The above slide, with student models sportingly pretending to take it all seriously, is from a very helpful webinar I attended today on "Designing Learning Outcomes and Engaging Assessments For The Online Classroom." It was helpful in part because the instructor teaches almost entirely asynchronously - that is, not through live zoom sessions - and described all sorts of engaging ways she "puts students to work" in their learning. Asynchronous requires lots of careful setup from the instructor, far more than planning an activity in an onsite classroom, but it's dawning on me that the online context's asynchronous possibilities offer the chance to facilitate new kinds of learning, not just distantly replicating those with which we're already familiar.
(This discovery is like the one I imagine many organizations are making. I know my clergy friends are articulating similar changes of perspective. Zoom is a lot better than expected in replicating in-person worship, for instance, but that's not so much because it replicates what we did in the past - there's much it cannot - as because it offers new forms of community. Since it may be a very long time before we can resume communal singing, peace-giving and Eucharist, it seems mete to think about these newly discovered possibilities, and to recognize and develop them not as substitutes for an old normal but as components of an emerging new one. Our rector says she "would hate to lose" the sense of a community watching and caring for each other which the zoom gallery provides, or the engagement in fellow parishioners' lives which breakout "coffee hour" affords (and learning people's names!). There's something nice about seeing into the places where people live... and how cool is it to be able to include people who can't come to church, because of illness or having moved out of town! There are downsides, of course, notably for those for whom zoom is inaccessible or offputting, but it does seem this is the time to let the "old normal" go and start to build the "new normal" in which online elements have a meaningful place.)
For my classes I've been swinging back and forth between thinking in terms of primarily synchronous discussion - isn't that what we do? - and significantly asynchronous learning which allows more students more voice (not to mention those in time zones far away), probably with online widgets added to synchronous sessions too (like the google.docs I used last semester). To be honest, part of what's pushing me toward asynchronous possibilities is the experience of being on the receiving end of synchronous online courses, however nifty: the student sits passively as breakout groups are formed, or slides are called up, all learning momentum draining away. The breakout groups themselves can be awkward and uncomfortable, and you're trapped in them until released by the instructor. More fundamentally, the more we instructors curate the students' interactions, the less active they are in their learning. And there still seems something panopticonish to me about the zoom gallery, even as I'm spooked when people turn their cameras off. Active and passive aren't where I thought they were.
So here's where my thinking is right now. Asynchronous teaching, while in one way much more directed than an in-person seminar class, allows students a variety of widely different ways of engaging with the material and with each other. Since it's available at times convenient to them, there's no dead time waiting for transitions in synchronous gatherings - indeed, the hope is they'll be more alert and engaged. Word on the street is that students take online discussions seriously, even perhaps attending more carefully to what their classmates are saying, taking more time to form their thoughts - and, of course, everyone gets a say. The synchronous session works well as gathering everyone's work together, recognizing and building on connections students have already been making, rather than counting on the alchemy of the classroom to bring them all forth from scratch.
I need to learn how to design assignments which let students go beyond what I've imagined, and to moderate discussions where genuinely new connections can be made. I usually give students considerable voice in determining where our discussions go and I don't want to lose that. We'll need longer synchronous sessions, uninterrupted by breakout rooms, to allow for that, probably with various roles for student facilitators. But I'm thinking I'll also invite them to help me construct asynchronous as well as synchronous interactions.
They will know, better than me, what works and what doesn't!
