. I have 4-5 questions in an 85 minute lecture. The questions take longer now. I can’t just move the lecture along when most of the students answer, as I could with clickers. I typically give the 130+ students 90 seconds to get the link entered and answer the question. 

I have wondered if I should just go to a fully asynchronous lecture, so I asked my students via a PI question. 85% say that they want to see the lecturer in the video. They like that I can respond to chat and to answers in Google Forms. (I appreciate how Google Forms lets me see a summary of answers in real-time, so that I can respond to answers.) I’d love to have a real, synchronous give-and-take discussion, but my class is just too big. I typically get 130+ students synchronously participating in a lecture. It’s hard to have that many students participate in the chat, let alone see video streams for all of them.

We’re down to the last week of lecture, then we’ll have presentations of their final projects. They will prepare videos of their presentations, and receive peer comments. Each student has been assigned four teams to provide peer feedback on. Each team has a Google Doc to collect feedback on their project.

So, that’s my practice. In the comments, I’d welcome advice on improving the practice (though I do hope not to have to do this again anytime soon!), and your description of your practice. Let’s share.