I made it through a year of remote teaching, research, and service as a faculty member. My institution is planning on full in-person classes for the upcoming fall semester. I hope there won’t be a Covid surge this summer here in the U.S., and while I’d like to say this will be my one and only year of fully remote work, I think the likelihood is high we will see another zoonotic epidemic within the next ten years. Whether that spills over into a global pandemic is less clear, but I certainly hope it won’t.
So how was working remotely? Overall, not as bad as I anticipated. The physical barrier separating work from non-work dissolved, but I did not find myself getting distracted by non-work activities while being home. And except for some online evening seminars, I also maintained my discipline of not working on evenings and weekends. Attending committee meetings, department meetings, and the like, was simplified, and I thought things ran well for the most part except discussions are a little slower. Folks (including me) occasionally still forget to turn on the mic when starting to speak. And I got used to following and utilizing the Zoom chat as an aid to the discussions.
Since I’m a computational chemist, my research was relatively unaffected by remote work. There was the inconvenience of using VPN on my Mac laptop, and not having my own Linux workstation setup at home, but I adapted quickly after writing some scripts and procedures for moving and analyzing files. Discussions with my research students was a less efficient, but still manageable. Lots of screen-sharing flipping back and forth. And analyzing data together just takes longer over Zoom. I think I did a poorer job mentoring my students through the research process overall. However, I did meet each of them once in person early on for research training, albeit in a less ideal truncated form.
Teaching, as expected, was the biggest adjustment. I’ve written several blog posts about preparing for the process (here and here and here), some of my frustrations (here), but also some of the milestones (here). Having gotten over the learning curve the previous fall semester, things went more smoothly this past spring semester. I was better at pacing myself, figuring out how and when to use breakout rooms, more detailed in organizing how I structured the course, and even tried one or two new things. I covered a little less material than I normally would in-person – I expected this and planned for it – but I feel that in some places, I covered things with a little less “meat” in them, and students may not have grasped some topics as well because of my limitations as a teacher doing things via Zoom for the second time.
A number of students enjoyed the more focused weekly prompts that I introduced this past semester. I wasn’t happy with my overly open-ended approach in the fall semester, so I tightened things up this semester. Several students commented that their favorite prompt was one that also encouraged a dose of creativity. While, I had some logic to connecting my prompts from week-to-week to what we were learning in class, I did not have an overarching coherent plan – a weakness, and something I need to improve on in its next iteration. The students also liked the detailed instructions of how to prepare for each class. I beefed them up this past year compared to the very brief version I had pre-pandemic. This is something I will keep doing.
While I continued to employ annotated self-graded midterms in my honors G-Chem class, I decided to do a mix of annotated weekend self-tests and two in-class midterms for my regular (larger) G-Chem section given the wider mix of academic abilities. I also think this worked well overall but I need to tweak how I allocate my grade bands since I grade on an absolute scale and I tell the students upfront what these are. There’s always the spectre of potential cheating during the exam even though Zoom cameras are all on. I don’t stare at the students nor do I employ any privacy-invading proctoring software. Overall final exam scores were a tad lower than previous semesters, but not by much, so even if there was some cheating, it wasn’t rampant. My exams are also written such that trying to look things up doesn’t help you all that much in the given time frame of the exam if you didn’t already know the material well. This was already true pre-pandemic, but I tweaked questions a bit to take this into account.
Student perceptions of the class and my teaching via their evaluations was overall positive. That was also expected. While my rapport with the students was not as good as it would have been in-person, I made an extra effort and some of the students noticed this. Those who came to office hours certainly appreciated it and I was able to give them more time and attention. Students liked that I wrote a lot on the whiteboard instead of talking my way through slides. Several of them said I was enthusiastic and enjoyed the connections I made to other classes (especially biology), and a number mentioned thought I cared about their learning. Not everyone was happy with their experience, and this is also typical. As in a non-pandemic year some students thought the class was too hard, and that I went too fast, but interestingly not as many said this as in previous years. I made an effort to slow down this pandemic year, and that was likely a good thing. One student did say that I cut off students when they were speaking. While I think this was because I would nod and make verbal noises (in an effort to communicate I was following along), I think that in a number of instances I was too hasty in thinking I understood the question and answered too quickly. I’m glad the student made me more aware of this.
What did I learn from remote teaching that I will carry over to my in-person classes? I think I will continue to use the LMS for its Discussion Board, detailed preparatory material for each class, and for students to submit annotated self-tests. I might consider a mix of both in-person and online office hours (they’re certainly more convenient for students instead of having to trudge across campus to my office). I think I should keep the pace I used during remote learning (clearly better for the students overall) which means talking and writing a little slower, and introducing pauses (which automatically happened remotely when I would flip between the camera focusing on the whiteboard versus screen-sharing). I think I should also be more actively conscious about connecting with my students and building rapport. Thinking about all this is making me excited about teaching the upcoming semester!
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