Zoom teaching goes viral

Well, there really wasn’t any choice and I was proud that ETH led the educational change in Switzerland when our rectorate stopped all presence lectures in the 5th week of the semester. Dang – still a full week with 7 hours. Just a week longer and I would have been mostly through with it ….. Lets bite the bullet, but how do I actually give a lecture online?

The solution from central services to lecture in empty halls, record the slides and voice from the off with no black board or live streaming was clearly not what I wanted. Within hours rescue came from the Center for Active Learning and computer savvy lab members: live streaming via Zoom (never heard of it). Zoom looked easy enough at first glance, although it is something else when you have 200 students watching you and something doesn’t work. All lecturers know the rising adrenaline level when the bell sounds, (some) attention turns to you, and your slides don’t show on the screen …..

Anyway, a new software did not appear an unsurmountable challenge even to me, but how to make the lecture interactive? My slides did not need to be changed much, but without a tablet I needed to be creative for what I would normally do on the board. In the end I did hand drawings on paper and took pictures at various stages. Neither elegant nor beautiful but I think it did the job. For my first Zoom lecture on the first lockdown Monday, Katja Köhler from CAL was “holding my hand” with appropriate 2 meters distance, which was super helpful as I had apparently activated a waiting room from which students had to be admitted into the lecture, and many came late. Yes, my cursor was too small (under systems preference, accessibility, display, cursor) and I had not yet figured out how to turn it into a laser pointer (click on the bottom left corner in the slide show view). Half way through the lecture I started to use the chat function more effectively. Although it certainly was odd to lecture into a sterile computer display, it somehow worked much better than I had hoped for. The students were amazing, possibly just as naïve and curious as me, and probably happy that things somehow continued in a reasonable manner. When I started to ask questions, they actually unmuted themselves and answered – what a relieve.

Within a matter of days all of ETH became zooming experts, and I certainly became more adept, too. Turns out the chat function lowers the hurdle for students to ask questions during lecture, providing a type of feedback that would be good to have even in normal lectures. With some effort interaction is still possible with the Zoom function of yes or no polls and the EduApp also works in the remote setting. Most importantly, active verbal participation works quite robustly when you make an effort, for example to wait out a minute of awkward silence. In particular the 2nd semester students amazed me in speaking up even though more than 120 were online, and I hope that some of this active participation will eventually also happen with the 4th semesters. Although recordings will be available, the vast majority of students in my lectures voted for live streaming. It maintains at least a basic level of interaction, and it certainly feels much better to talk to a virtual audience rather than simply recording.

Two weeks into the lockdown, Zoom lectures became familiar to lecturers and students alike. Yes, it still is weird to talk into the void of a computer screen, but it is probably for the better that participant cameras are off, in particular when streaming at 8:15, judging from a few accidental camera activations. Some of the changes that were now forced upon us might even find their way into future teaching. I can see the main protagonist of new teaching concepts, Ernst Hafen, smiling somewhere in his home office. It remains a huge challenge to transfer practicals and block courses into this new format, but, overall, it all worked surprisingly swift and well thanks to the extra efforts of lecturers, CAL, and flexibility and forgiveness on the side of students. Sarah Springman’s early and bold decision to revoke exam failures in the summer was an important signal that we are all in this together – and has since then become known as the “ETH model” that – in some cases triggered by student protests – was later copied by many other schools.