Montreal City Weblog

Kate 18:19 on 2020-09-28 Permalink Reply  

• Dwgs 19:48 on 2020-09-28 Permalink

  Mcgill is pretty much a done deal. From what I understand they were leaning towards distance learning but wanted to see what other schools were doing and would announce mid October. At this rate I doubt they will wait that long.

• Jack 10:17 on 2020-09-29 Permalink

  I find Zoom a miserable way to teach. How do students feel about it at the University level, can someone chime in.

• DavidH 10:37 on 2020-09-29 Permalink

  @Jack, I’m on my second zoom class. Both are seminar graduate classes where a small group of people discuss the research. We have the occasional guest researchers or field experts joining us. It’s definitely easier to get guests to pop in virtually than it was in physical rooms.

  It’s working for me because I’m self-motivated and the subject matters lend themselves to that form. I would hate to do math in this format for example.

  I’m not sure I would have fared well 25 years ago when I first entered University. A lot rests on your self-discipline and personality. it’s very hard to stay engaged more than 2 hours online. I don’t think undergrad classes with dozens or even hundreds of students must work very well. Having people’s home phones ring and kids entering the room also interferes a lot. The limited access to the libraries and institutions’ archives is what is bogging me the most at this point.

• CE 11:43 on 2020-09-29 Permalink

  I had a couple classes (not university) that were finishing up when the pandemic was starting so I only had to do a few Zoom classes. I hated it. I couldn’t stay focused, I was constantly distracted by other things on the computer, and the sound quality and all the flashing around between different cameras gave me a headache. I also found it very unpleasant to try to talk; it felt unnatural for everyone to have to take their turn. If I were in university this year and had to do all my classes online, I would be trying very very hard to defer.

  I also can’t imagine having to do classes, write papers, and study all in the same place. When I was in university, I had a dozen or so different places around the city/campus where I would do different tasks. I did maybe 20% of my work at home.

• DeWolf 12:00 on 2020-09-29 Permalink

  For me, one of the best things about university was the seminars – small classes with fewer than 10 people, usually three hours long, where you could really get into an in-depth discussion about the topic you were studying. That’s where I learned the most, especially since I was shy and the professor had to push me to participate. If those seminars had been a nightmarish collection of glitchy Zoom calls I wouldn’t have learned half as much.

  That doesn’t even being to touch on the social aspect of university. I met my wife and almost all of my closest friends during my undergrad and master’s studies. That obviously wouldn’t have happened if my classes were online. I feel bad for kids whose time at uni has become a glorified correspondence course.

• dwgs 13:58 on 2020-09-29 Permalink

  And it’s official, Mcgill will be online for the winter term.

• Mark Côté 15:13 on 2020-09-29 Permalink

  I’m currently teaching a course at McGill right now. It’s the first time I’ve ever done this (I’m a software-development manager) and I haven’t been in university in 20 years, so I don’t have much to compare with, but it’s definitely weird. And I say this after having worked from home full time for over 8 years and now again for the last 6 months, most of that time managing a distributed team.

  The challenges I’ve heard of and experienced are

  • It’s very hard to tell how engaged the students are during class. Sprinkling some questions and breakout-room discussions has helped (this is actually the same as was done in person in previous years), but when I’m talking I can’t tell if people are following me or not. That said, I would probably have been a lot more nervous standing in front of a class of 60+ students than talking over video, at least given that I don’t have much experience in teaching.
  • Courses have had to be rejiggered because big midterms and finals don’t work well in a remote setting—they are stressful and (supposedly) prone to cheating. The thought is that if you have a giant test worth 40-50% of your grade and you are all by yourself with the Internet handy it is going to be very hard to resist the temptation to do a bunch of googling and/or talking it over with your friends. (Maybe this is a sign that big tests are just not an effective way to evaluate students, but that’s another topic).
  • Instead we have been encouraged to try other things. This course already had a project and some hands-on “labs” (basically short practical exercises). So I ditched the big exams and replaced them with a few short tests and a short research paper.
  • But what this means is that the work is more uniformly distributed over the semester. Some students are really struggling with this, as it means, with 4 or 5 courses, they have multiple tests and assignments every week. The theory is that if you are keeping up with the course you shouldn’t really have to do any prep. This is still a big adjustment, though.
  • The lab assignments used to be done in the tutorials, in person, and were timeboxed at an hour. This is much harder (basically impossible) to do now, especially given that we have to support asynchronous learning (for students outside of Montreal). Whereas in the past some students wouldn’t be able to finish a lab in an hour and would get only part marks, at least they were done and could move onto other things. Now some students can (and do) work multiple hours to complete them, even if their grade at the end of the course would only be marginally higher. We’re still debating what to do about this.

  This is just a smattering of what’s going on. It’s not easy… but it’s also new, and there’s a pandemic that is affecting students’ mental health at the same time.

• Mark Côté 15:13 on 2020-09-29 Permalink

  Ergh my bullets got eaten; sorry for the wall of text.

• Kate 20:29 on 2020-09-29 Permalink

  Mark, I’ve tried to guess where the bullets go – let me know if I buggered them up.

• Ian 08:29 on 2020-09-30 Permalink

  I have taught 8 for-credit 60 hour courses (CEGEP) since lockdown in March, and while it’s not ideal to not be able to see what everyone is doing and have a classroom atmosphere simply by virtue of us all being there in person, all my courses are essentially computer labs anyhow, so it’s not as big a jump for us as it might be for other disciplines.

  My students definitely appreciate that my classes are being recorded every day so they can easily refer to them later online (they expire after a few weeks). I personally very much appreciate not having to commute. I create a class environment by running the class following agile methodology including standups, very much like my experience of working on a distributed team. All of my tests are open book and the largest proportion of the marks I give are project based so it’s actually a good thing if students try to figure stuff out using the internet since that’s what they will be doing in the field once they graduate. We have been told to accept late work with no penalty to accommodate people working in less-than-optimal home office environments, so timeboxing is no longer an issue. I think in many ways this is better than regular on-site classes.

  Like I said though, I realize that this shift has been harder for some disciplines than others.