I grumbled in mid-August when our semester began three weeks earlier than usual. But as Thanksgiving approached signaling the end to our semester, I felt much better. I made it through my first semester of fully remote teaching, not having to pivot last spring because I was on sabbatical. Overall things went better than I expected, although there were ups and downs.
Before providing my lookback, here’s a timeline of prior blog posts as I moved through the process over the last six months.
· 1.5 months prior: Procrastination, as it wasn’t clear we’d be remote.
· 2 weeks prior: Knee-deep in remote preparation.
· 1 week prior: Feeling unprepared listening to others’ experiences.
· First Day: Went okay.
· Third Week: Experiencing some Zoom fatigue.
· Fifth Week: Got grumpy as I increased my expectations.
I got over my grumpiness in the seventh week and things went fine all the way to the end!
My upper division origins-of-life class was little affected by the shift to remote. The students mostly knew each other, and I knew half the group from previous classes. Since the class was entirely discussing the primary literature, my mini-white board was sufficient when I needed to draw a chemical structure. Actual discussion was robust because I posted reading guides and discussion questions ahead of time and all the students came prepared. Asynchronous outside-of-class discussion did not work as well and I abandoned the online discussion board requirement. The student blogs were mixed. Some were very thoughtful and exactly what I had hoped; others were cursory with much less effort. The final group presentations were overall good even through Zoom – smooth delivery, no glitches, and students seemed comfortable overall presenting. The final papers were weaker than I had anticipated, but I blame myself for not forcing students to turn in an earlier draft, having assumed they knew how to do this from a prior Research Methods class that has a similar final project.
In my honors first-semester G-Chem class, I’ve already discussed my grumpiness with Zoom limitations but I think I managed well overall. I had cut course content by about ten percent compared to previous years, essentially leaving out optional topics. I gave more first-five-minute quizzes. Assigned online homework was a tad less than previous years, and I cut one problem set. On the other hand, there were four rather than three take-home midterms thereby allowing the students to “test themselves” on all the material before the final exam. The final exam scores were a tad lower than the previous group, but the overall average performance across the course was similar to other honors G-Chem courses. No one performed poorly, and some did quite well.
Because all my G-Chem students were also new first-year students, I made an additional effort to build class community through the online discussion board. I think this worked well for about two thirds of the class who participated very regularly. I had fewer Breakout room sessions in Zoom, but there was plenty of back-and-forth interaction in Zoom both verbally and sometimes through the chat when I posed a question. Interestingly I had more students in office hours for the first five to six weeks, at which point slightly less than half the class moved on-campus and student visits to my office hours declined. This is not surprising because the students (living together) found it more convenient to ask each other for help in-person, and work together on homework, problem sets, and annotating their midterm exams. Nevertheless, I still think there were more Swiss cheese holes in student knowledge as I was not able to have the students engage the material as richly as we would do so in-person.
I received my student evaluations of their educational experience yesterday. They were very positive, but participation was significantly lower. While 80% of my origin-of-life class students filled them in, only 60% did so for my G-Chem class. This was my first time doing on-line evaluations; I chose not to set aside class time but to remind students multiple times but clearly this doesn’t work as well. When done in-class I get over 90% participation. In the Likert ratings, my scores were all high (and higher than usual) in terms of student perception of the quality of the class and my ability as an instructor. (They were very high in G-Chem.) In terms of workload for origins-of-life about half the students thought it was about right and half thought it was slightly heavy. For G-Chem, three-quarters thought it about right and a quarter thought it slightly heavy. The written comments were also exceedingly positive, more so than usual.
That being said, I don’t think that this semester’s evaluations are as representative, not just because of the lower participation rate (less-than-happy students might have opted out), but because both my classes were smaller in size and to some extent specialized. (Also I wasn’t teaching P-Chem.) Only students who were interested in my origins-of-life class took it as their chemistry elective, so they were all motivated. The class had no exams and was all reading-and-discussion-based. Many of the students also took the class because they enjoyed being in my G-Chem class two to three years ago so they already had a positive impression of me as an instructor. In my G-Chem class, many of the students said my class was better than many (possibly any) of their previous remote classes. For one, I didn’t have to pivot. And I’m highly organized – which is perhaps even more crucial in a remote environment. I actually think my quality of instruction was a little worse remotely than in-person, but perhaps I made up for it by being relatively better than what they had experienced thus far.
I’m starting prep early for next semester. No procrastinating this time since I’m very sure we’ll be starting remote given the present bleak U.S. Covid situation. I have learned a few things from this semester about things that work and things that don’t work. I have one larger class next semester, so that will be a new challenge. But I’m less anxious than I was because I know I can teach remotely without being a complete failure. The more important question is whether I can do it better the second time around. I certainly hope so.
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