Teaching to empty rectangles
Lessons from teaching a college course on zoom when students won’t use cameras
I recall vividly the last lecture I gave on-campus in March 2020 prior to the pandemic. A student approached me after class, worried about the news reports of COVID-19 but uncertain how to respond. I am sure I mumbled something about how I would talk to the campus health department and tell the class what I found.
Of course a day later our college in Bellevue was in lockdown. All in-person lectures stopped, and it became clear that all college courses would be fully online until some uncertain day in the future. I had a lot of practice with video and screen sharing technologies from my work with overseas developers — but how could we make this work for our students?
The good news is that I’ve received lots of positive feedback from students about the approach I took for this course. Let’s talk about what we did and see what it can teach us about teaching remotely.
Student engagement declines after the class goes remote
The first thing we did was to switch our class to Zoom. Because I used PowerPoint presentations as a teaching aid (they help me to remember the talking points during a lecture), I could use Zoom’s screen share feature along with my camera to show a document and talk about it.
Very quickly I noticed a change: students who were excited about the class in person would gradually turn off their cameras, stop participating, and become empty dark rectangles. How could I get them back to the days when they would join in a discussion, shout out ideas, and raise their hands to ask for help?
Some teachers suggest incentives like contributing to charity to motivate students to turn on their cameras. I felt this was coercive; some students might have valid reasons for having their cameras off. I had worked with students who were dealing with dangerous life circumstances; it would be unfair to ostracize them for not wanting to be seen on video.
At the same time, many students asked me if I could record my lectures and upload them as (private) videos. In theory, this sounded like a great idea! I could still hold the same lecture as before, but a student who needed to use the restroom could watch the video back and see what they missed.
The consequences of recording a class and publishing slides
Excited with the possibilities, I announced to my students that I would record the class and upload the video, unlisted, to YouTube.
I should have known better.
Immediately the class went from twenty students attending a lecture down to one or two. Because the lecture was recorded, the student or students who attended were uncomfortable asking questions. I checked the statistics afterwards, and each video had one or two views, and most of the views would only watch ten percent of the recording.
After two weeks of this approach, I canceled the recordings. I told students that they would need to attend lectures if they wanted to hear me discuss the material, but if they missed something for whatever reason I would upload my PowerPoint deck for each lecture so they could compare notes. Attendance began to creep back upwards.
The next challenge was to bring back some of the connections students had depended upon when the lectures were held in person. I experimented with a few ideas:
- If I uploaded my planned PowerPoint decks prior to a class, some students would read that and skip the lecture. I decided to remove all the PowerPoints from my Canvas course upfront, and then to upload each one after its corresponding lecture concluded. This had the side benefit of allowing me to fix typos and add content right up until the moment I gave the presentation.
- I included scheduled pauses in the discussion and got myself a bottle of water. This was useful to remind me to periodically stop talking and create an opportunity for a student to find their voice.
- Although it felt a little silly, I would occasionally call out for microphone checks, “Does this solution make sense?” and other little asides. I find it useful to simply ask leading questions like, “Can everyone read the text in this screenshot?” — just as a way to get people comfortable speaking.
- I emphasized that students can ask questions in chat, if they’re not comfortable unmuting themselves. This helps students who have concerns about interrupting the lecture, plus it gives me an excuse to pause the lecture periodically to “check the chat window.”
These solutions weren’t perfect, but they created just enough engagement that giving the lecture became rewarding again. The next challenge was to figure out how to rebalance the homework burden.
A mixture of different types of projects, assignments, and tests
Originally my class had been entirely project-based. I taught my students how I led a small team of engineers to build GamePulse, a data analysis platform for videogames. I tasked each student to build a small movie-focused research project using the same techniques.
I found that my students had widely varying levels of success with project-based learning in this new remote world. About one fifth of my class would excel; three fifths would generally do okay, and one fifth of the class would be hopelessly stuck. It’s almost a normal distribution!
I practiced writing blogs about teaching, web scraping, and technologies like Jupyter and Python to help clarify my thoughts. But some students continued to struggle.
- One assignment where I taught students about virtualized databases had an extremely high frustration ratio. After a few attempts, I realized that I was introducing too many new concepts at once, and that this assignment would need to be spread out across multiple weeks to work. I replaced it with a quiz that tested students on reading comprehension on the same database technology.
- For a midterm I asked students to do a “refinement” pass on their first six weeks of work. In practice, most students just resubmitted what they had done the previous week. I decided to remove one assignment and just reduce the overall course load on students; in its place, I spent more time talking about career possibilities in the field.
Because I had the good luck to be able to teach the same class quarter after quarter, I was able to test alternative versions of each assignment to see what types of work students most enjoyed. I was able to fix some of the rough edges and pre-answer questions likely to get students stuck.
Finally, I re-emphasized student discussion boards, a great feature supported by Canvas and other learning technology systems.
Student discussion boards and professional growth
Many students I spoke to hated the idea of “mandatory weekly discussion”, and many of them disliked it and asked me to stop it. Instead, I focused on the reasons why I hold weekly student-led discussions: because it is a professional skill that can help accelerate their careers.
When I earned a degree in philosophy, I enjoyed the classes not so much because I liked reading Kant and Hegel, but instead because the engaged students would have amazing discussions each week in between classes. I wanted to recreate this experience and also connect it to career growth.
I told my students that, in the professional world, they would be expected to share their research with others and to write about the things they accomplished. I showed them examples from my own blog and demonstrated how this work could help them build a professional reputation.
I gave each week’s discussion a focus: it would be to share their progress on the weekly homework task. I reminded students that, in the professional world, they were not only allowed to use other people’s work but encouraged to do so — provided that they gave proper credit.
I graded discussion participation on a simple rubric:
- If the student only posts “Thanks, I liked this lecture!” ten minutes before the deadline, they get one point for participating.
- If a student engages with the discussion, posts questions, tries to help out others, and tells everyone which ideas helped them solve a problem, they will get the full five points.
- Anything in between is graded based on encouraging students to grow. For the first week I grade generously; but as students begin to master the material I start to expect more from their comments.
The end result was very positive. Some students would avoid the discussions and only write a post 10 minutes before the deadline; but many other students would eagerly participate, sharing problems and solutions equally.
The students who struggled with assignments would often find that their problems were answered in the student discussion by others who were working on the same project together. And the successful students loved blogging; some would even start their own technology blogs, and some would find careers based on their work and the code they shared.
The process of refining and improving this class during the course of the pandemic has been an enlightening experience. I welcome thoughts and collaboration with any other teachers facing these same issues.
Ted Spence teaches at Bellevue College and lives in West Seattle. If you’re interested in software engineering and business analysis, I’d love to hear from you on Twitter or LinkedIn.
