Is anyone else attempting (or being forced) to teach seminars concurrently, i.e., with some students online while others attend in person?
It seems to me that this is the worst of all possible worlds, and is likely to leave everyone unsatisfied and the lecturer run ragged.
It also contradicts most of the previous guidance/educational theory about teaching online, which stresses how different online learning is from teaching in a regular classroom, and argues that it therefore requires a different approach in order to succeed.
Yup -- that's my university. It's not going to work.
100% online or 100% in the classroom would be way better for seminars. Most of my seminars are based on small group work and workshops, peer-reviews of drafts, &c.
We've already run a few welcome week orientations online, and 100% of the students who attended kept their cameras and mikes off. Just a wall of avatars. No one speaks up, no one has asked a question. No one has answered any questions. You have no idea if you're getting any reactions, positive or negative, just looking at gormless student ID photos. This happened at the end of last semester, too, when we were doing quick and dirty live sessions -- students would join in, then sit there silently, so you ended up feeling like a fool talking to the camera, since you had no reaction from any of the students.
You can't tell me that they aren't going to log in and go off and do something else during that hour -- I have done similar during the mad training sessions we've had at various points over the summer.
I plan to practice the guitar during a useless two-hour mental health counselling training workshop we're meant to have in two weeks (not mental health for us -- another initiative at my university is to force a percentage of staff in each dept to take on a roster of 20-30 students and act as mental-health counsellors and advisors over their 3 years. Absolute shite -- two hours powerpoints to 'train' me to do what my cousin, a genuine child psychologist, has been studying, training, and practicing for almost 40 years).
Hybrid learning is going to be absolute shit -- I'd rather give the lectures live and do seminars completely online.
We simply do not have the classroom configuration for seminars, not with social distancing. One colleague has been plunked down in an enormous lecture hall for seminar with her 18 students (it otherwise seats 150 people).
Not only do I have to do the seminar type with half the students there, and half dialled in, I have other seminars are are 'too big' for that type of blended learning, so I have to teach two smaller groups the same material, back to back. I wouldn't care if it were two lectures back to back. I did that in the USA a lot. But leading two different seminar groups back to back is exhausting, especially if you get one group that's really quiet, and one group that's lively.
We have to record all seminars, even if all of the students are there in person (the smaller groups all meet in person). In the case of two seminars on the same module: we have to record them so that students on Seminar A see Seminar A's recording ONLY, and students on Seminar B see Seminar B material only. Except at the moment, Teams isn't letting people set up exclusive streams.
None of this shit works, none of it has been beta-tested; many of the classrooms, a colleague discovered today, do not have HDMI cables.
We have been advised that it might be easier to use the laptop as a webcam, and actually teach using Teams through the desktop. THEN WHY NOT SUPPLY WEBCAMS INSTEAD OF SHITTY LAPTOPS?
I am shouting into a void, I know.
