Hello! I’m back with an update after my first Online class. In short, it went really well! Most of my students actually showed up. This was a surprise, considering that last night, on our instructors’ text chain, I was making contingency plans for the case that literally no one shows up.
Me: Would you record a lecture anyway? How long do you wait for people before you start teaching? What if no one shows up, you wait 5 minutes, you start, and then one student shows up 15 minutes late, realizes you’ve been teaching to an empty classroom for 15 minutes, and then laughs at you for the next 10 minutes?!
Friend: These are new and terrifying things I have not thought about, and now I will not sleep.
Anyway, almost everyone who is in the right time zone showed up, and more than that, the ones who did were actually engaged. They asked and answered questions, responded to Zoom polls, and were generally really good about being engaged (which can I just say, I’m genuinely thankful for? It really made my life easier knowing that all of this hard work in putting my course online isn’t going to waste.)
Anyway, to cut a long story short, here are things that helped me, and please send any ideas you might have to improve this system my way.
- I have set up a recurring Zoom meeting just for our lectures. They already have the meeting ID, but I sent out an email about 10 minutes before with a link to join.
- I am using my laptop to host the meeting, which, in particular, means I’m using my laptop’s webcam for video, and my headphones are connected to my computer too. However, I’m using my iPad to share my screen where I’m writing notes.
- I put up a “warm-up problem” on the screen before I began my class so that students who join early have something to work on. I do this in my IRL classes too. I like to be early in my classroom when I can be, and this helps fill in the awkward gaps before we officially start class.
- I found that using chat is distracting, so I turned off the feature where “participants can privately chat with other participants” but left the “participants can chat with everyone” on, in case some people do not have reliable audio.
- The “Poll” option in Zoom is convenient, but I still have to figure out how to make a poll before class that I can pull up whenever I want.
- I set my lecture meetings to auto-record on Zoom, which means that I do not have to remember to record them every time. This also means that if I join early (which I want to keep doing), it also records the first 10 minutes of silence. This is not a problem, though, since Zoom’s functionality of clipping out the first few minutes is speedy and efficient.
Maryam Khaqan 