Hi, my name is Amin Azzam. I'm a psychiatrist by training and a passionate educator.
I teach at three San Francisco Bay Area health science universities, and I also work at Osmosis.
Today I'd like to talk to you about how to effectively run large group sessions or
old school lecture-type sessions using video conferencing. I'm going to divide up my reflections into
what to do before the session, during the session, and after the session.
OK before the session: first of all, it's important for you to practice the technology.
Create a video test conference session and familiarize yourself with the specifics of the video conferencing platform you're using.
You might use multiple of your own devices to simulate multiple learners.
Or better yet,
invite your colleagues and peers to help you tech test the technology.
Make sure that you're completely facile with it before you even start using it in front of students.
Additionally, before the session it's important to communicate with your learners what you expect of them before they come to the videoconference session.
So you might also ask your learners to test run their technology before the session.
Consider providing the slides or materials you'll share in advance, so that students can preview them and note points of confusion or questions.
Additionally, declare if you need participants to use a screen larger than a cell phone.
For example, if you intend to share your screen, but also expect students to concurrently engage
with other technology, platforms, or with each other-- then a cell phone screen just isn't large enough for that kind of multiple activities concurrently.
Now I'd like to talk about what to do during the session. First, let's talk about managing technology.
Remind everyone during the session that if they didn't get your upstream advice in advance, or requests beforehand,
that you're expecting people to use a screen large enough to see everyone. So that may well mean
that they thought
they were going to join with a cell phone, but you're going to advise them that you need a bigger screen
to be using this session on. In terms of the actual session-- several tips.
If you want to manage everyone else's eyeballs,
then you should share your screen and have your slides or your PowerPoint deck or your Google slide deck
on your local device and then advance the screen as you narrate. This is especially useful if you've got animations in it
because you are controlling the flow of what they see.
Just like you would in a large group lecture hall in person.
Alternatively, if you want everyone to control their own eyeballs and advance past what you're narrating, and use the time as Q&A,
then share your slides in advance and don't share your screen during the meeting. Instead just open it up for Q&A about the slides.
You could jump to a specific slide and say "Alright everybody. Let's go to slide 12 and let me answer that question."
If your video conference system allows breakout rooms,
I think this is a fabulous way to engage learners- even a large number of learners.
This forces active student participation. This is - if you will- similar to using pair share in large groups or
in Team-Based Learning where you have teams of students where we break up into small groups and come back to a large group.
All of those techniques are designed to maximize active student learner and minimize passive student
recipient of knowledge-on-high. So use the technology features.
Breakout rooms, for example, can be
scheduled to end. You can decide the learners in advance or you can randomize them to groups. And you can send messages to all the
Breakout groups that say: "We're reconvening in a large group in 30 seconds." So there are ways to use that technology to your advantage.
Use the chat feature.
I think this is especially useful for questions or getting more involvement without having students talk over each other or interrupt each other.
Remind students that they can use the chat to everyone or to individuals.
Remember that when you're sharing your screen, some video conference systems do not allow you to see the concurrent chat occurring.
So declare that to the learners in advance of sharing your screen. So they realize you won't be seeing their chats.
Alternatively, you might want to use the chat feature
explicitly to see students reactions or to clarify points of misunderstanding.
So for example,
You can post a question in the chat
so you can see all the responses coming in and
Understand how many students are getting your question right or wrong, or the variation across students' responses.
Next I'd like to talk about ways to ensure student engagement.
I think this goes without saying, but "Cameras on to be fully present."
That means you ask the students to turn on their cameras. After all you're turning on your camera!
So you should invite them to only turn off their cameras if the bandwidth is an issue.
But let them declare that in the chat feature, so they're explicitly saying why they are off camera.
We have Osmosis team meetings of over 50 people every week, and everyone's on camera.
We are owning that we are all working from home, but we're all present fully by having our cameras on.
Have students randomly check in by having the presenter say
"Type yes in the chat, if you can hear this." Or pose playful questions to the chat feature
so students are engaged in using that, as a way to not have to unmute and talk but are actually still engaged in the process.
Consider renaming "audio-only" partcipants' phone numbers
with their own names, so that the video-participants know who's present. Students should be able to rename themselves--
they'll figure this out. But if you want, you could ask them to have a framework.
So "Everybody I want you to rename yourself and put in parentheses what level of learner you are." Or "Put in parentheses
where are you working right now." Or some other sort of tool. Put in parentheses
"if you did the pre-work." Or put in parentheses "What your favorite color is." It doesn't matter.
The point is-- by renaming, you're engaging even a large group of learners with some kind of a shared existence in the videoconference.
Consider asking a student volunteer
to scribe, either in the chat feature or some other shared document. If your students have some sort of a note-taking
sharing system, this is the same concept.
You're just doing it in the videoconference or via some sort of Google Doc or some other mechanism where somebody's taking notes.
So you have that log or repository of the meeting after the fact.
In fact, you can record the whole meeting and then you've "Once and done" given your lecture. And now you never need to give it again unless
things change. And you've got the recording for subsequent cohorts of students to watch.
Additionally, consider having someone be responsible for monitoring the chat for good questions that come up.
So you-- as the content expert-- don't have to split your focus between what you're sharing and what's going on in the chat feed.
So if you will, that's like a chat moderator that can then pose the best questions to you, or to triage, or to
prioritize which questions you need to spend time answering in real time. Because those are the most prevalent.
Next I'd like to talk about managing multitasking.
Look, we all try to multitask, but the science of learning will tell us all
that in fact, we learn less when we multitask. And we retain it in shorter durations when we multitask.
So
share that learning with your students. Own and admit that we're humans, and we can't multitask.
Our brains are just not hardwired-- if we want to learn and retain something. So I invite you to ask everybody to
"Explicitly single-task for a change" or just for the time that you're in this session.
You can frame it around respect to you as an educator or respect to their peers.
But I think ultimately framing it around: "You want them to maximize their learning and efficiency in their time"
so you're inviting them to see just how much they can actually retain of this session by single-tasking for a change.
And you can also say "I'm single-tasking too, so I ask you to do the same as a sign of mutual respect for
educators and learners." And then standard practice to remind everybody to mute themselves when they're not talking
so that way there's no background distractions or noise.
Okay last I'd like to talk about what to do after the session. Look we're all educators.
We grow and learn professionally, even no matter how many years of being an educator you have.
So let's embrace continuous professional growth as educators by reflecting on your own performance.
There's lots of different frameworks you can use, The Plus-Delta framework: What are things that I did well, and
and what are things that I can improve? A different framework is the "Stop-Start-Keep" framework.
What are things I need to stop? What are things I need to start? What are things I need to make sure I keep doing?
Another strategy is to ask yourself: "What's my key takeaway or carry-forward from today's experience that I will bring into my future practice?"
Or another framework would be:"What's the one thing that I will do better the next time I try a large group video conference?"
Lastly, let's solicit feedback from our learners. Let's bravely ask them to give us feedback in the same way
They ask us to give them feedback when we're teaching.
You all know the feedback sandwich
That's nothing I haven't told you before. The bread is: "What are things that someone did well."
The meat-- or the tofu if you're vegetarian-- is "What are the things that I could do better?"
and then we top it off with a bread: "What are the things that I did well?"
So I know some people hate the feedback sandwich-- I personally love it.
Because it doubles the amount of positive or reinforcing feedback. Because we want to continue the things we did well.
But it also allows us to know that we weren't perfect and there's room for growth.
And you can talk about an open-faced sandwich, or a flipped sandwich, or whatever. It doesn't matter--
the point is: let us ask people to tell us how to get better,
So that way we can improve the next time we try a task.
Alright, so as a quick recap:
There are several things you can do to effectively facilitate large group learning via videoconference.
Before the session: practice the technology yourself, and communicate your expectations to the learners.
During the session: think about how you'll run the session, use the chat feature, encourage student engagement, and manage multitasking.
After the session: reflect on your own performance, and solicit feedback from your learners.
I hope this was helpful. If you don't have the resources you need at your school, or if you have questions,
please reach out to us at partnerships@ osmosis.org