Over the past 8 months, UC Berkeley students, and students from many other schools alike, have adjusted to fully online learning. Throughout this period, almost every aspect of schooling has changed.
One of the biggest changes, which has presented many challenges for both faculty and students, is content being delivered remotely. While most professors and lecturers have been delivering lectures through Zoom meetings, there are some things that have set certain classes apart from others.
In some classes, students are able to understand and interact with the content almost as well as if they were in person. However, in other classes, remote delivery has created a substantial barrier between faculty and students, leaving students feeling isolated and lost while faculty are unaware of how to help their students.
Our team has consolidated our best and worst experiences in all of our remote classes to share our thoughts on the most effective methods of online learning.
We’ll start with the least effective methods:
The least effective method of online learning that our members have experienced is professors posting old recordings of their lectures from previous semesters. Although this surely saves the professor’s time, it is truly limiting for students to not be able to interact with content and ask questions when they are confused.
Another ineffective method of online learning is online lab sections of classes. In-person labs offer students a more interactive component to the content presented in lectures. However, online labs often create a larger barrier to students learning the actual content because they are unable to perform the experiments themselves.
The final ineffective learning method that we have experienced is break-out rooms in Zoom. All too often, these break-out rooms result in a few students all sitting together with cameras off and microphones muted. If one student dares to speak out, the others find it too easy to hide behind their screens and simply not respond.
We have also experienced many very effective methods of online learning:
One effective method of online learning is professors using tablets or other methods to physically write out the notes, as they would on a chalkboard or whiteboard in a classroom. This gives the students sufficient time to write their own notes and think through each idea so that they can ask any questions that come to mind right away.
Another effective method of online learning is smaller discussion sections in which students actually participate. For our new members that are freshmen, smaller discussions such as these have allowed them to make friends and actually get to know the people in their classes as they could in an in-person lecture.
The most effective method of online learning that we have experienced is the use of a tracking camera and multiple whiteboards set up so that the professor can write out just as they would in lecture, and the tracking camera moves to allow students an up-close view of the board as the professor moves around the room. This method mimics in-person lectures as much as possible while remote learning is required.
In our experiences, these teaching methods have made for the least and most effective learning over these last 8 months of quarantine.
This blog post was written by Brooke Chang and reflects the experiences of the entire team. #ZoomUniversity #Remote #Teaching
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