Going Virtual

My basic tips on teaching online:

• Flip the classroom so lectures are pre-recorded and treat the live sessions as discussion section
• Your recorded lectures should show your face even if you think it doesn’t add value, it does (just look at all the famous YouTubers)!
• You need to get students working first before they can breakout into different rooms otherwise they feel very lost and will happily not interact in their breakout rooms.
• Students should share their faces in breakout rooms
• The instructor(s) need to go around to different breakout rooms to check-in on people’s status
• I encourage live questions through the “chat” capabilities.
• I have quizzes/surveys between lectures to make sure students are keeping up. If they do not respond between classes, they lose the credit. My goals here are to encourage them to keep up with the lecture rather than to assses their knowledge so I’m okay if they discuss with peers.

Tools for recording lectures

Here is my open source setup:

• I use Seashore as my blackboard.
• I use Jupyter Notebooks on Firefox for my computing tasks.
• I did spend money on a Wacom tablet
• I did spend money on a Logitech G635 headset with a microphone which is pretty comfortable. The prolonged pressure over your head can be quite annoying. A friend recommended against a super fancy mic because they can pick up very small vibrations from your floor (I live in NYC Chinatown).
• I used Open Broadcaster Software to make “live-stream-like” videos to switch between different screens while keeping my face shown.
  • Note, this is NOT a video editor so you’ll need another software if you want to speed-up, cut, add filters to the videos. I avoid this because making mistakes make you more human!
• I uploaded my videos on Vimeo because it has a reasonable free-version. Here’s an example lecture I’ve uploaded.

Designing the discussion

A lot more planning is necessary around the discussion

• The section should be at most 2 problems that can be broken into different steps.
• The problems should be somewhat open-ended that requires some exploration from the students.
• I would try to “start” the problem with the entire class before going into breakout rooms.
• TAs and instructors should switch breakout rooms (3-4 students each) every 2 minutes so you don’t end up working on the problem.
• I recommend asking people to show their faces in the breakout room but not in the main lecture in case people’s slow internet become an issue.