Prof. Sonia Adeva, University of Alcalá, on Deploying Virtual Teaching in Just 2 days — Part 2
Interviewer/Writer: Amish Gir
Interviewee: Prof. Sonia Adeva(University of Alcalá), Professor of Spanish
Part 2 of the interview continued (find Part 1 here)…
Were students reassured by the fact that their classes were going to stay on?
Right now, some of the students are forced, for example, to come back to China. They are relieved that okay ‘I have to pack up, but I don’t miss my classes’, ‘I’m at home but I can follow the teaching with the same teachers, with the same class mates and when everything has calmed down I can come back to Spain’.
For the countries like Japan or China it’s also a relief because their students have paid for a course, but they can continue their education online with the same type of materials, same teachers and basically the same way of teaching as in the presential classes.
How have students found the virtual classroom experience?
In general, the students like it and find it fun. The biggest problem is just they might not have their eBook yet or they can’t come into the class for one reason or another and they want to reschedule because they don’t want to miss class.
When I watch the classes I like to watch them having a coffee whilst in class. They are more relaxed. Sometimes the students live together so they’re all around one computer and they are having their breakfast and enjoying the class. They like it. When they do have any problems, they are so understanding, they are happy to wait for it to get fixed or rearrange. They seem to be having fun.
They also love that they can watch a class after its finished. For example, in the class I’m teaching for exam preparation we do a mock oral exam. And, my student, she loves it because she can watch herself after doing this practice. All the teachers love that also.
Lets talk about the challenges of teaching virtually. What technical or logistical challenges have you experience?
Right now, we have students living in Spain, China, others in Japan and sometimes we have Erasmus students. We have people from Germany, Ireland, United Kingdom and France. The scheduling can be a little difficult because everyone is in different time zones.
Other problems they face are sometimes their connections are down so they can’t log into the class or they might have sound problems. These are technical problems, but they can happen with every single platform.
For me, for example, I don’t have great reception on my phone so I talk near the window of my home which can be a bit noisy sometimes. Those kinds of problems we can’t solve with WeChat or WhatsApp or whatever because it depends on factors that are out of our control.
For example, on Thursday one of my teachers’ text me, ‘I have problem with my internet connection’. So, we had to do the class another day because they could not connect. This isn’t a problem with ClassIn this is a problem because of the situation right now. Everyone now is connected because we’re all at home.
Were there any other challenges?
We’re facing all the problems one by one right now and overcoming them. The main hurdle right now is working with ClassIn support to figure out the best way to conduct an exam online.
In the beginning, one of the difficulties was with feeling less control over the administration of classes. To explain, normally when students start a course, they do a level test. Our Spanish proficiency test is a written test and then a speaking test.
In the university, I can have 150 students doing this test with all the teachers at the same time. They do 150 little conversations in order to know the level of the conversational speaking and the grammar. The students are then placed in classes with similar proficiency levels.
This time it was difficult because we could not do that part. I could do it with a few students, connect over ClassIn and have a small conversation in order to know what their level was.
Sometimes students also want to change their level. Usually this is very easy, I just change the list that the student is on and talk with the teacher to let them know. It’s a little frustrating because now students have to contact me and then I have to get a hold of the teacher. It’s not as fast as I would like, there is a delay.
But I understand that it’s the first time we had to work with ClassIn and doing it in just 2 days, we will do it better.
What do you foresee as the next hurdles for Alcalá?
I think the next challenge that we have to think of is what will happen when everything has passed with the situation and students have to come back to presential classes.
Most of the students are abroad. Some of them won’t be able to come back at the same time or cannot get flights at the same time. We don’t know at the moment if we are going to change the classes so that we have teaching classes for students in Spain but then have classes for online students instead of mixing both at the same time.
What advice would you give to other universities thinking about using virtual classrooms?
Keep training the teachers, that’s the first point. Right now it seems to be that universities think that if you put all the content online, like 100s of pages on a platform and the teacher then just has to read it.
They have to think more about the new model of online classroom — training of teachers, preparing good programs of education for that new type of methodology (classes online) and a good platform that will cater for all their types of classes.
