My final teaching commitments before I retire are fully online. I have taken on 2 groups of Business School Master's level students of Management who would like to learn some French, some are absolute beginners, some have experience or speak another romance language. This is not for credit, it is an optional course for which the resources have already been placed on a moodle course and which has previously been provided as a face to face experience. Attendance is the only criteria for assessment. There are over 100 students on the class and all share access to the moodle environment. They are not grouped in any way, all can see everything. I have about 40 of them and this week I met them for the first time in a Microsoft Teams channel I set up for our synchronous sessions. There will be 8 weeks @ 2 hours a week, all running at night. They are joining me from wherever they happen to be right know due to covid, some in Warwick, many in Asia.
Anyone reading this with any teaching experience will be able to decode what I have just described - a highway to hell in teaching terms! A hiding to nothing perhaps. Putting to one side the pedagogical challenges of designing for this mixed ability, time poor group of students I would like to capture here some of the many issues that present themselves in the light of my rich experience of teaching with technology.
Closing psychological distance matters.
In a physical classroom there are many techniques I use to do this. Some may call them ice breaker activities but they go beyond the "first impressions" stage in a language class. My constraints in this setting are imposed by the requirement to teach using MS Teams. This (like many of the tools institutions provide for teaching) is not designed for teachers. It is cobbled together from the leftovers of tools created and sold to businesses, often with the tagline that they are solutions to better team work. In MS Teams case it remixes a huge investment made in buying Skype (see this from 2011) with the extensive use of MS Office 365 in HEIs. Recouping return on investment whilst claiming to be a covid solution. So, once the students have their email address (courtesy of Office) they can join a Teams channel and hold meetings. So far so business like. They can even join as a guest but they will then have restricted access. However, in a teaching context where one is trying to establish a collegiate, collaborative and welcoming environment this just increases the work the teacher must do. Student names appear in the room in surname/first name order. Many of my students have very long names, meaning is is very difficult to see their first name in the participant pane, so I have to cross reference with a separate spreadsheet to avoid mistakenly speaking to people using their surname. No possible renaming as we have in zoom, no freedom for students to access under a name of their choice. Reminiscent of a public school classroom from the era of Jeeves and Wooster. So far so colonial.
Feeling at home.
The combination of a Teams space and a moodle course means that tutor time has to be invested in a guided tour. Despite already having a recorded version of this prepared before I started teaching, most had not seen it and so some serious hand holding was needed. I used screenshare to show everyone around both spaces, sharing links in the chat so they could investigate further. I designed a task in sub teams (group work within MS teams) for students to input into a notepad shared document how they wish to use our precious time together. This gave them experience of jumping into a different virtual room and collaborating together. This is do-able in Teams and by and large we got through it but it is very clunky compared to the interfaces I am used to for breakout rooms (in Zoom/Bb Collaborate for example). No quick room allocation through drag and drop, no one-stop recall message to call everyone back in 5 mins, instead I visited each room in turn to invite them back the main room, interrupting whatever they were doing to demand their presence. I certainly didn't feel at home.
Emotions matter.
We know that learning is positively or adversely affected by one's emotions. Most virtual rooms acknowledge this by offering a range of emoticons or reaction images which participants can use during conversations, giving a guide to the "room temperature". In MS Teams you can raise your hand and just like in school you can be ignored! It is not easy to navigate through a large group of students in order to ensure everyone feels heard. I became very reliant on good old fashioned teaching skills - namely my voice - to inject warm and welcoming vibes and encourage everyone to use the chat so I could deal with their queries. People who don't feel heard just get noisier or withdraw. Another cultural reference came to my head: Joyce Grenfell. Those were not the days! Of course there were individuals for whom I didn't have a Warwick email address and they couldn't participate in the group activity as their guest status prevented them from seeing the subgroups. More work for me to sort out and update their details and more disappointment for them. It is lonely when you can't get through the door.
So all in all, this term will be a challenging one. One where I am constantly reminded that my 10 years of experience through virtual exchange, although it has equipped me for anything, has failed to result in evidence informed technological provision for great teaching and learning. Plus ça change!
