It’s the first day of the new term! Interesting to see how far the countryside along the line from Castle Cary to Exeter has changed in just a month, especially with all the warm weather we’ve had in recent weeks. An excuse to drop into The Exploding Bakery next to Exeter Central station, as it’s over a month since I last indulged in one of their cakes. Lovely to meet up with colleagues again. Above all, however, it’s the culmination of my final-year Thucydides module, the student conference on Thucydides’ Contemporary Relevance, in which they all offer their different perspectives on the text that they’ve been slogging through all year, culminating in a guest lecture and general debate. Well, that was the plan…
Instead, here I am at home, wondering whether that current slight headache, achy shoulders and tiredness is a sign that I am inevitably succumbing to the virus, or just the legacy of an energetic weekend in the garden and a rather disturbed night. My sense of seasonal change is limited to the aforementioned garden (which is doing very well so far this year, because of all the time we’ve been able to devote to it in lieu of any other activities), and the ‘student conference’ now consists of uploading everyone’s PowerPoint slides and notes to the VLE. I think a fair proportion are focusing on Thucydides and COVID-19; it might have been fun – since now the only person likely to be engaging with this material is me – to have got everyone to do that topic, but that would be unfair on those who’ve been planning their presentations for well over a month.
The combination of this and a couple of interesting threads on the Twitter this morning has got me thinking about the future – what is teaching going to look like next term? (Especially, as some of my dreams have made abundantly clear, as I am very definitely suffering from lecturing withdrawal). I’m due to take on a substantial admin role next year, so scheduled just to teach two final-year modules rather than, as this year, doing a big (150-odd students) survey course as well. I keep changing my mind about whether this is a good thing or not.
To start with the big one: it’s a no-brainer that this will be impossible under conditions of social distancing – it takes 10 minutes to get the previous group out of the room and my group into it, under ‘normal’ conditions of everyone milling around in close proximity, and idea of two lines of evenly-distanced students, each line about a quarter of a mile in length, somehow avoiding contact with one another and with all the other students trying to get to or from different rooms is simply inconceivable. Besides, the whole point of my lectures is to get the students talking in small groups at least some of the time – doesn’t work if they’re all two metres apart. So, the whole thing might as well go online; it’s then manifestly obvious that there’s no point at all in expecting everyone to log in live (even if the system could cope), so it becomes a matter of redesigning the whole thing as a different kind of learning experience.
Much of the time, this feels quite unappealing; as I think I’ve commented here before, I enjoy the performance and improvisation aspects of lecturing, and the challenge of getting discussion going in a big group, and I’ve found this year difficult at times because of the demand for me to change my style of PowerPoint slides (which also necessitates a change of lecturing style) and to make available (which is also to say: to fix) much more in advance. Creating an online module would leave even less space for such flexibility. But I can think of some interesting things I could try, if I needed to.
The big advantage, I think, is knowing that I would have to start more or less from scratch. The reason why it often feels an advantage that I’ll (probably) just be doing small final-year seminars is that it feels less impossible to try to recreate the usual seminar experience online; the reason why it doesn’t always feel like an advantage is the suspicion that actually it may not be so easy and/or maybe I shouldn’t be thinking in those terms at all. It’s possible to see Microsoft Teams (the university’s mandated system) being used for a seminar of 10-12 students, where a class of 150 is clearly a non-starter. But having now had a couple of department meetings via Teams, I’m sceptical of the value of the experience. We’re going to be putting a lot of thought and effort into creating protocols for online class discussion that might, perhaps, be better invested in thinking about whether online class discussion is what we actually need to prioritising. The fact that it’s currently the core of these modules isn’t set in stone; it’s worth keeping in mind that it is, in the end, the means to the end.
Again, part of the issue has to be: do I instinctively try to preserve something resembling the normal seminar experience because that’s what a final-year module is all about, or do I do it partly because it’s what I’m used to and partly because I enjoy the experience myself, improvising different ways of getting discussion going, responding to unexpected questions or perspectives etc.? If the discussion were more structured, as a result of being set up properly in advance, might it be possible to get more people more involved – and even more so if it takes place asynchronously, so people have time to think and compose their answers, rather than privileging the ability to come up with coherent thoughts spontaneously?
The really unpredictable factor, of course, is what sort of external constraints there will be on how we are expected to go about switching to online delivery (assuming that this becomes unavoidable) at some point over the summer. Probably there is no point in thinking too hard about this, if I might have to tear everything up again in due course. But it’s difficult not to wonder about what’s going to happen – if only, let’s be honest, as a means of grasping some illusion of control: goodness knows what’s going to happen to society, economy or higher education over the next four months, but I *can* still think of how to deliver my teaching effectively, on the assumption that there will be some students to deliver it to. The cats are getting rather sick of it…
Sphinx 
I think you make an important point about not confusing means and ends. This can be a struggle when it comes to course structures and assessment methods even at the best of times. On the positive side my (very limited) experience so far suggests that online discussions via chat can be pretty good. It’s different from being in a classroom of course but they are easier to de-centralise, and do give everyone a little bit more time to think and compose their contributions. So far though I’ve seen it work with groups where everyone already knew each other: I’d expect the dynamics to be different again if the discussions were purely online from the start.
I think a lot is going to depend on the particular features of different programmes. Teams shows only four people at a time, so the only way of joining the discussion is just to butt in – not great. I hear that Zoom has a facility to show that you want to say something, but we’re not allowed to use it. In either case, it seems to require strong chairing and control, which is exactly the sort of seminar discussion I try to get away from normally…
Yes, video conferencing just seems to encourage that strong chairing and instructor-centredness that you want to get away from, even when it works properly. I was thinking of a text chat channel. Not as flashy, but it turns out that seeing other people’s faces may not be the most important thing in a seminar discussion. It’s also relatively easy to link to materials and supporting documents, and everyone has a complete transcript at the end. In my small neck of the woods we’ve had success with Slack, but Teams seems to have a very similar capability.