Tips and Demos from Faculty: Teaching Remotely

Tips and Demos from Faculty: Teaching Remotely

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Your colleagues are an invaluable resource. These videos share their tips for teaching online during the 2020 global pandemic.

“Teaching on Zoom is different than in person. I try to keep my lectures to no longer than 5 minutes. I plan to cover about 20-25% less content, which allows me to get more students involved, go deeper on topics and get more participation. Also I find I need to ramp up my energy by about 50% to keep students engaged.”
Graham Weaver
Graham WeaverLecturer, CES
“We began each class with student presentations, and we had multiple speakers during each session. Changing speakers each class helped to keep the class more lively and less fatiguing.”
Peter DeMarzo
Peter DeMarzoProfessor, Finance
“My main approach – that's kind of a two-pronged one – is thinking about pace ... trying to keep it fast and very high energy … And the second thing I've been thinking about is structure. So, how to restructure my typical session into a series of shorter segments.”​
Kate Casey
Kate CaseyAssociate Professor, Political Economy
“People were up and down over the course of the quarter. It was important, I think, for people to see that not everybody was okay on a given day, and to acknowledge that and to let people know that wherever they were was okay.”
Sara Singer
Sara SingerProfessor, Organizational Behavior
“Normally in a case discussion class, we would have all 60 people sitting in one room, and you'd have one person talking at a time. I thought [over Zoom] we'd just lose the group if everyone had to wait their turn across 59 people. I thought the breakout rooms would be the best way to handle that ... The real challenge was, how would I make sure that the time they spent in those breakout rooms was productive?”
Jim Lattin
Jim LattinProfessor, Marketing
“I think that many of us were very worried about using the [Zoom] Chat function when we started to teach virtually. We thought it might be distracting … but I found the opposite to be true. It was a really great tool for me in my class to make our class more interactive.”
Allison Kluger
Allison KlugerLecturer, Organizational Behavior
“The virtual environment really allowed us to think about some new possibilities … We thought a lot about: ‘What are the core elements of the class? What do we want people to be able to put together and take away from this exercise?’”
Ashley Martin
Ashley MartinAssistant Professor, Organizational Behavior
"A big advantage of Zoom is the ability to use frequent and short breakout sessions. In addition to the pedagogical benefits, students enjoy these as they get to interact and know each other better."
Peter DeMarzo
Peter DeMarzoProfessor, Finance
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Gregory Martin

Faculty panelists share inspirational quotes and six-word stories

In this video, faculty panelists from the 2020 Teaching and Learning Hub event series share inspirational quotes and six-word stories about teaching in a fully online environment during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Professor Kate Casey video thumbnail

Kate Casey’s approach to restructuring a lesson into smaller components

Professor Kate Casey recounts how she restructured her lessons into smaller components better suited to an online format. In the video, she demonstrates the cues she used to communicate the new structure and how she signaled transitions between parts of a lesson.

Sara Singer creates community in classes held over Zoom

Professor Sara Singer shares four ways she created a community within her online classroom: interactive PowerPoint slides, student temperature checks, small group exercises, and social time before and after class.

Jim Lattin’s strategies for making the most of small group discussions in Zoom breakout rooms

Professor Jim Lattin describes how he set students up to have successful small group discussions in Zoom breakout rooms. His strategies included framing the discussion with explicit instructions and questions, assigning roles to group members (e.g. scribe), being intentional about how much time was allotted, having students take notes in a shared GoogleSlide that he could monitor, and using those notes as a launching point for a whole-class debrief afterward.

Allison Kluger leverages Zoom's Chat tool

In online and hybrid courses, there are fewer cues about how a lesson is landing with the audience. Allison Kluger shares how she used the Zoom Chat tool to get a better sense of student questions and needs during lectures and guest speaker sessions.

Professors Deborah Gruenfeld, Maggie Neale, and Ashley Martin video thumbnail

Deborah Gruenfeld, Maggie Neale, and Ashley Martin move an experiential course online

Professors Deborah Gruenfeld, Maggie Neale, and Ashley Martin describe challenges and opportunities in moving their Week 0 experiential course, Managing Groups and Teams, online.

For more teaching best practices from faculty, see Tips and Demos from Faculty: Engaging Students

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