Teaching in Higher Ed

Teaching

How to Design Online Courses that Are Full of Surprises

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This article is part of the guide Toward Better Teaching: Office Hours With Bonni Stachowiak and was originally posted on EdSurge. The following is the latest installment of the Toward Better Teaching advice column. You can pose a question for a future column here.

Dear Bonni,

“Any suggestions for ‘mixing it up’ in asynchronous online courses?”

—An online educator

It is a paradox. In our teaching, we want to be consistent enough so students can easily navigate our courses and not be confused about where to find things. On the other hand, we want to surprise students and ignite their curiosity.

One way to approach a desire to change things up in our teaching is through creating what are called ‘times for telling.’ I was first introduced to this idea from Derek Bruff, director of the Center for Teaching at Vanderbilt University and author of the forthcoming book, Intentional Tech: Principles to Guide the Use of Educational Technology in College Teaching. On Episode 71 of the Teaching in Higher Ed podcast, he stressed the importance of getting the students curious about something before expecting them to digest what might be perceived as the less-interesting parts of the explanation. As Bruff said: “Students first need to encounter a problem, or a challenge, or something mysterious… and then that provides them with the motivation to hear the 15-minute explanation.”

Bruff took his inspiration from a 1998 article by Schwartz and Bransford called “A time for telling’. When teaching online classes, it is all the more vital that we set the stage up front for why what we are about to share is relevant and interesting. Starting with questions instead of answers is one way to do that. The goal is to evoke emotions and get learners thinking. How did that happen? How does it align with or contradict my existing perceptions? Did I just see what I think I just saw?

Unexpected Videos

When curating videos for students to watch, or when creating your own, the goal is to find ones that are unexpected. All too often, when we watch videos designed for online classes, we anticipate that we will see what we usually see. There will be a slide deck, with around five bullets per slide and someone talking over them. We may or may not see a face to accompany the voice. Either way, the person will be taking the content and themselves very seriously and will maintain a methodical cadence throughout.

Another option for videos is to change things up and have your students create them. Smartphones offer a whole universe of possibilities for video creation. One option is to use a service called FlipGrid. Pose a question on FlipGrid and then invite students to participate in the discussion by filming a brief video of themselves with their phone or webcam. This makes it possible to have class discussions where each participant sends in their comments whenever they have time, but where everyone can see and hear each other.

Changing Up Note-Taking

Instead of leaving students to take notes individually, you can invite them to participate in some group annotating. Hypothesis is the service that I use, both for my personal note-taking, and for having students collaborate by highlighting passages of a text and note-taking together. Hypothesis essentially creates another layer on top of any web page being viewed in a browser. Most of the time, Hypothesis is tucked away as an extension (a button) on my internet browser. When I am ready to take some notes for my own records, or to engage with others in annotating, I press the button and use a set of tools off on the right-hand side of my browser to make comments.

Most of the time, I use Hypothesis for straight text notes when I want to share my ideas about a site with another person. However, you can include other rich media—including videos, pictures and links—that really brings the conversation to life beyond what words may be able to do in a given context.

Next Steps

To recap, here are three ways to mix things up in online classes:

  1. Start with times for telling and ignite the curiosity of your students (give them the why), prior to providing them with longer explanations (the how).
  2. Use FlipGrid or other video services to invite students to become content creators, instead of mere consumers of content.
  3. Try Hypothesis or other social annotation tools so that students can discuss class reading material in community, instead of the usual way of each student making notes that only they can see.

The goal is to offer a sense of the unexpected in our teaching, while still maintaining consistency around how the class is set up and what is expected from the students.

One fun example I will leave you with comes from Alan Levine (aka CogDog), an independent educational technologist. Levine teaches a course called networked narratives (#netnarr). He establishes what he calls spines, or the skeletal framework of the course. Each week largely follows a similar structure. Levine sends out a blog post each week, to let the students know what is coming. They are also warned that blogging will be a big part of them engaging in the class.

However, every week has a series of surprises. It might be an unexpected guest who joins in one of the virtual studio tours he leads. Or it might be a special project, such as creating a gif or sharing their work in a digital art exhibit. My favorite element of surprise on the networked narratives website is the hamburger menu (three horizontal lines stacked on top of each other in the upper right-hand corner) with the label: “do not click.” The curious learner will be met by a number of surprises, if they push past any rule-following tendencies and see the trail of fun left behind by Levine. He offers further reading, links to non-essential resources and even a joke for people who listened to him on an episode of Teaching in Higher Ed, when I complimented him on this serendipitous opportunity to explore.

I am appreciative of the example that Levine provides to us of how to really mix things up in our online teaching.

Photo by Scott Walsh on Unsplash

How to Demonstrate Confidence in Your Teaching

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This article was originally posted on EdSurge and is part of the guide Toward Better Teaching: Office Hours With Bonni Stachowiak. You can pose a question for a future column here.

Dear Bonni,

Various times I get feedback from students that they find me too unsure when in front of the class. What are helpful strategies to get better at this? This is especially hard for me since I teach large classes and it is challenging to connect.

—From a professor ready for confidence

When I taught my first class at the college level, I was somewhat nervous, but not as much as I may have been if I had comprehended the magnitude of what I was about to do. The first decade of my career had been in a dissimilar context, the franchising industry, teaching computer classes, and my expectations were unrealistic as to just how different it would be to teach at the college level.

The person who had originally instructed me how to teach had ingrained in me that you should avoid telling people that this was your first time teaching a class. While never asking me to lie, he had proposed that my first-timer status should not ever be brought up by me. He said that otherwise, I ran the risk of having people lose confidence in my capacity to guide them through the day of learning a new software program.

As I began my first night of teaching in a university setting, I asked the students to take out their textbooks for the class and turn to a particular page. My secret about this being my first trip to this particular rodeo was out. It almost never happened that students would bring their books to the very first class session at our institution. My request was met with blank stares. It was time for me to begin asking some questions and learning more about this new environment. My confidence was shaken, but not broken.

Think of someone who contributed to your learning in a meaningful way at some point in your life. If we gathered all the stories of people reading this column together, we would have a tapestry of diverse people who all had unique approaches to contributing to others’ growth. But I suspect that one characteristic that would be common among all the stories is that these influential teachers had confidence in the importance of the content they were teaching, if not also some belief in their teaching abilities after having built up their capacity over some time.

Gaining confidence can be elusive to those of us in higher education, since academic culture can often subtract from our confidence, instead of building it up. Our strength may already be worn down by going through a challenging promotion and tenure process, or after years of having our research evaluated by peer reviewers who sometimes reject work without giving effective feedback; or reading negative comments from students on our course evaluations.

However, a wonderful anecdote to those encounters is to have a strong connection with our sense of meaning and purpose in our work. Regularly answering the question surrounding why we teach in the first place can build up greater protections against those factors that may detract from our assurance.

During Brittani Packnett’s 2019 TED Talk, How to Build Your Confidence and Spark It in Others, she describes the importance of knowing how your fearlessness will be used as leverage toward some broader vision. She asserts:

“For some of us, confidence is a revolutionary choice.”

Packnett connects her work as an activist with the inspiration she takes from Septima Clark. This civil rights leader knew her purpose well and connected it with all of the work she did to fight for voting rights and civil rights. Packnett shares how Clark helped her see that confidence lets us take our “most ambitious dreams” and turn them into reality. “Confidence is the necessary spark for everything that follows,” Packnett argues. “Confidence is the difference between being inspired and actually getting started.”

Dave Stachowiak is the host of the Coaching for Leaders podcast most recently an audio production project called Dave’s Journal. He also happens to be my husband. He admonishes us to stop seeking confidence entirely and recently argued that we should Stop Wasting Time on Confidence. He stresses on that Dave’s Journal episode that:

“The problem is that virtually none of us seem to be able to wish or will our way to confidence. Despite every grand intention I’ve had of being more confident, that alone has never moved the needle.”

Even after you have connected with the reasons why you teach, the concerns expressed in your question may still be a factor. We can have habits embedded in our teaching practices that cause us to come across as unsure, even as our sureness is growing.

For that reason, it can be more effective to focus on ridding myself of those behaviors that might indicate to others that I lack confidence, rather than trying to convince myself in the first place to change my feelings.

Here are some practices I use to attempt to project confidence:

Avoid apologizing for extraneous events that occur, especially ones I have little or no control over. This means that if my technology isn’t working, rather than apologizing for it, I typically change over to a backup plan that doesn’t rely on technology. This is especially important at the start of a class or presentation, when I want to be making an impression that everyone is in good hands.

Frame questions with confidence. I stay away from asking, “Does anyone have any questions?” Instead, I pose the question this way: “Who has the first question?” After that, I use the eight-second rule, which dictates that we allow for what can sometimes feel like a ridiculously long time to pass after making another query. This intermission turns out to be much shorter than we imagine. By allowing for eight seconds to pass, I can use the power of silence to demonstrate to people that I am actually expecting an answer and am looking forward to what they have to say. I use the eight-second rule regularly when asking knowledge-related or reflection questions. This prolonged pause provides ample room for learners to not only absorb what I have asked and formulate an answer, but also to weigh the risk of being wrong and looking foolish in front of their peers. People’s natural discomfort with silence (at least in many Western cultures) works in our favor a lot of the time. There’s often someone who would rather get the conversation going again and who also has the confidence that I won’t embarrass them if their answer winds up being wrong. I share more about the eight-second rule in episode 6 of the Teaching in Higher Ed podcast.

Use declarative statements. When I first started with computer instruction, I had the opportunity to listen to recordings of myself teaching. I would use a lot of unnecessary phrases that made what I said harder to follow and made me sound like I wasn’t sure what I was getting at. “Go ahead and go up to the file menu and then look for the open menu and click it.” After being horrified at how this sounded when being repeated what probably added up to hundreds of times in a given eight-hour class, I made a big change. My instructions became: “Click the file menu and select open.” My teaching has evolved to hardly ever give a series of step-by-step instructions the way I did early in my computer training days. However, in the cases that I ask students to hand something in, or set up an exercise for them to work on in class, my requests are made without the verbal fluff that could easily be construed as coming from someone lacking confidence.

When we are perceived as unsure, we are held back from having the kind of impact we desire in our teaching. Packnett reminds us in her TED Talk that:

“Without confidence, we get stuck, and when we get stuck, we can’t even get started.”

Our certainty can grow as we center on our sense of significance in our teaching. We can also behave our way into greater boldness by avoiding extraneous apologies, following the eight-second rule and keeping superfluous phrases out of our statements.

Photo by jesse orrico on Unsplash

Addressing Students Who Neglect to Formally Request Accommodations

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This article was originally posted on EdSurge and is part of the guide Toward Better Teaching: Office Hours With Bonni Stachowiak. You can pose a question for a future column here.

Dear Bonni, I’m a brand new faculty member. I do not have formal training in pedagogy, except one measly adult education class from undergrad. I have a question regarding how you and others approach accommodations for those who are reluctant, resistant, or defiant to going through official channels at the university.

How I figure it, there are a list of things I find reasonable for all students—letting them stand or wiggle when they are having problems with attention or sleepiness, taking extra time to answer questions for assignments and projects, moving at a pace that is comfortable for the slowest in the group when we are on-the-move for class, etc.

However, students who ask for extra time on tests/projects, high levels (30%+) of extra credit, or to make up work weeks or months later, without having responded to any communications or requests for updates/accommodation needs… and still do not go to the Office of Accessibility… am I being a hard ass? How much do you bend?

I have 22 students all on the exact same schedule. I do not imagine that our program is their only or top priority, but I also do not imagine that it is fair to let some make up months of past due work to improve a grade from a previous semester or give extra time on evaluations without medical justification. Am I being too much of a hard ass?

—A new faculty member wanting to do the right thing

Candidly, your letter has been taking a back seat to questions I felt more confident in answering in recent months on EdSurge. I wish I had easy answers for you. What I have, instead, is nuance. No hard and fast rules exist, when it comes to navigating these spaces. I hope my messy experiences provide some ways of thinking differently regarding these decisions about your pedagogy.

You asked a couple of times in your message if you were being too strict. In general, I have found when I begin posing those questions to myself, I am likely not looking at things clearly. More so, I am likely not recognizing how complex students’ needs are—including those who might need accommodation.

There’s still a great deal of stigma around disabilities—learning-related, or otherwise. I have, on more than one occasion, witnessed faculty expressing disdain for the accommodation notifications that are sent to them, instead of grateful for the heads-up that their help and support is needed. It makes sense to me why students wouldn’t want to disclose their challenges, particularly when they could not be assured that it would actually help them in their learning any better than trying to go it alone.

There’s an air of suspicion among far too many faculty that students are attempting to use their diagnosed learning disabilities as a way to get preferential treatment that is unwarranted. Mike Caulfield, director of blended and networked learning at Washington State University Vancouver, tweeted about this misnomer back in March of 2019:

“I find it amazing that so many professors think access accommodations are easy excuses taken lightly by students, when the truth is that most students would love nothing more than to be see by a professor as “normal”

Caulfield then shared about a family member who has an accommodation, but does not disclose it at the start of most of her classes. She is too concerned that as soon as the professor becomes aware of her situation that she will be defined by her disability. “Every action is going to be interpreted through that lens. Even your normal behavior gets pathologized by others,” Caulfield conveys.

The implicit biases surrounding disabilities are ever-present, even if we aren’t able to see them in ourselves. Another common bias surrounding accommodations is to think of students requesting them as lazy. Devon Price, a social psychologist, writes in an essay on Medium

“if a student is struggling, they probably aren’t choosing to. They probably want to do well. They probably are trying. More broadly, I want all people to take a curious and empathic approach to individuals whom they initially want to judge as ‘lazy’ or irresponsible.”

Price’s last point about taking more of a curious approach reminded me of how important your question is to your doing just that, by reaching out. The reflecting you did around accommodations we can all make in our teaching to help students in their learning is wonderful. Getting students moving, over-communicating your expectations, and varying your pacing to reflect differing processing needs can all contribute to creating an environment more conducive to learning.

When it comes to deadlines for assignments, my approach varies widely. I found that when teaching as an adjunct in a doctoral program, both the culture of the program, along with the types of students who pursue their education in this way, contribute to me being less strict with deadlines. I have two days per week in which assignments are due (Tuesdays and Saturdays), but I let students know that as long as they are caught up by the start of each week (on Mondays), that they will be able to take advantage of the scaffolding that is built into the course structure.

The issue of stigmas I described earlier is particularly pronounced in doctoral programs. David M. Perry, writer and historian, writes in an article in Pacific Standard that while data does not exist regarding the rates of disability within U.S. doctoral programs, that there has been some research done on mental health, specifically. “The results are terrible,” Perry argues, noting the high rates of suicide, sexual harassment, depression and anxiety reported in a study involving 500 economics students.

There is no easy prescription to remedy these challenges. However, a big part of moving toward a more sustainable path is to remove the stigmas that exist and to normalize help-seeking behaviors.

My undergraduate courses have tighter deadlines. In fact, the ability to accomplish tasks by a certain date is an important measure in these classes. As an example, I teach a personal leadership and productivity course. It focuses on topics like setting goals, task and project management, email maintenance and calendaring. A big part of the class is being people of integrity to do what we say we will do—and that includes getting things in on time.

However, even in my undergraduate courses where I am stressing deadlines more heavily, I do build in some practices that allow for the occasional missing of a deadline without it having a big impact on a grade. This approach looks different depending on how I have structured a course. Sometimes, it might be to omit a couple of the lowest scores on low-stakes assignments. In other cases, when completion is more important for building a foundation for learning, I allow for a couple of instances for assignments to be turned in late (without a requirement to explain the reason why).

Each class policy we put in place should be based on whether or not it supports the students learning in some way. We also need to be humble about the fact that we lack the knowledge to always be able to make decisions that are defensible. I used to “ban” laptops, for example, not realizing the impact of this choice on all students. As Matthew Cortland, a writer, lawyer, and self-professed public health nerd, stresses, “even with exceptions for students who really need laptops, bans introduce discrimination and unfairness to the classroom.”

While I am still aware of the challenges that digital distractions can bring in the classroom, I prefer to think of the times when I propose that students put their digital devices away for a bit as an invitation I am making to them to a unique experience for learning. I also remain aware that there should be times in class when students are welcomed—and even encouraged—to use their devices.

You asked at the conclusion of your message to me: Am I being too much of a hard-ass?

From the little information I have, you do seem to be over-simplifying the choice that it can be for students to decide to seek accommodations. My advice is to become more familiar with just how much stigma still exists to seeking that kind of support and the discriminatory ways in which far too many faculty respond to these legally-mandated steps.

You are not alone in this, by the way. I used to find myself without much of an understanding of how those with learning and other disabilities are discriminated against in higher-education spaces. I found greater capacity for empathy and a greater awareness of the issues by following these hashtags on Twitter, along with the list of people I have curated to follow on Twitter, linked to below.

Hashtags:

#disabilityed

#disabilityawareness

#disabilityjustice

#a11y

Twitter List:

Disability Advocates and Educators

Extra credit goes to those who browse Dr. Amelia Gibson’s syllabus for her disability informatics course.

Update

Someone commented on Twitter that another piece of advice I could have provided this person on my original EdSurge column is to suggest that they consider using a Universal Design for Learning (UDL) approach. I appreciated the recommendation (there was so much to say!) and have invited this person to come on a future episode of Teaching on Higher Ed. In the meantime, this episode with Mark Hofer is a good starting point, as is episode 227 with Tom Tobin.

Photo by Alex on Unsplash

Teaching Reflections – 2019 Spring

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I have wrapped up another semester of teaching and am full of thoughts about what transpired. I already miss the students and am glad to be able to cross paths with at least some of them in the Fall semester.

Podcast listening at Back Bay, Newport Beach

Below are some of the ways in which I experimented in this class and what some of the results were.

Syllabus

Each time I go look at old syllabi these days, I find myself thinking I really sound like a jerk. My practice, lately, has been to remove the offending passages. Sometimes, a kinder, more edifying way of phrasing something is possible. Most times, I find the deletion stands and there is no need to add anything back in.

My Business Ethics syllabus was changed to remove the strict language about what ‘participation’ really means and the consequences of being disruptive in a class. My goal was to remove all language that sounded patronizing and to only add things back in that are written in such a way as to be likely perceived as supportive of one’s learning.

OpenTextbook Adoption

I decided to take the plunge and go without a textbook from a for-profit company. I had used a $70 text from a traditional textbook company in the past. This time, I used a combination of readings from two different open textbooks on the topic:

Both of the texts were licensed such that I could use portions of them within our LMS. I copied short sections of the text and always was sure to include the copyright information and links over to the primary sources. Also included were brief videos related to the same topics, as well as additional commentary that was written by me.

Course Workload Estimator to Get Realistic About Reading Requirements

The Rice Center for Teaching Excellence has a Course Workload Estimator, which is extremely helpful in determining approximately how long reading and other assignments will take to complete. It has regularly caused me to dial back the amount of reading I have assigned.

Anecdotally, this seems to contribute heavily to the likelihood that students complete that portion of the class (in addition to the other practices I use to build in some accountability). I also relied heavily on video content to fill in many of the gaps.

Shared Learning Outcomes

This ‘less is more’ approach also carried over into my learning objectives. I had five goals for the class outlined before we began. Then, during the first class, we discussed what the students were hoping to get out of the class. That dialog resulted in placing a slightly different emphasis on one of the goals I had outlined, in addition to adding an entirely new outcome that hadn’t been among the ones I brought to the table, initially.

I asked one of my students if I could share his reflections on part of the course here on my blog. He welcomed me to do so:

“One of the learning objectives that really impacted me and my thoughts in regard to ethics, in general, was learning to be a more conscious consumer. As a young adult, I find myself buying things that are just basically affordable. After learning about India’s sweatshop factories for “cheap fashion,” I realize how impactful my purchases can be in the long run. Knowing I have a voice and can write and communicate my thoughts towards a company has given me more confidence to stand up for what I believe is right or ethical.

My change in perspective came for the in-class film, ‘The True Cost,’ where filmmakers take an insiders perspective on the devastation of fast fashion and the cost it is taking on the workers who are the ones being the most impacted by the cheap clothing craze going on right now. This not only gave me a better insight as a consumer of clothing but also made me question other purchases that I make daily.

I now believe that this aspect of the class has given me something that will stay with me for the rest of my life and allow me to be ethical and support or vote with my money on companies I believe in.”

The True Cost was a great resource for the class (thank you, Ruthie and Kerry, for both suggesting it in the past!). Not only is it a tremendous film, but they have plenty of resources on their site for taking action on the learning that results from watching it.

My friend Jeff recommended another video series that I wound up adopting for this class: PBS Frontline – The Facebook Dilemma. The students did enjoy the videos, though I am not sure that the ways in which their personal information has been violated, through an unattenuated quest for profits quite got through for some of them. I didn’t show this one from John Oliver this time around (including his interview with Edward Snowden) – as it emphases more of the ways in which the government surveils its citizens and not as much on the profit motives that are more aligned with the course objectives. I know I have more room to grow, in terms of raising the awareness of our students about privacy and the profit motive – in as compelling of a way that The True Cost does for fast fashion.

Business ethics game
The final project was to create a game that taught some aspect of business ethics

Attendance

For the first time in my 15 years of teaching in a higher education context, not one student missed a single class session. There were a couple of times when people were late, but since it was so rare that anyone was missing, we would often text them and check in to see where they were.

One guy had gotten caught up in playing a video game in what Csikszentmihalyi would call a state of flow. We managed to break him out of his unbroken focus to remind him that we had started class. This is something that normally would have made me angry in my early years of teaching. Today, I’m glad to have gotten over myself enough to know that I am not the center of my students’ universes – and that this is something to celebrate and not to be angry about.

The other day, I ran into someone else from the class and was talking about how surprised I was that everyone had done so well on attendance. He replied, “I think we were there all the time because we really wanted to be there. We knew if we missed a class – that we would be missing out on something really good.”

We listened to a podcast as a class – and took a walk on Back Bay. This student became my podcast buddy – as she discovered this powerful way of learning and shared recommendations on what to listen to with me.

I used to spend a lot more time thinking about policies that would use punitive methods to maintain a certain minimum level of acceptable attendance rates. Now, I invest that time in creating positive learning experiences that students won’t want to miss. It seems to be paying off!

Grades

The grades for the students in this class were also quite high. I am aware that this will be frowned upon by some of my colleagues who believe that only a certain percentage of high grades should be awarded in a given class, regardless of student achievement.

Some of my fellow professors got into a discussion with a candidate a couple of weeks ago about the potential for grade inflation. They shared their beliefs about the importance of always having grades that spread across a curve of potential levels. The perspective is that if too many students earn A grades – that there are a certain percentage of individuals who won’t work even harder as they might if greater levels of granularity were identified and more grades were pushed down to the lower levels.

The conversation reminded me of when Cathy N. Davidson was on Teaching in Higher Ed, episode 169 to speak about her book: A New Education.

She shared about the history of grades and how they first started out as a means for assessing the quality of meat. The meatpackers initially opposed the system, since it wasn’t complex enough to accommodate the various qualities and characteristics of the meat they were being asked to rate. Davidson wonders if the system wasn’t good enough for the meat packers, why so many of us continue to mindlessly practice it today?

My beliefs about grades are all over the place these days, as I continue to be challenged by conversations I have been able to have on the podcast, such as:

  • Episode 217: How to Ungrade with Jesse Stommel
  • Episode 209: Antiracist Writing Assessment Ecologies with Asao Inoue
  • Episode 29: Specifications Grading with Linda Nilson
  • Episode 228: How to Create Engaging Online Classes with Laura Gibbs (only a portion of the dialog is about grading – but well worth a listen)

Business ethics games - created by the students

Your turn

How did your teaching go this semester? Did you experiment with anything new? If so, how did it go?

5 Tips for Teaching Live Online

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5 tips for teaching live online classes

This article was originally published on the EdSurge website. 

The following is the latest installment of the Toward Better Teaching advice column. You can pose a question for a future column here.

Dear Bonni: I'm wanting to learn about best practices for virtual courses that are “live” (e.g., using a platform like Zoom). It differs both from face-to-face classroom learning and traditional (asynchronous) online courses. I'd love to know about resources addressing this learning format. —Keith Johnson. director of theological development at Cru. My team facilitates and teaches graduate-level theological courses for a non-profit.

Teaching a class by live video conference is quite different than being in person with a room full of students. But there are some approaches we can draw from traditional classrooms that work quite well in a live, online environment.

Here are some recommendations for virtual teaching:

Prepare Your Environment

I have witnessed some cringe-worthy moments when other professors try video conference sessions without thinking through their set-up in advance.

One rookie mistake is to have the light source behind the professor’s head, which makes it look like the person is having some kind of out-of-body experience. Being sure that the light source in your room is originating from somewhere in the room that is behind your webcam and shining light on your face is essential.

Another common error is for a person to sit in front of the camera in a way that makes it look like the top of their head is cut off—which can look distractingly comic to students.

It often helps to raise your laptop or webcam up high enough that it is at least eye-level, if not slightly above that. I have a picture on one of my Teaching in Higher Ed blog posts that illustrates the difference it makes when you get the camera at an appropriate level, versus how much chin and nostrils are exposed when you don’t.

It turns out that eye contact is important, even in an online setting. So it must be simulated by looking directly at the camera on your device, or at least somewhere close-by.

This video has a bit more information about how I prepare my environment to hold an online class.

Get Good Equipment

Until I invested in some high-quality equipment for online sessions, I didn’t realize it made that much of a difference. The essential items for hosting sessions include a webcam with at least 1080p resolution, an external microphone and a headset.

Alternatively, a more-sophisticated headset might include both a microphone and a headset. Below are the products I typically use when facilitating live classes:

My absolute most preferred (and adored) video conference tool is Zoom. When I am leading a Zoom session, I can indicate which webcam, microphone, and audio output source to use. The camera that is integrated with my monitor doesn’t have as nice of video output as the Logitech does, so I hook that hardware device onto the monitor and it actually winds up covering the other camera up completely. All sorts of headsets would work in terms of being able to hear what others have to say on the session. Since I carry my Apple AirPods with me pretty much wherever I go, they make the most sense to use for that part of my set up.

Even though your computer likely already has speakers and a microphone, having other hardware to accomplish those feats make it that much less likely that you will have any issues with feedback noises during the session (at least coming from your end of things). When sound comes out of a speaker and is then fed straight back into a nearby microphone, you get that awful feedback noise that for most of us is like giant fingernails scratching across a chalkboard.

A headset that has both sound input (coming in your ears) and output (a microphone included on the headset) will mean you do not require two separate devices (a microphone and headphones). Since my BlueYeti is also always sitting on my desk and has superior sound input to the Apple AirPods, I typically select it as my microphone during a Zoom session.

Set Norms

One of the norms I used to set for all my synchronous classes was to ask everyone to leave their webcam on the entire time and to not mute themselves. In a conversation with Maha Bali, associate professor of practice at the Center for Learning and teaching at the American University in Cairo, I discovered that I was being pretty culturally inflexible with that requirement. She shared about how sometimes people in her classes might not want to show their faces at all, or may even prefer to engage purely through the chat function.

Since receiving Bali’s cautions, I now talk through the downsides to keeping ourselves muted while we are participating in these online sessions. It is so easy to forget to unmute yourself when you have something to share. I suggest that we may be able to best simulate an in-person conversation if we leave our webcams on and avoid muting our microphones, but I do not insist on everyone adopting these norms.

Another norm I attempt to instill in all my synchronous sessions is to regularly encourage people to share their screens. Zoom has a setting where you can allow attendees to share their screen during a session and that is the option I use. If someone were to inadvertently share their screen, or if I ever had some renegade screen sharer, it is easy enough to take control back from anyone who is currently sharing their screen. I have never had any issues with allowing for quick sharing of screens from attendees and it becomes an established norm with most of my classes that people will be prepared for a little “show and tell” at any moment during the session.

Mix it Up

The most important way I have found to engage learners during online sessions is to regularly be changing what we are doing. One minute, I might have them in breakout rooms discussing a topic. After that, I may have individuals post on a virtual whiteboard one takeaway from their dialog.

I hardly ever have student presentations take place with the entire class. Instead, I ask each group to designate a timekeeper and have short presentations take place in breakout groups of three to four people, maximum. Then, when people rejoin the full class, I ask what surprises came out in their conversations, or what we should be sure gets shared with the larger group.

Online polls are another way to break things up. If I do wind up doing a short, five-minute lecture during an online class, I still break up that duration with at least one or two polls, asking students to answer either a fact-based or opinion-based question about what I have shared.

Practice Interacting Online

If you really want to get good at leading online sessions, it helps to be a participant in them regularly. I find great benefits to engaging online at conferences that I am unable to attend in person through Virtually Connecting.

I am also finding more and more that people enjoy even one-on-one meetings to be held over Zoom, in order for us to easily be able to share our screens and see each other’s non-verbal cues.

Ultimately, I find people get more out of our online sessions when we talk less and get the participants to engage more.