in some way... you actually meet the student more intensely than during an ordinary lecture.

I never thought I would be an "online teacher". I thought that I love meeting the students in the classroom too much for that, but of course, now when the small microscopic entities have invaded the earth, even the most stubborn teacher has to change his mind. I have now both finished one course and started a new course with 50+ students, teaching them in their isolated homes on a course that was not originally meant to be online. It has been a very chaotic experience, with both positives and negatives, and I want to share some of my thoughts about this first month teaching from quarantine. 

It's the interaction, the unexpected detours into experience and non-anticipated questions that makes teaching what it is.

The setup is very simple, I have a laptop with two extra monitors attached, an A5 Wacom pen tablet and a fiber connection. The sound is handled through an ASUS ROG 7.1 gamer headset (which of course is a giant overkill, but the sound is good, and it isolates me from the surroundings). For the lectures we use Zoom, as stipulated by my University. This works fine most of the time, at least now when they added extra capacity to the local servers. 

The courses I teach currently are in User Interface Programming, and they are both project based, which means that I can do quite a lot of the work through supervision online. The examinations are a combined home exam and an oral examination, which also is fortunate, since it has transformed well to online teaching. I never examine things that you can Google, but you really have to understand the topic of the questions, so online cheating is difficult (albeit not impossible). 

Are they really listening?

So, with all that, what has happened? Well, the first lectures were very difficult to hold, I have to admit. There is simply not the same contact. It's a fact, and it just something we have to accept: group teaching online is very prone to be boring, since it is very difficult to get a interactive lecture going. Since I am very active when I am lecturing, I don't feel very comfortable sitting in front of the computer presenting overhead slides that are no longer shown overhead. I feel amazingly boring, to put it bluntly. And, to make it even worse many of the students don't turn on their webcams. This means I have very few means of "reading the audience". Are they really listening? 

Most of the students don't ask question via the microphone, for good or bad. However, the chat questions are also difficult, because they distract the presentation flow even more, than spoken questions. Essentially, I would like to have an assistant who could monitor the chat board, so that I don't have to split my attention there. In a way, I feel that it might be better to prerecord the lectures and post them online, rather than presenting live, but on the other hand  - of what use is the the teacher? It's the interaction, the unexpected detours into experience and non-anticipated questions that makes teaching what it is. 

Finally, I have now had to listen to the recordings to edit out breaks and the start and ending parts of the lectures. Oh, what horror... I really seem to use one word vastly more than any other. Guess which?  Ahhhhh, Ahhhhh, Ahhhh...  Yes, those sounding pauses. Big note to self: Train on removing them from my speech! It is horrible to listen to, and I don't envy my students. I just hope this is at least to some degree due to the new media, and not how I sound in reality. 

So, this sounds like mostly negatives? Is there anything positive about teaching online? Yes, of course there is. Strange as it may feel, it seems that it consumes less of my time on non-essential things. I think that I can focus more on the teaching itself than on the non-important administration. Even though the interaction during the lessons is less direct, the teaching itself feels more to the point and focusing on the teaching. Maybe not during the lectures, but I have a large amount of supervision as part of the projects on the course, and these group meetings tend to be far more effective, and shorter, since there is less social introduction and chit-chat around. In a way, I miss that of course, but from a practical point of view, it seems more efficient. 

I have also noticed that the material handed out to students has to be even more well prepared now, when they have to access it online. Program code, examples, etc. must really talk for themselves. Well, that should have been obvious already previously, right? Yes, probably, but it wasn't. The students asked questions during the breaks between lectures, and you explained things that were unclear. Now that these small meetings are much fewer or even non-existent,  the material has to be much more self-explanatory than before. 

One final positive thing, is that I have found that I really do have time even to give individual support, if any of the students has problems with some part of the course. The connecting is very simple, I can remain sitting and don't have to go anywhere, and the same thing goes for the student, who will just check in and out in the time slot. In this way, even a five minute meeting will feel meaningful, since I don't have to travel half an hour to meet up somewhere. I think this is actually beneficial for the course as such, even if it has not yet been too many individual meetings. And, during the individual meetings you actually meet the student more intensely than during an ordinary lecture. 

All in all, what do I think about teaching online now, after a week of forced transition? Well, it seems to work, at least when everybody are aware of the situation and realises that nothing can really be perfect now. I am amazed by how well the change has gone, as a whole, even though it has been a lot of work. There are a few issues that I have noticed need some additional consideration, such as.

• It is necessary to increase the interaction between teacher and student.
• It is also necessary to rethink the material, so that it is less "boring" with this type of teaching. 
• We can actually become less stressed when teaching online, once we have adapted to the idea.
• It was less of a challenge to do the change
  • some things required more attention than anticipated...
  • some things less...
• We need to have better tools for the distance teaching in this way. Skype, Zoom, Hangouts, etc. are tools for meeting, not really teaching. 
• The video recording and editing of the lecture takes far too long time, but it is really necessary. 

There are surely many more things to attend to with time, but these are my initial reflections. If you want to discuss distance teaching with me, then don't hesitate to contact me.

I hope you find this post interesting and helpful. I will come back with more experiences from this as time goes by.