Abstract:

COVID-19 hit most educational institutions in the United States halfway through the Spring term in 2020. Educators had little to no time to adapt their classrooms to zoom and other virtual delivery methods. However, in Fall 2020, we had time to prepare and to explore new delivery tools and techniques. The author was faced with adapting a course normally offered to 240 students in a lecture hall twice a week and to groups of 24 in a third discussion period into a fully online offering. Discussion sections are supervised by graduate students each week, with each graduate student being responsible for two discussion sections. Given the waning enthusiasm that students in a smaller class displayed in Spring 2020 for the zoom environment, this author chose a format that combined asynchronous recorded lectures and live zoom sessions for the lecture sections. The graduate students chose to conduct their discussions entirely in zoom. This paper will present the results of the two solutions (asynchronous/synchronous blend vs. synchronous discussions), the difficulties of each, and student feedback. It will also address the author's plan to continue using asynchronous short videos prior to live lecture hall classes in Fall term 2021, and the relative success or failure of such a solution. By the time that the conference is held, we will have experienced more than half of the Fall term, making it possible to evaluate student success through midterm assessments and anonymous polling. It is hoped that this presentation will lead to discussions concerning the utility of pre-recorded material for classroom courses, and the ways in which a hybrid model can improve quality of instruction.

Keywords:

Lecture hall, synchronous, asynchronous, hybrid, zoom, virtual, classroom.