As the coronavirus spreads, higher education institutions are facing a major challenge: how can they continue to offer instruction if face to face classes and lectures are closed? An increasing number are moving classes online as a short-term solution. Moreover, as students want to be actively engaged in their own learning, universities are proposing new forms of teaching and learning. Distance education and MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses) using pre-recorded material have been a very popular solution to this challenge, but there is another specific type of distance learning: synchronous courses, in which face-to-face and remote students receive instruction together in real time.

On this regard, Eurydice interviewed Senior Lecturer Sophie Queuniet from Columbia University. Her professional experience has been mainly focused on the teaching of French as a foreign language. She co-authored the French Online project with Chris Jones at Carnegie Mellon University, which received the 2007 Access to Language Education Award for best publicly available on-line instructional language materials. She also just finished writing the Intermediate level of French Online with colleagues at Carnegie Mellon and the Français interactif team of University of Texas at Austin (UTA). It was piloted at UTA in Spring 2020.

Sophie now uses a 100 % online synchronous approach. She started this practice on 9 March when Columbia University closed down because of the pandemic.

What are the advantages of 100 % online synchronous learning? Why would you recommend it?

It helps to keep the contact with my students and to motivate them. It is well known that asynchronous online learning (like MOOC’s) has a high attrition rate. With synchronous teaching, students get immediate feedback, immediate answers to their questions without any break in the learning momentum. When a student needs further examples, the teacher can provide them. In an asynchronous environment, if the student has a question, the teacher might not see the email or answer it immediately. The motivation/enthusiasm for learning, wanting to persevere even with doubts/questions is often cut short.

What are the disadvantages?

What colleagues and I have observed is that synchronous teaching is not always possible and this for many reasons: material ones (no access to wifi or bad connection, having to share a computer between many people in the family), personal reasons such as health, family situation – if you have several young children or ill parents you need to take care of, location ones (different time zones), medical reasons but also for reasons associated with learning styles. Some people really prefer asynchronous learning. You can learn at your own rhythm, especially if your schedule prevents you from attending regular synchronous lessons.

Do you think students are able to develop a sense of community through online synchronous communication?

I cannot really answer that question because I have never been in the situation where I synchronously taught online from the beginning. I had already taught my classes for seven weeks face to face when we had to move online. However, I just participated in a Zoom workshop with teachers who have done synchronous distance teaching for years at Yale, Cornell and Columbia and according to them, it is absolutely possible to develop a sense of community that way. Here are some of the tips they gave us:

•    Group projects

•    Use breakout rooms of 2-3 people (Breakout rooms are sub-rooms that can be created within a meeting or training session).

•    Always give time (beginning of class or during break time) to students to speak alone without the teacher (even if they speak in English)

•    Use the present situation, the reality of the situation to teach (describe the weather where you live, your background images on Zoom …)

•    Make sure that everybody knows each other’s first names and use them when they address their classmates.

•    Give the role of ‘captain’ to someone to report questions/problems from the whole class.

•    Use a google doc live during the class where every student is encouraged to post something (vocab, question, suggestion, comment). The teacher then edits it and it’s there for students to go back to.

If we have to teach online in the fall, during the first two weeks of class, I will write a short bio (or record it depending on the level I’m teaching), have students read/listen to it and I will ask them to do the same and share it with everyone. I will also ask that everyone comment on it. 

How do you keep students’ motivation?

A cynical answer would be ‘grades’ BUT since Columbia University is doing Pass/Fail option, students are not motivated by that anymore. I was expecting students to lose motivation in the second half of the semester but they have not. They keep giving their best. One reason is definitely that they are such smart students, not in the sense of students who ace every test, but they are deep thinkers who know that they are in it for something else than grades. But it is true that I work a lot on each and every class, making sure that I’m always available outside of class. I also prepare interactive classes, making sure I vary activities using all kinds of technologies and tools that keep students engaged: pear deck, quizziz, kahoot. I have as well tailored final projects to each of my students. If they work on something that interests them or that they enjoy will help a lot. For instance, with my Elementary French Online 2 class, I decided to give them as final written projects things they are interested in instead of one single comprehensive grammar exam. Report on a chapter of Camus’s ‘La Peste’ (law student), an article on Bacchus by Vernant (Classics student), transcription of Couperin’s notes on how to play the harpsichord (Juilliard student), etc.

How do you set the stage for successful interaction?

Here are my tips:

•    Mute audio for better sound quality

•    Use the speaker’s view on Zoom (gallery view is distracting in my opinion)

•    Share screen: the teacher’s and the students’ screen (presentation, writing)

•    Use breakout rooms

•    Share video clips (making sure students turn off their video to have better streaming and making sure to click on ‘Optimize Screen Share for Video Clips’ and ‘Share Computer Sound’)

•    Use the Annotate or Whiteboard functions on Zoom. You can show a map of France and ask students to place various cities.

•    Use the Pear Deck app: tool you can add on to google slides. It makes for a very interactive class.

•    Call students one at a time by name instead of waiting for them to participate. That helps minimize awkward moments of silence.

Here are some other ideas from colleagues: have students host the Zoom session. Use slack for chat sessions in real time without being in breakout rooms. Use ‘lucidchart.com’ to create artifacts or texts collaboratively.

What are the essential things to be a better online teacher?

Be flexible and open-minded vis-à-vis new technology. It might be daunting to try new things. It might seem gimmicky, but you try them, and you realize that it does help with motivation or interaction, and you realize that students are so quick to adopt it. They like the quick pace of it, the fun aspect of it.

How do you organize your lessons from a practical point of view?

I organize them just as I did before. I just have to think carefully beforehand what document my students will need to have for class. You cannot just hand in material like before. You have to post files on our course repository (Canvas) and send an email, or put it in the assignment for the day, to remind students to have printed it or downloaded it. I have a color code on my course notes. I highlight in yellow everything that students need to have beforehand. I highlight in green what I can just share on the screen with them. You have to know for instance that once students are in breakout rooms, they cannot see your shared screen anymore. So, I make sure they can access the document via Canvas or I ask them to take a screenshot of it before they go into breakout rooms. I make sure that I incorporate group work in my class plans. I have also made more of an effort to vary classes (activities, order, type of documents) because it is so easy to disengage when you are on Zoom.

Any suggestions to teachers that have to prepare this for the first time? There are many given the current situation …

Go to your tech team if you have one. Take Zoom workshops to get acquainted with the technology (share screen, white board, chat, poll, etc.). Ask a friend, colleague or family member to practice with you beforehand. Talk to colleagues, share a google doc where you post ideas, tips, etc. If you are a successful teacher offline, you will be a very successful teacher online. You know how to prepare a class, with a well-organized outline. It is really about getting used to the technology and using all the new tools you have on hand to create an interesting and interactive class. It might look daunting at first. When I think back on my first two weeks online, it makes me cringe. There were moments of silence, I felt that I did not have every one’s attention, it felt boring, etc. but I am entering my sixth week in that mode and I feel more confident. There are still some minor technological issues sometimes, but I do not panic about it. I am often looking forward to teaching my classes because I have new tools to share with my students.

How do you ensure not running cyber security risks?

I do not know if you've heard about ‘Zoom bombings’. That is when Zoom school sessions are hacked by people who post indecent pictures or racist slurs on the screen. After this wave of incidents, Columbia University has asked us to add a password to our Zoom sessions. I don't know if that is enough. I have heard that Zoom has not done enough in terms of security, even though they recently fixed a few issues, but what choice do I have? I have added a browser extension to Firefox and Google Chrome called Ghostery that blocks ads and trackers. The second thing I will add is that our Zoom sessions are set to automatically record the class. If all students are in attendance, I turn off recording. If I have to leave a recorded Zoom session, I will just leave it on Canvas for a week and then delete it.

Many faculties are switching very quickly to online learning following the covid19 outbreak. Do you think this will mark a point of no return for the future?

I hope not. Many studies on distance learning vs face to face learning have been already conducted since the 2000s and the results have always been that students prefer face to face classes. I hear that some college students are thinking of taking a semester off if their university is going to teach online in the fall. Students in the US do not want to pay $60 000 to see a talking head on Zoom. They can get that for free on a free MOOC.

However, if some classes are already online, they will stay online (I am thinking of language classes in big state universities where it is cheaper to pay one teacher for a huge student body online) but these are asynchronous classes with little one-on-one interaction.

Authors: Anna Maria Volpe and David Crosier