April 2020
Featured Article
COVID - An Exercise in Turning on a Dime
By Elisa H. Barney, Boise State University
My biggest hobby before I moved to Idaho was folk dancing. I enjoyed traveling around the north-eastern US giving workshops and participating in dances and even dancing in Europe. My PhD advisor said that being a researcher was like being a dancer – you had to be able to turn on a dime. The COVID experience is certainly a time where I have had to turn on a dime.
Idaho is a mostly rural state and was one of the later states to be affected by COVID-19. We read about problems in China and how the quarantine decree was affecting their Chinese New Years celebration, then problems in South Korea, France and finally in the US in nearby Washington State, but the news was conflicting as to whether this was an emergency or just a new flu. Still Idaho was safe. Gradually the news reported more states were having confirmed cases. I read about my alma matter in New York converting to remote instruction and later sending students home. I received notice the ECEDHA Annual Conference and ECExpo I had been planning to attend was cancelled. My family was still planning to use our plane tickets and take a family vacation there for Spring Break which followed it. At that point plane tickets were not refundable. We’d visit Disney World and the Everglades. March 12 Disneyland announces it will close down the “happiest place on earth.” Things must be getting serious. I bet they’ll shut Disney World down eventually too.
Friday March 13 our university planned a one day “all classes will be taught remotely” exercise. This had been under planning since the beginning of March as our leadership was paying attention to the COVID outbreak. The exercise utilized resources across campus, including our Center for Teaching and Learning, Learning Technical Services, the Instructional Design and Educational Assessment (IDEA Shop), the main campus IT department. Lots of notices went out DO NOT CANCEL CLASSES. I only lecture on Tuesdays and Thursdays, so I wasn’t involved. I took the campus shut down as an opportunity to use a free ski pass I had been saving before the season was up. After skiing the news reported on the Governor’s press conference that morning on how everything in Idaho was super. Campus news reported that the emergency preparation exercise on campus had gone well. Then at 5:35pm another press release: the first COVID case in Idaho had been reported. “The person is a woman between the age of 50 and 60 and is in isolation at home in Ada County. She recently returned from a conference in New York City where three other attendees tested positive for coronavirus. She is currently doing well and recovering from mild symptoms.” Those demographics and the occurrence during travel sounded like it could have been me. I had taken 5 business trips already this calendar year because of my role as chair of IEEE’s Student Activities Committee. I was sure my non-university friends were going to think that it was me – I assured them preemptively that I was fine. At 6:23pm we receive an email stating “Starting Monday, March 16, Boise State University will deliver all Spring 2020 courses remotely through the end of the semester in an unprecedented campus move to help Idaho slow the spread of the coronavirus (COVID-19).” The IEEE Student Branch which I advise had a Student Professional Activities Conference (SPAC) planned for Saturday and the chair reached out to me to see if the associated ban on group gatherings meant they had to cancel. Yes. Life was changing real fast. This was not an exercise.
At 8:17 pm I posted a notice to my students in both my classes that I’m sure they heard classes were going on line, I just read that same email myself. “I don’t know exactly what I will do, but please continue to allocate time on Tuesdays and Thursdays for our class. Let me know if you have issues with internet access and computing resources.” and finally “If any of you are experiencing unusual levels of stress about this, please reach out to someone for support.” I had had three students reach out to me in the previous two weeks that they were experiencing emotional problems unrelated to COVID and needed my patience with their in-class performance. I was sure that this was not going to help them, and there were probably others who hadn’t spoken with me who would see an increase in stress from this. We were entering uncharted territory. Time to plan.
A professor in Mechanical Engineering, Krishna Pakala (he deserves a shout out), scheduled several Zoom help sessions for Saturday and Sunday for the rest of us in the College of Engineering. I attended one. I had never used Zoom before, and realized I had no choice now. I had done tons of Skype and WebEx meetings, so it wasn’t too difficult to figure out, but it was nice getting the software loaded and proofed on my laptop and hearing about “breakout rooms”. I asked a few questions and thanked him for the exercise.
I am teaching two classes this semester. One is a junior level Signals and Systems course. It is taught in the flipped classroom mode. I wrote an article for ECEDHA Newsletter in September 2018 about this. I have broken the class into bite-sized learning objectives and prepared 80+ videos describing each. I have 80+ online formative quizzes in our BlackBoard LMS. I have in class activities for every class meeting (minus the three exam days). I was way ahead of my colleagues “across campus” who had never used BlackBoard before the COVID preparedness drill Friday. Now I knew about ZOOM Breakout rooms, that will solve the problem of how do I still achieve the small group interactions that I see as the best feature of a flipped class. While a lot was already set up to handle remote instruction, I still had to change my BlackBoard setup to post the assignments as actual assignments giving them a place in the system to submit their results. I usually let them come back to my office hours and complete the in-class assignment anytime in the coming week if they needed more than 75 minutes to work the problems; not all student work fast, and I decided a few years ago it was better to give them more time to complete assignments if it meant they would learn the material, than to force them to rush and penalize them for incomplete work. I decided to post the PDF of the in-class assignment in the evening before the 7:30am class. If they got there early, they could start early, and I wouldn’t have to worry about it in the morning. The due date was set to one week after the class, matching what I had been doing when assignments were on paper. They were told to print out the assignment and work on it, or if they didn’t have a printer to look at it on the screen and write their answers on a piece of paper. No students replied to my initial email that they didn’t have internet access. I did find out later that one student was meeting for class in a coffee shop to get internet access – until the state shut down restaurants and coffee shops. Another only had a cell phone to access the internet, no real laptop, tablet or workstation. Those are examples where I know the details. I’m sure others had issues they didn’t let me know about. I start the Zoom session about 10 minutes before the official class starts and configured it to allow participants to join before the host (me). I talk with the students who join early about how things are going, both in and out of class, then about 7:30 announce that I will start putting them into breakout rooms. I stay out in the “main” room until the later arrivals slow down, then start going from room to room, similar to how previously I’d start wandering around talking to the students at different tables. My LA would do the same. I make him a co-Host so he can move freely. The different rooms have different personalities. In one room they all share video feeds. In one they do everything by chat. One uses the Zoom whiteboard and collaboratively work out the problems, each using a different colored pen. Attendance was real good the first week. Then we had Spring Break. After Spring Break attendance has dropped some, but not as bad as some of my colleagues report.
Overall I classify this as going pretty smooth and well. Our department academic advisor has been asking students as she meets with them to plan out their summer and fall course schedule and they rated my class as one of the good ones. The biggest challenge for me is the extra bookkeeping of posting the assignments and solutions as daily instead of weekly posts and including adaptive release so they see posted solutions automatically after they submit and I have graded their problem sets. Grading the problem sets in BlackBoard is more challenging than on paper. The interface includes a pen markup tool, but they haven’t connected that tool to touchscreen interfaces so I need to use a mouse or my touch pad to write (Our Learning Technologies office talked with them and they define that as a “Known Issue”. Luckily I developed the skill of writing with a touchpad years ago before I bought my first tablet, but it definitely is slower than marking up a stack of papers). Students haven’t complained about my handwriting.
Students I have found now get together to “study” in Zoom. It is possible they used Zoom to do this before I first heard about Zoom last month. I remember one evening getting an invitation to join them in their Zoom room. They had their cameras going so I saw children running around in the background, or a pet sitting in a student’s lap. It had really been like being invited into their homes, and I feel privileged that they feel comfortable enough to do so.
I see a greater number of minor errors in the student work since switching to Zoom. While I think that they do actively engage each other during the online problem sets, they can’t see each other’s papers and neither can I see theirs. Many small mistakes I would have seen and commented on when walking around I don’t see: “remember to label that amplitude,” “put a more descriptive answer for that question.”
The second class I am teaching this term is a mixed senior and graduate student course on machine learning and pattern recognition. This course is a lecture course, but my lectures are very interactive making it almost a seminar. For this class I have Power Point slides. In the live class I would show a slide, walk around the classroom discuss it and write on the whiteboard to supplement it and answer student questions. Now I use my touchscreen Surface and share my screen with the slides. I can draw on the slides with the stylus as I discuss them and answer student question. Students already learned that they may and should ask questions, so there is quite a bit of discussion. I post the slides before class in BlackBoard so they can download it and follow along making their choice of lecture notes. They asked me to record the lecture, so I have been doing that and posting it in my YouTube channel, with a link in BlackBoard.
One trick I figured out really helps is to have Zoom running on my bigger computer while I’m sharing the screen on my Surface. On the bigger computer I can monitor the chat window, and I can reset responses when I ask students to give me yes/no about a question, without disrupting the presentation. I can also check BlackBoard or my copies of course files if they ask a logistics question.
My day now consists of way too many hours sitting on my sofa with a laptop on my lap. I have extended drop-in office hours policy to be willing to meet with students more frequently via Zoom, often for just 5-10 minutes. Many students email me frequently with questions on homework assignments, or photos of a portion of their answer asking “am I heading in the right direction?” They tell me my classes are going better than many of their others. They complain that other professors don’t mark on the PowerPoint slides or ask questions like I do, or that they don’t feel they can ask as many questions of go to “office hours” with the others, but these complaints are about professors whom students had trouble relating to when all classes were in person.
March 17th, 2 days into remote teaching, I was sent a link to a charming parody video by Dr. Michael W. Bruening, Associate Professor of History and Political Science at Missouri S&T. If you haven’t seen it, take a look. At that point I had just had two successful online classes, but that video definitely hit the mark, and was good to get a lighter side to the situation. Now after 3 weeks at home, spending the day on my laptop with Zoom classes and several Zoom meetings is the “new normal”. Students who are working in local industry and taking my Pattern Recognition and Machine Learning class as part time students or “Courses of Interest” students are asking if I will teach my Image Processing course in the fall in a similar fashion. I don’t know if starting the semester off online would allow the same level of rapport to be built, but departments who teach 100% online do ok. It might open my class to reach more students, both in Boise and beyond. If there are layoffs because of this shut down, many people will be returning to school as we have seen in past down turns. We send our students to other universities to take summer courses online. There might be demand out there for my elective courses or even for my Signals and Systems course, but it is more work to teach in this mode. I’ve heard a quote similar to “You never want a serious crisis to go to waste. And what I mean by that is an opportunity to do things that you think you could not do before.” before and a Google search says this version is attributed to Rahm Emanuel, although Quotes Uncovered said a version of it is found in 1976, when M. F. Weiner wrote an article in the journal Medical Economics entitled “Don’t Waste a Crisis — Your Patient’s or Your Own.”. Maybe this crisis which has caused me to try teaching online (remote actually) is the opportunity to reflect and think about using this option in the future.
Elisa H. Barney, Boise State University
Email: EBarneySmith@BoiseState.edu
** If anyone is interested in my Signals and Systems flipped classroom videos or BlackBoard resources, please contact me.