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I recently taught a hybrid online/offline MBA class. I have some thoughts about online versus offline, and about teaching in-person during a pandemic. I’ve also assembled a few pithy “lessons learned.” So settle in for a while, cause we got ourselves a thread...
For proper context, I should first describe the circumstances that led me to choose to teach in person (I actually had a choice in the matter).
When I agreed to try teaching in-person, COVID numbers were fantastic in the Netherlands. And the students (nearly) universally said they wanted to go back to live classes. For me, that was enough to join a conversation about whether it would be feasible to teach in-person.
Rules for social distancing, however, meant that none of the available spaces on campus would work for my class of ~35. So the MBA program offered to rent three large, adjoining conference rooms at a nearby hotel.
With so much space (plus hotel air conditioning) I felt like it would be pretty safe to teach in person. Being inside with other people is still a risk though, so why would I do such a thing if it wasn’t required?
Well, frankly, online teaching is HARD. I was, and still am, completely exhausted by [waves hands around wildly] all of this.
I know there are some people who can pull it off, but the idea of case-based teaching via Zoom sounded, at the time, like a ton of extra work and frustration leading to a dissatisfying outcome.
So I signed up for in-person. I scheduled the intro, case discussions, and student presentations in-person, and the sessions without cases to be online.
As it is well known, we are ruled by a trickster god. So, of course—of course!—infections started rising sharply in Rotterdam right as I was getting ready to teach.
Now, I may be foolish, but I’m not an idiot. When I decided to teach in-person, I knew that COVID cases would increase as the weather improved and people went back outside. What I didn’t expect was for infections to rise so quickly.
The higher case numbers ended up being a huge source of anxiety for me, and I was much less productive because of that anxiety. In hindsight, revamping the material for online might have taken the same (motivational) effort as prepping for in-person while cases were spiking.
Lesson 1: The cost of preparing for online teaching is high, but so is the cost of worrying about catching COVID while prepping to teach in-person. Don’t underestimate the latter.
The MBA program set rules for social distancing and norms for wearing masks. On the first day of class, adherence to these rules was less than I was comfortable with, so I explained (threatened) that we would move all classes to be online unless that changed.
That was a rather unpleasant thing to have to talk about—especially on the first day—but it worked. From that point onward, students behaved most excellently.
Lesson 2: Take a hardline stance when it comes to safety. It’s safer and feels better, and it establishes clear boundaries with students.
I wore a mask while speaking, as did many of the students at first, and (nearly) all of the students by the end of the course. Masks were officially optional in the classroom, but in retrospect they should have been required.
Lesson 3: Masks should be required in the classroom. Even if they do little with respect to the virus, they do a lot to remind people to stay away from each other, wash their hands, and all that other good stuff. Plus they probably help to prevent spreading the virus.
The mask I settled on was a disposable (the kind graded just below N95). A thicker fabric mask muffled my voice too much and fogged up my glasses, so I settled on the thinner paper ones.
Of course, the downside of these thinner masks is that they don’t protect others as well. I guess there’s a trade-off, because what’s the point of being in the classroom if students can’t understand what you’re saying?
An aside: because paper masks let a fair amount of low velocity moisture through, after a few minutes of speaking at normal lecture volume you realize you’re surrounded by a fog made of your own lung juice.
I had never before considered just how much spit I’ve been sending out into the classroom. This was a revelation for me, and I felt bad for the students in the front row, especially because...
Lesson 4: If the lecturer gets sick, so will many of the students. The lecturer might be a bigger risk to the students than the students are to the lecturer. Allocate resources to protecting the students from the lecturer’s lung-fog. We handed out cloth masks, for instance.
For a variety of reasons—contact with infected individuals, travel to red zones, risk salience, etc.—not all students were able to attend classes in person. By the end of the course about 1/3 were staying at home. So class sessions were live-streamed.
Remote students could speak up and address the class via Zoom, which we heard via loudspeaker. The technical setup however was camera based, so the online students couldn’t see my black boarding (writing on the projected slides via iPad) very clearly.
Lesson 5: In-person doesn’t really exist anymore because at least some students will be remote. So when teaching “in-person,” use a computer setup that is optimized for online teaching, and then send the online stream to the in-class projector.
Compared to the online sessions, the in-person sessions were more interactive and spontaneous. But to my surprise, the difference wasn’t nearly as big as I had expected.
Face-to-face might be better than online, but I also think that students, instructors, and administrators are biased in favor of overvaluing in-person teaching.
Lesson 6: When weighing the value of in-person against online teaching, consider that in-person teaching isn’t nearly as dynamic when the teacher is sitting behind a desk and the students are spaced out in a large room, wearing masks that hide their expressions.
Overall, the experience was...alright. Of course, had I contracted COVID, you would be reading a different thread (or maybe no thread at all).
The MBA program did their best to keep everybody safe, and the IT support was excellent. The students behaved well and they were very understanding about my anxiety. In short, everyone did their best.
And still...looking back, it isn’t clear to me that it wouldn’t have been wiser to just do everything online. I would have had to work harder up front, but I would have been less stressed while teaching.
I think my teaching was on par with past years, but I also know the stress must have affected it to some extent. I’m not sure that the students would agree, but they also lack the perspective that comes from having taught the same course many times before. So... ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯
Anyway, if you’re still reading, thanks for making it this far.
