Hello today, we would like to welcome Dr. Fred Torrey to speak to us about his recent experiences with emergency remote teaching. Fred, just before we get started, could you please share a little bit about yourself? >> Hello, it's a pleasure to be here. Just a little bit about me. My name is Fred Torrey. I'm a what's euphemistically known as a senior faculty member. I've been at the University of Michigan since 1985. So I'll let anyone who cares do the arithmetic. I was teaching at EECS 215 when the emergency hit. It's a class, I've gone quite a few times and well a foundational class in electrical engineering it's one that I'm very, very passionate about and have a great deal of fun teaching. And so as the emergency hit one of the concerns was trying to keep the class with me during this challenging time in a very challenging course. >> So Fred you've mentioned that the course that you were teaching was particularly challenging in and of itself and then within a challenging time. What were you most concerned about when you learn that you needed to transition your course from a face-to-face environment to a completely online one? As I mentioned it's a course that can students consider challenging. It's the first class in electrical engineering. It's the gateway into that bachelors program and it's useful for a couple of other programs as well. So for many students, it's their first kind of major entry into a serious engineering work. They've had preamble classes but this is the first time they see okay, this is what the majors think of us and many students find that particularly challenging. The semester was going well probably better than average. I had made a lot of efforts during real-time to connect to as many students as possible. And so I really felt a strong bond to the class. So the major challenge was not so much content delivery in the strange online environment, it was how I could keep them motivated and how I could keep them in any sense connected in this odd environment. We were already in a pretty heavily electronic mode. Lecturers were in person but I was I was recording them. So some students despite my urging would too frequently choose to watch the recorded lectures rather than actually coming to class and interacting more. All the assignments were turned in online principally on grade scope. So there was a lot of electronic interaction. We were already using Piazza very, very heavily for Q&A. So a lot of the machinery was all set up. What got lost when we went online was any sense of seeing each other face-to-face and so again kind of keeping keeping the engagement, keeping the momentum in this technically pretty intensive class was the thing that I most worried about. >> So Fred you've just described how going into the online environment you were concerned about keeping your students engaged, keeping up the momentum within your course. As you were thinking about this transition, what aspects of your course, did you really need to focus on in terms of being intentional about engaging with your students? And a second follow-up question to that would be once you were in the online environment, did you need to make any corrections? Did you need to change your approach once you saw how things were actually working? >> So when we went online, one of the immediate decisions that I had to make was how I was going to deliver content what was going to replace lectures. One of the things I did quickly was put out an informal survey via canvas to my class asking them about their various levels of technology. What kind of Internet did they have available, well, did they have a printer? Things along those lines and not surprisingly the overwhelming majority of our students had high speed internet. They had a printer at home. Many, many of them had tablet computers, but a significant number did not. Some had unreliable internet, others had no access to a printer. And so basically all of that suggested what our leadership both at the college and university level, well, quickly affirmed that really you better do delivery that works for people that can't use things synchronously. And so I decided quickly that okay, I'm going to essentially flip the classroom. I'm going to do a recorded lecture segments, ask them to view them and then do live sessions to hold discussions about that material. I was already comfortable using Camtasia, and I used a tablet computer for most instruction anyway, so it was not a big deal technically for me to do that. I took into account what our folks and in CRLT Engineering had taught me that shorter is better than longer. I didn't quite make the the ten-minute segments things went on a little bit longer, but I kept the lecture segments short. And then very quickly I would post up a suggested schedule that you should view this segment by this date and then we'll have a live session to talk about any issues. So that actually worked quite well and got lots of good comments from students both during the event and also in the end of semester evaluations. And in fact, that's something I hope to continue in the fall. I have to talk some colleagues into going along with me. The other thing that I did immediately it was, I was actually teaching on Wednesday afternoon, March 11, and I have worn my students at the beginning of the class that the next days maybe interesting. We don't know how quickly things are going to change, and at the end of the class one of the students raised her hand and said professor, classes have been canceled and we're going online. [LAUGH] So that's how I found out about the transition. The next day I held my first online office hours on blue jeans. And so that's something I was a little bit nervous about using it that scale, but it actually worked quite well initially on blue jeans and then on Zoom. And so those were sort of the immediate adjustments that going online for office hours the day after the shut down. And then I think the first lectures I posted were probably over the first a synchronous lectures I posted were over the weekend. And so that all work extremely well, and then the issue was trying to get as many students to connect in that environment as possible. I'll comment at this point and then before the next piece probably switch it off. The hippopotamuses in the background are eating watermelons or something that I, That I threw in at the beginning of live sessions, at least when we went to Zoom, at the beginning to live sessions just to lighten the mood. There would always be a few minutes at the beginning where a few students were on but not all and we would be chatting a little bit and it just kind of helped relieve the tension a little bit. Something from my life in the normal world, at least part of the students really like that. So the class I was teaching has an integral lab. There were six labs spaced at roughly two week increments. Usually three hours each. We were partway through I think lab four when the lights went off. And so one of the things that we had to prioritize is, okay, the labs are great experience, great spots for making the theory and calculations in the class less abstract, make them seem real, nobody's going in the lab anymore. And there was no way to make any kind of adjustments to doing smaller experiments at home, that just couldn't happen in the emergency. So we basically had to say, if you've done lab four, you can use your own data, turn the lab four reports in. If you haven't done lab four, the GSIs are going to go in, they're going to give you the data. And we can just say, we're just going to count the best four out of six labs. And the remaining part, the GSI is collected data and did videos on labs five and six and they actually did that pretty quickly before we started throwing people out of campus. Those were available, if you really want to do them too because you had a poor lab grade on the others, then you can do them virtually. Otherwise ignore it and concentrate on the main lecture material. That was kind of the biggest structural change in the class was essentially eliminating the last two labs. Pedagogically probably the biggest single loss point is just that experiential component just could not be replaced. >> So Fred, you've already shared how when you went into the online environment, the office hours actually worked out pretty well, maybe even even better than you had anticipated. I'm wondering if you can think of any other examples of bright spots that appeared in your transition to the online environment? What worked particularly well in perhaps ways you weren't expecting? >> Yeah, so some bright spots. I had mentioned the online office hours, one thing that did not strike me initially but one really cool thing there is that students on office hours, sometimes they would say, hey can I share my screen? In some sense, it wasn't as nice as sitting down at a desk with them and looking at what they were writing, but the flip side is that it was really cool that they were sharing their screen, they were showing their work. Other students could look and say, yeah, and comment as well. And so that was really neat and became- that's actually an interaction that not only I got better with, so did the students. So it was an interesting training ground for them on how to do these remote interactions. Several faculty have commented in different forums that it's also cool that okay, you look on the chat window or the Q&A window and you can see who's asking the question. And so that's pretty cool too because instead of, yeah, I know that face, what's that person's name, I can't remember it. You've got their name right there. So you could do a lot more, yes, that was a great question, let's talk about that. In an odd sense, while distant it made things in a sense more personal. Another spot that was really interesting since I was at home all of the time and basically wasn't doing any of my research work or any of my administrative work, I was living online. And so lots of students, many of whom did not interact on the live sessions would send materials on Piazza. I've got a question about this, what's wrong here and so I was answering those very, very quickly. It was exhausting but I was answering them very, very quickly. So there was a lot of not synchronous but at least rapid exchange. They would send me examples of what they were trying to work on and what's going wrong here and we were actually doing a fair amount where we were using Matlab or Mathematica to solve the more tedious parts of some of the problems in, my code's not working. Well, they'd have the equations right but some small aspect of using those math tools, they needed those fixed. And again, the degree to which I could rapidly answer that really was pleasing to the students and caused more of them to engage in that and that format. Kind of the third major bright spot is that because of a lot of technical issues, I was not comfortable with doing timed exams. I just was not comfortable using any of the technology. I was aware of their Internet connections, all of that stuff. So I made all of my exams one week events, open book open resource. The only rule is the only human they were allowed to discuss it with was me. In the College of Engineering we operate under an honor code and lots of people fret about the potential for cheating. I just affirmed to them that, look, I trust you. You're going to follow the honor code and I resisted putting that in negative terms. That in the back of my head was if you do cheat, I'm going to get you if I can but I didn't say that. I just kept it all positive. And again, I think that kind of helped the spirits and there may have been one or two cases of cheating. But as far as I can tell, they were really quite honest and I think besides just being good people, just the affirmation that I was behind them I think helped. And so that felt good, one neat thing about these online are these untimed open resource exams. I think many students actually did better as a result. The pressure was obviously lower because you weren't sitting in a room for an hour or two hours and then you had to turn it in. You could check your answers with software tools, so it wasn't so much getting the right answer, it was knowing how to do it. And so I think a lot of students did better. I think in some sense it's a more natural test of what you can do. None of us take one hour exams anymore. We have a project, we've gotta produce results, all of that, but we don't have a one hour exam to do it in so I think it's actually a more reasonable testing environment. I think it really, really helped many students actually do better and do some really hard stuff but do it very, very well. And so that was very much a bright spot. The flip side of all of these bright spots, nothing's perfect. Kind of the biggest downside and in the midst of the emergency I had, they couldn't find good mechanisms of fixing this. I had students that were already engaged in the class. And if anything they cranked it up. They they worked harder, they listened to the lectures. They came to the online meetings. They interacted on Piazza. They revved up their act, but then there was sort of a divide. There were some that chose to do this and not just the AA+ students but there were some B and C students that cranked up and they kept engaged. There were other students, I can't give you statistics, but more than a typical semester either the pressure of the emergency or just how weird the environment was any of that, I had some students just switch off. They just, they either literally just stopped turning stuff in or they turned stuff in with low quality. And so there was a bifurcation. I think it was kind of like a funhouse mirror magnification that it split those that could engage into into a heavier engagement mode and those that had various levels of motivational and other pressures just caused them to kind of shut down. And so that that was the negative and this happens in a normal semester with normal face-to-face contact but it seemed to be magnified in the Covid era. And we never have perfect tools to go out and grab the student that seems to be drifting but it's definitely harder if they're not even not even in Ann Arbor. >> Frank, thank you for sharing your experiences with the bright spots of going online, but I'm also glad that you pointed out that there were some students who faced challenges and difficulties through this this experience. From the students though that you maybe did hear from at the end of the semester, I'm wondering if you have anything to share about what their experience was like. If they if they shared those kinds of thoughts with you. >> Well, let's see. The first part is a little bit of bragging I did work very, very hard to try to deliver a high quality experience for them. As I mentioned in the beginning this is a gateway class. They really have to master a lot of this material to do well in the classes that immediately follow and I felt a responsibility to get them ready for that. I pushed them pretty hard and so I always worry, when you push students hard in person what are they going to think when you push them hard remotely. That becomes even more worrisome and so I was really deeply gratified after the semester ended that the students, our honorary society and electrical engineering and computer science, is a Beta Kappa Nu. They award to Professor of the Year Awards each year, and that's by student vote, one in the electrical and computer engineering division and one in the computer science and engineering division. And I was fortunate enough to get the the ECE division award this year which I literally teared up because it was it was so gratifying after this exhausting experience. As I commented to my colleagues, I know a lot of students were very happy and appreciated, well, one is they saw all the effort. They could just tell that okay if he's answering questions on Piazza at midnight and he's answering more questions at 6:00 AM, they knew I was putting a lot of effort in. Many, many students just clearly appreciated that I was in it with them, many of them liked the short lecture segments recorded format and really benefited from that. And as I mentioned in sort of the negatives, there were some students that were like, okay, this was not enough and so those I felt really bad for and so actually those are kind of the, I felt really bad for them. But the flip side is I couldn't just say okay, here's a C, you passed the course. Because they would have gotten mowed down in the next course, so that's kind of the dilemma that you always have with a key prereq class again, it's just kind of magnified in the Covid era. Other things that jump out from student comments. One of the things I did, because I could not sit them with them and office hours and address questions when major questions would come up, I would post detailed examples and sometimes the detail examples would just be my work. Sometimes it would be my work and okay, here's the computer code, the Matlab m-files or the mathematical notebook files that I used for doing the drudgery. And in a few cases here's a short recorded video segment that explains all of that. And so those kind of extra examples to partly make up for the fact that I couldn't sit across the desk or sit in a small classroom and say, okay here's how you do a problem that looks like that. Those were things that I got some very good comments on as well. >> Fred, thank you for sharing the range of experiences that your students had this past semester. But now as we think forward to the next semester and potentially even beyond, I'm wondering if you have any thoughts about lessons that you might carry forward into your teaching. >> It's interesting that I will be doing the same class again this fall. I didn't mention in the beginning an advantage and a disadvantage I had moving into the online period is I was the only faculty member doing the class. I had two sections of the same class. And so it was all on me and my GSI's who were really, really, really super but I was the professor in charge when I decided this is the way we're going to do it. That was the way we were going to do it. I didn't have to convince anybody else. Next semester I've got a wonderful colleague, a friend that I'm teaching with, but we're going to have to agree on things. So right now these are all things that we may or may not do but given the environment that we're going to be, at least in the best case, somewhat distanced in the fall. Hopefully with some students and residents, but we certainly won't have packed lecture halls. What I hope to do is actually much more intentionally do a flip classroom kind of scenario of doing short recorded lecture segments and then using the live sections for structured discussion and Q&A. What I did not have time in the emergency session to do was make those very well structured. I didn't have time to say okay, it's not optional. You need to come to these sessions and we're going to lead off with one more example. We're then going to do open Q&A, so they were on a more voluntary basis. So having those set up to be an important part of the class and an expectation of the class again with adjustments in case we have students that are unable to join synchronously, either because of time zones or internet, you'll we'll have to adjust for those cases. But making it much more of a structured part of the class is something that we're thinking about. The other piece that we're trying to plan for, as I mentioned, we had to basically cancel the last two labs. If we have some remote students, if we have a situation where we can't have two students sitting next to each other in a fairly packed lab environment for health reasons. We need a way of having them obtain that experiential component of the class, but in a in a distance and safer matter. So literally on the desk to my right is a little apparatus that we're working with since it's an electronics class, we're fortunate modern technology. You can actually get reasonably inexpensively cuts that will let you do experiments at home, with a well contained apparatus that they're not quite as good as what we can do with 15, $20,000 dollars worth of equipment per student in in a nice laboratory. That's an advantage of being a big powerful research university, but they're pretty good, they're pretty good. And so the scenario that we're planning for now is how do we convert our labs into into good experiences, using these at-home cuts? We've actually already ordered 500 of them for a few ECS classes. And so they should be available when our students arrive, again another challenge. We're not the only people in the world who've got this idea. There are thousands of universities teaching engineering, lots of smart people and like we're going to do this. So the companies that supply these are getting swamped with orders, so we had to move very quickly on that. But the working idea right now is, okay, whether you're in a dorm room, or other residents, or in an Ann Arbor or whether you're in your family home at Will Hon, or Singapore, or you name it. If you're sitting at home, you can do these experiments and send in your lab report, send in video, send in data if you're in Ann Arbor, the idea is, okay, you'll build your circuit. You'll do your testing at home, you'll generate that data. And then at prescribed times, again, not 20 people at capacity in the lab. But a few people will come in at an appointed time, and they'll do the higher quality measurements in the lab. And record that data much, much shorter than our three hour labs cut they've already put circuit together, they've already tested it. And so they could take advantage of what we have to offer as a residential university just in a more socially distance and time prescribed fashion. And then kind of another piece of that is that maybe you've asked if there's a remote student or two, we're going to be sending them some of that data as we did in the past. But the experiential component will get built in much more deliberately into the class. There will probably be some other things as we as we sink through this into the coming fall, but those are the major things that we're thinking about right now. >> Fred, thank you so much for taking the time to speak with us this morning.. It was especially interesting to hear about how you're thinking about running your labs in the fall semester. So thank you once again, and we appreciate your time.
