Hello. Today we would like to welcome Dr. David Lipps to talk about his recent experiences with emergency remote teaching. David, before we get started, could you share a little bit about yourself? My name is David Lipps. I am Assistant Professor in Movement Science in the School of Kinesiology at the University of Michigan. I teach a couple of courses in our curriculum and clean a 300 level Movement Science 330 course on the Biomechanics of Human Movement, which is what I was teaching during the winter 2020 term. This course is about 75 undergraduates every semester, and is taught in kind of a flipped classroom, active learning type of environment where students work in groups of 5-6 every semester as they work through this content, which is a combination of anatomy, physiology, physics, and mathematics. So David, you've already mentioned that prior to the move to emergency remote teaching, you are employing in a flipped classroom or an active learning experience for your students. As you thought about this transition, what were some of the greatest areas of challenge in your mind? What were you most concerned about when you needed to move to the online environment? So I had a couple big concerns. I think the primary concern I have in terms of the lecture of the course, was the fact that groups of 5-6 students were working together throughout the entire semester or about halfway through the semester, and I adapted this course a couple of years ago because I found that students were learning the material better when they worked in groups. So I was concerned that as we were going to the emergency approach to teaching the course and moving the course online and remotely, how well can maintain these team interactions going forward. Another concern of the course was the fact that one credit of the course is a laboratory experience, and we're about halfway through the semester and how we were going to manage running the laboratory portion of the course remotely as well. So David, you've mentioned the idea of being concerned about being able to continue to facilitate these student-to-student interactions that were so important in the face-to-face version of your course. As you face the need to move online, what aspects of your course design did you prioritize? What aspects did you perhaps need to change a little bit? Then once the course was actually running online, did you need to make any course corrections even once you had started to move to the online phase? So we moved online and turning your decision may appraise the beginning, the first thing was how in the world would I be able to use the technology to do team interactions? This proved to be more of a challenge than I initially expected. We were initially using BlueJeans with the course, and BlueJeans had a breakout session where you could do teams, but then at least in terms of managing the course, there was no way to actually get it to continually maintain a list of students in the groups every time you logged in. So that proved to not be possible because you could not possibly put 75 students in a group at the beginning of every lecture. At the time, we didn't have access to Zoom. I believe Zoom does have some of those features in it. I've heard that works a little better than the BlueJeans features. So what I did instead, was I actually set up individual rooms for each team. So I went in and manually setup a recurring meeting every Monday, Wednesday, for each one of the five individuals. I'd have everyone started the class in the main classroom, do my announcements for today, give a little 20 minute mini-lecture, and then I'd be very clear at the students that we are going to now break into our Team Rooms and leave the lecture for the BlueJeans meeting, go to the Team Rooms, and I'd also give them instructions of comeback at 01:45 PM. Very specific instructions of when to come back to the main classroom. This approach worked out pretty well. I didn't really have any complaints from students about it. I will say that [inaudible] approach, I was able to login to each one's individual rooms and answer questions, and we had a Google Hangouts Chat for the entire class. So if they need me to come to a Team's Room, I could come and answer their questions, similarly like we were in a classroom, they'd raise their hands, I come up to them, and I think some students, initially when I talked to them, they were a little bit concerned about how this team-based stuff would work. I think after doing it one or two times, I think they realized that it was actually very similar to how they were doing in the classroom, I think once they got over that anxiety. Some things I had to change over the course went on, there's more relates some of the lecture development and delivering the lectures. Initially we do a lot of large problem sets. Physics and mathematics have a problem sets, and originally I just kind of present PowerPoint slides that go through that. I found that didn't work very well with a lot of students. They could not follow at all. So I learned that I actually needed to lecture on my computer. I have an iPad next to me that I can actually write notes down on, because the students seem to do better with actually see me write out the problem solutions than doing the PowerPoint slides during that. So that was something that I had to cut down as the semester went on, because I could tell on day one that, that was not working in terms of enhancing student learning in this remote environment. So David, you've already shared some challenges that you experienced with the video conferencing technology. But I'm wondering if there were perhaps some unexpected benefits or bright spots even that may have emerged through this experience. Things that you weren't expecting that the online environment could afford, but it turns out that you were able to do things perhaps differently and even more productively than previously? So earlier I mentioned team-based instruction is very important for this course, and I was actually quite surprised to see how well it actually worked. It was actually a concern of mine, I was trying to salvage it and I was willing to scrap it if it wasn't going to work out well. But after one or two class sessions, I think the students actually really appreciate to be able to interact with their peers because basically most of them went home to be with their families and they're actually able to talk to their peers like they were previously talking with individuals going through the same hardships as them. Another thing that I think was a bright spot of the class is actually question-answer sessions. I think it was much more smoothly. I found that it's addressing what's more approachable in this remote settings to actually ask me questions when they were in a classroom. So I actually really enjoy actually being able to interact with students a little bit more during the actual much of push around the course. So David you've just described some really wonderful and productive interactions that were possible through the video conferencing technology. I'm wondering if you heard anything from your students, maybe after the course completed. What was their experience like? What feedback have you heard? I've actually been surprised by the level of feedback I've gotten from students. Typically, when a semester ends, you get one or two student e-mails thanking you, typically they're social or someone looking for a letter of recommendation. But in my classes in English Five, I can honestly say about 20 percent of my class has sent me e-mail thanking me for maintaining the structure of the course, having the ability to actually talk to their peers still because they're back at home and they really weren't interact with their own sides of family. I think they really appreciated all the time and effort I put in really on the course, getting them comfortable with the technology, being very structured in my approach. I think in this time when people are going, moving all across the country and they don't know what's going on with these unforeseen circumstances, I think they really appreciated this amount of structure. Then also having the ability to know that every Monday, Wednesday, at one o'clock they had a lecture to log into, and they didn't have to deal with asynchronous learning. I think that a lot students had mentioned to me as well that they really appreciated, this was the only class that was maintaining their typical class meeting times. So that also I think help them going forward. So overall, I was actually surprised at the level of feedback I got from students, and there was, in general, very positive with their feedback on this remote learning experience that they went through. David, thanks for sharing that, that you received such wonderful feedback from your students. That's really encouraging to hear. So as you reflect back on this past semester, I'm wondering if you're thinking about any potential lessons that you might carry forward, either to the next semester, which could be some combination of online and face-to-face and even further into the future. What have you learned that you intend to perhaps consider for future iterations of your course? For future iterations of this course, I think first of all, I learned that the technology is there to make team-based pedagogy act of learning curriculums work in a remote environment. When I first started doing this, as I mentioned before, I was having a lot of issues with the technology, and after I gain a hand with it, I found that there's one or two different ways that I could potentially do in this going forward that definitely I carried forward. For me personally, I think I learned about being more flexible with students. It was a challenging time for everyone. It was challenging time for the students. Those times [inaudible] too. I've been stuck in the house teaching with a one-year-old, three-year- old in the house without any child caring longer. So I've learned to be more flexible. Structure of the course, I try to maintain some of that structure, but I also think I learned that I had to adapt and be more flexible. I think going forward in my course designs, I'm going to have to build that in more. Finally, I think that I've learned how to interact with students a little bit better. Honestly, that's experience. Not having that ability to do that face-to-face and moving remotely, having to to do office hours, one-on-one meetings with students, teaching remotely in a room by myself, and doing Q&A sessions back and forth represented by students from across the country I think it's really improved my ability to interact with students. I think that's something I will carry forward in future iterations of this course. Thank you so much, David, for spending some time with us today. I know that our learners will really appreciate hearing about your experiences and your reflection on your most recent time teaching online. So thank you.
