Online Teaching Safety Net

Build in extra time for logistics

Allow additional time in your lesson plan for giving instructions and managing technical functions. In order to do so, you may need to be more selective about what you cover in a given session.

Stay flexible

No matter how much planning and preparation you do (and you should), you will learn as you go. You may find ways to change your approach in order to be more effective. For this reason, among others, you want to keep your approach simple so that you are able to adapt quickly.

Leverage the tools you have

• Keep your students in view: Zoom’s gallery view lets you see thumbnails of up to 49 students at a time.
• Use Breakout Rooms and Zoom Participant Engagement Tools for calling on students (raised hand and chat) and surveying the entire class at once (polls, reactions) to engage with students and break up your Zoom sessions.

Maintain energy throughout virtual class sessions

Conducting an online class session can feel more tiring than a face-to-face class, both for the instructor and the students. Plan ways to keep up your energy and the students’ interest.

• Break down lectures into shorter segments (around 10 minutes) interspersed with interaction opportunities to keep students engaged. Think about your sessions in terms of segments of presentation, participation, reflection, small group work, and debrief. Even a light activity, such as asking questions via the chat function or taking a quick poll, is enough to hold focus.
• To combat “Zoom fatigue,” minimize time that students must be on Zoom, if possible. You might use pre-class videos or online content to cover material that is less interactive and then dedicate class time for more interactive discussions and activities.
• Create variation in the ways you teach and the ways students interact with the material.
• Use cold calls or warm calls to prevent students from being distracted by phones, email, etc.
• Incorporate breaks into your session. Even 30 seconds for students to stand up and walk around every half hour can help maintain engagement — and help you keep up your energy during class.
• Begin each class with an interactive hook (e.g., role-play, live data collection, poll, quiz, whiteboard drawing).

Role-plays can be built into a teaching plan with pre-assigned roles to promote student preparation, or they can be used spontaneously in response to a specific comment or class discussion. In either case, role-plays typically require a setup, action, and debrief. This guide can help you think through using Zoom tools to conduct role-plays in the virtual classroom.

Zoom’s breakout rooms feature allows you to split students into separate “rooms” for small group discussion and work, and then bring everyone back together to resume the large group meeting.

You can form groups in three ways:

• Randomly assign students to groups (known as "automatic" assignment in Zoom)
• Manually specify who will be grouped together ("Assign manually"). For more information, read our caveats about this approach.
• Allow students to choose their groups ("self-selected breakout rooms")

Here are some tips for making small group sessions work:

• Provide explicit directions for what students will discuss or do in the breakout rooms. Suggest time limits for the discussion or steps of the activity. Let students know what to prepare to report on once the large group reconvenes.
• Send messages to the breakout rooms to share information or to communicate timing.
• Join breakout rooms to listen in on discussions, prompt students, and provide feedback.
• Plan a system for students to communicate with you while they’re in breakout rooms. Students can use the ‘Ask For Help’ feature to call you into their breakout room, or you can set up a shared GoogleDoc where students can enter questions and ask for help.
• Consider using a Google Doc for students to take notes or share ideas during their small group sessions – this can both provide accountability and increase your awareness of what’s happening in each of the breakout groups.

Several GSB faculty who taught online have noted there’s a challenge of building a class community. It is paramount to build a sense of community when class only meets online or will be meeting online long term without in-person interactions. In these cases, it can be easy for students to feel that they are only observers as opposed to key contributors. Here are a couple of examples of ways you might foster community in your class:

• Have students turn their cameras on. In online live sessions, the sense of presence will be enhanced when everyone shows their face via their webcam. Recommending or requiring students to turn on video, especially at strategic points of discussion, can be one of your class norms.
• Build in time to check in with students. For example, you might hold regular office hours in Zoom and be available on Zoom for a few minutes after each session to allow for student follow-up questions. Some instructors found it useful to hold get-to-know-you Zoom sessions with small groups of students before the start of the quarter.
• Hold group Zoom office hours. These might take a variety of formats, such as drop-in discussion topics, informal virtual lunches, pre-quarter get-to-know-you meetings, etc. Many faculty have found these types of meetings to be highly successful in allowing students to engage more deeply with the topics and connect with each other. It can also provide further opportunity to facilitate connections between your course content and current global events without taking too much of your class time.
• View the 'Connecting with students' video to see how some GSB faculty created a sense of community while teaching online.