Mini-tip Monday: Zoom Polls

Happy fourth week of online teaching, everyone! Can you believe we made it to four weeks? Today’s Mini-tip Monday is also about the move to remote learning. (See here and here for the previous posts in this series.)

If you’re new to my blog, let me remind you of my set-up. I am teaching Calculus II synchronously using Zoom, the now-famous web-conferencing service. I share my iPad’s screen and use notability to write while I lecture. I use Canvas to communicate with my students, post class recording and notes, and share any other resources.

The set-up has been working very well for me. On average, about two-thirds of my students are attending the class sessions live. The others are engaging via Canvas, and I haven’t had a student completely disappear yet. (I have had a couple of close calls, but reaching out to them has always resulted in them resurfacing. I’m keeping my fingers crossed that my students can all make it through these chaotic times in good health and spirits.)

While I have adjusted reasonably well to teaching online, I really do miss being in a physical classroom. Apart from just missing the energy of a physical classroom, I miss being able to communicate quickly and effectively by virtue of being in the same space as my students. There are just some things that cannot be replicated in an online class, though not for lack of trying. One of the things I miss the most is the ability to get quick feedback from students when explaining a new topic. I do this in a face-to-face class by breaking my lecture up with straightforward problems that I ask them to solve on a pen and paper. I encourage them to talk to each other while attempting these problems, and I do a quick walk-around to glance at their work and gauge where they are. If needed, I pause and chat with the students who seem to be struggling, offering individual help. 

Sometimes I do the same thing before I introduce a new topic. I ask the students to solve a warm-up problem, something that nicely sets up the next section we are going to cover. (I will talk about warm-up problems more in a future Mini-Tip Monday.)

All of this seems impossible in an online class where I can’t glance at their work in real-time. While I haven’t found a way to completely replicate the ease of a physical classroom, one of the most effective tools I’ve used to get me close is the “Polling” option on Zoom.

I have taken the time to reframe the problems I’d usually ask students to solve in a class into multiple-choice questions. Obviously, this reframing would not work for every type of question. Still, when it does, it provides me with invaluable quick feedback that I had no other way of getting in an online class.

Let me explain how Polling works a little bit. You can set up polls you want to use in a class session ahead of time. I usually do this the night before. If you have a recurring meeting scheduled, you can add polls to the meeting at any time, and Zoom saves all of them. Here I will list three examples of questions that translate well to Zoom Polls.

Example 1

Topic: Trigonometric integrals.

Warm-up problem: Integrate sin^2(x) with respect to x.

Zoom Alternative: Which of the following methods would you use to integrate sin^2(x) with respect to x? 

Poll Options:  Integration by parts, u-substitution, a trigonometric identity

(Once students have answered this poll, I would ask them to take a few minutes and try to solve the problem using the method they picked. After a few minutes, I would rerun the poll, asking them to choose either the same or a different approach.)

Example 2

In-class problem: For what values of x does the series {insert some power series here, say with the interval of convergence [-1/2,1/2)} converge?

Zoom Alternative: For what values of x does the series {power series} converge?

Poll Options: (-1/2,1/2), [-1/2,1/2), [-1/2,1/2], (-1,1), I do not know.

(If anyone picks the last option, I would pause and ask them if they have a specific question.)

There are also some much simpler questions one could ask over Zoom. For example,

Zoom Poll: Does the series {insert series} converge or diverge?

Poll Options: Converges, Diverges.

Here’s one I used in class just today.

Zoom Poll: The following differential equation models the growth of a population P: dP/dt=8P(1000-P). If the current population is 200, is the population increasing or decreasing? 

Poll Options: Increasing, Decreasing.

While this approach has it’s imperfections, I have had a lot of success using it. In particular, I like it a lot better than the alternative that I’ve been considering: breakout rooms. Let me know in the comments of any strategies that you’ve developed to make your online lectures more interactive. I am always looking for ideas!

 

Update after first online class.

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.

Teaching in the time of Corona

I’ve been wanting to start a blog about my experience teaching undergrads for a while now, but haven’t taken the plunge for various reasons. Now that the Covid19 pandemic is forcing us all to teach online, I thought it might be worthwhile to share how I’m dealing with everything that comes with that. The hope is that this might become a medium to share and receive ideas, or if nothing else, a sense of solidarity.

I’m writing this first post one day before my first online class. I’ll be using Zoom on my laptop for sharing video, and I will be sharing my iPad screen where I’ll be writing down notes for the students to read. I will post an update with how it goes tomorrow!

For now, here’s my list of everything I plan on having on my desk and apps I will be using on my devices while teaching, in no particular order.

• My laptop, with Zoom Web Conferencing installed.
• My iPad Air, with Notability for taking notes, and Desmos for quickly referencing graphs that I can’t draw by hand.
• Apple Pencil.
• My trusty bluetooth earphones with mic.
• A cup of chai (black tea, brewed in hot water and steeped in warm milk)
• Facial tissues.
• A glass of water.
• My handwritten notes: One page with just the outline of the lecture, divided into 5-10 minute chunks, one notebook with detailed notes, solved examples, etc.
• The textbook, just in case.

(Am I going overboard with this? I don’t know, but I’m of the view that being over-prepared is better than being under-prepared.)

Wish me luck!