Students giving me some feedback about the activity we just did. Credit: Amy J. Ko

Ohyay and the pedagogical power of emojis

Last month, I ranted about how much I hate Zoom for teaching. It’s missing all of the key things necessary for great synchronous teaching—student gaze to convey attention, indicators of student confusion, conversation, social grouping, and freedom to configure a classroom for learning—while adding new problems, like latency and disembodiment. Many of these things are more generally problems of video chat, but some are also specific to Zoom itself and it’s sterile, featureless design.

When I posted my rant, Arvind Satyanarayan reminded me of Ohyay, and pointed me to Kayvon Fatahalian’s blog post about using it for teaching. I’d heard of Ohyay once before, when Jean Yang was first tweeting about using it for a playful Zoom bachelor social. I’d dismissed it early on as a cute platform for creating little custom video chat rooms for small groups. At the time, I couldn’t see how it might be used for teaching. But Kayvon’s post had some intriguing highlights: office hour rooms, emoji reactions, and a tantalizing idea of treating the online lecture like an exciting and unique event.

After a miserable quarter of Zoom this past winter, I spent an afternoon playing with Ohyay, assessing feasibility. At first, it seemed to have steep learning curve. The user interface was unconventional, ugly, and was unabashedly complex. It was immediately clear why I’d heard so little about it in the many months since it had been released: all but the most technical adopter would be immediately overwhelmed by its perceived complexity. But I pushed through, and found that it actually relatively simple in concept. There were a few key ideas:

• A workspace is a set of rooms, each of which can contain participants. Which room someone is in is always visible in a sidebar.
• Rooms are a highly customizable canvas of elements, and it’s up to a workspace designer to design rooms that serve whatever need they might have. This flexibility allows rooms to be anything from a generic video chat to any number of other things, depending on what elements are added to the room.
• Some elements share video, usually video from a web cam, but also screen shares with optional audio. Other elements include Q&A widgets, chat widgets, video and musing playing widgets, clocks, interactive buttons, and whatever else the developers have decided to add.
• Every element has dozens of properties, each of which is configurable. For example, chat widgets have customizable background colors, and settings for how chat behaves; video widgets have properties that can turn on and off name, sound indicators, and more.
• Rooms can also optionally have an emoji reaction toolbar, which allows people in a room to select emoji, which then float from the bottom of the screen upwards, creating a fluid stream of emojis from the audience.
• Rooms can also support background music, painting on the canvas, and customization features, like optionally allowing participants to and move and resize elements.
• Crucially, and unlike most other video chat platforms, everyone in Ohyay sees the same thing. This makes it clear at all times what others are seeing and discussing, making conversations slightly more seamless than on video platforms that give each user their own view.
• There are three modes. Editing mode allows admins to change the contents and behavior of rooms and the workspace. Preview mode allows admins to participate while still accessing most editing features. Participant mode shows none of the authoring tools.
• The room is always live. There is no concept of starting or stopping a “call”; it’s just a persistent space that’s always available.

That’s really it. And this is the blessing and the curse of the platform: if you can think of a creative way to use the above to support your virtual event, it can be far superior to a generic video chat tool like Zoom, Teams, FaceTime, etc. But if the only ideas you have are recreating generic video chat tools, then you’ll end up creating a subpar Zoom.

When I thought about how horrible Zoom had been for my winter graduate course and how much worse it would be with hundreds and 1st and 2nd year undergraduates burned out from a year of pandemic teaching, the idea of designing my own custom space for teaching and learning was highly enticing. I set forth imagining how I wanted class to work and how Ohyay might support it.

My class this quarter is a survey course, bounding through the broad expanse of topics intersecting with information. My syllabus focuses on reading, reading reflections, and two projects that engage students in analyzing an information system, and then designing an information system. In the past, I used lectures to teach the core content knowledge of the course through lectures, and interspersed active learning throughout, usually through PollEverywhere, or physically collocated interactions through students and their neighbors in a large lecture hall. It was fine, but not particularly engaging. I’d just written a new book on Foundations of Information to try to make the reading more inspiring. With Ohyay, I wondered what I could do to exceed the level of engagement during lectures?

The Ohyay editor, and my starting room, where I gave instructions to students about how to engage. Credit: Amy J. Ko

Here’s what I designed: I had two 1 hour and 50 minute sessions each week and up to 175 students in class, with about 50 in Asia, in an infeasible time zone to attend synchronously. On principle, I try not to do any one thing in a class for more than 25 minutes, and not more than 7 minutes if possible, recognizing the limits of human focus. And I so broke down each lecture period into six segments: prelude, lecture, discussion, break, activity, and projects. I designed the landing page room above to welcome students and explain how to use Ohyay. I designed a lecture hall room shown below with a video placeholder for me, smaller video placeholders for my TAs to be onscreen and visible, a big screen share video placeholder in the middle, Q&A and chat widgets on the sides, and a row of video placeholders for students which I called the “Stage”. Here’s how I’ve been using Ohyay for each segment.

I rock out to Barcelona before talking about privacy and security; students react to the photo of my cat Boomy that I’ve added on the bottom right. Credit: Amy J. Ko

Prelude (10 minutes). I begin class by sharing my slide deck. It structures the entire session and is always shared. I join class 10 minutes before each session, and chat with whoever shows up early and joins the stage; if no one joins the stage, I just ask questions into the ether and see if I can get someone to post in chat or give an emoji. Someone always reciprocates, which gives a nice social way of starting class, as students began to enter the room. (In the screenshot above, I was talking with someone about my cat Boomy, and students—the cat lovers at least—reacted with hearts). As I discuss below, I also give extra credit for students discussing what they read on stage, and so there are often many students lined up on stage to speak, creating a baseline audience for chat. Just before class starts, I start Ohyay’s built-in recording feature to record the session for the students who cannot attend for any reason (usually time zones), then I play a song that fits the theme of the day (e.g., see my playlist), and class start as soon as the song is over. (Ohyay only supports sound sharing through Chrome tab sharing, so I play songs by inserting the song’s YouTube video and playing it at just the right time).

A student gives a thumbs down to my description of U.S. government surveillance. Credit: Amy J. Ko

Lecture (25 minutes). Once class starts, I welcome everyone, cover the usual class logistics (e.g., reminders about assignments, answers to common questions, reviewing the agenda for the day). Then, I jump in with a short lecture, recapping the key ideas from the required reading, but also augmenting the reading with other media, including rich photos and diagrams, and a curated video about the topic with a focused prompt to discuss in the chat. Throughout the lectures, I include prompts to write in the chat or react with emojis, creating a lively and continuous feedback loop. But quite often, I don’t need the prompts: when I share some shocking insight, students react with “mind blown” or brain emojis; when I say something that makes marginalized groups visible, students react with hearts and rainbows; when the curated video reveals some surprising fact, students react with their emoji of choice to indicate learning. For example, in the screen shot above, a student gives a thumbs down to me explaining U.S. government surveillence, revealing to me at least one Snowden fan in the class. I reacted to their reaction, creating a dialogue in the middle of the lecture that wouldn’t have been possible in person.

A student discusses the tension between protecting his privacy and getting value out of services. Someone thumbs up the sentiments he’s sharing. Credit: Amy J. Ko

Discussion (25 minutes) is how I bring student voices into the day’s topic. I have students read a chapter I wrote prior to class, along with a reading of selected from the references in the chapter or a podcast from a curated set of podcasts I’d chosen. For extra credit, students can come to stage, summarize what they’d read or listened to in a minute, and I then I react, engaging the TAs in conversation or asking for crowd reactions. Most students don’t turn on their videos, but it doesn’t really matter: they are present, engaged, and insightful. There is a cap on the number of extra points students can earn by sharing, so this leads to different students sharing each day, depending on how much the topic of the day resonated with them. I usually have up to 10 students share, which gives me a chance to meet nearly everyone in class by name and have a 2–3 minute conversation with them. After sharing, I shift into Q&A mode, prompting students to add questions to the Q&A widget, upvote and downvote, and then I answer questions live until break time.

We all take a break before our activity. Credit: Amy J. Ko

Breaks (10 minutes). I actually take a break. After 50 minutes of talking and listening, I need it, and students likely do too. I play another song from the playlist, turn off my video and mic, and stretch for 5 minutes, or use the restroom. When I return and the song is done, I chat with anyone on stage until we resume. This isn’t a private chat, but the conversations are always worth lurking on, covering a topic more deeply, or students sharing something about how the topic resonated with them.

I review my security best practices and students react, mortified that they do none of these things. Credit: Amy J. Ko

With activities (25 minutes), I try to creatively find a way to leverage the scale of the more than 100 students in class each day. Students get credit for participating by submitting some small pass/fail deliverable. Sometimes we work in a big shared Google Sheet, writing a bit and reacting to each others’ writing. Sometimes I have students develop short speeches and present them on stage. Sometimes we share in Discord, which I use for asynchronous chat and questions, and upvote and downvote students’ written insights or creations. One time we created a shared map to try to find our “birthplace neighbors” and then meet our birthplace neighbors, to illustrate the tensions in creating information systems. In the screenshot above, I was preparing students to reflect on their privacy habits, and sharing my own habits; they reacted, surprised at how many of these practices I do that they don’t. I warn students each time that I had no idea whether the activity will work or be fun, and they often help by sharing ideas in chat, asking questions in Q&A, or coming to stage to express confusion. After the activity, I recap the connections between the ideas the lecture, our discussion, and our activity, then ask for feedback in emoji reaction form. As shown below, students often give me a bit of Ohyay applause before we shift to projects (the clap emoji is one of two that actually makes noise, which is surprisingly fun to receive after 90 minutes of teaching!)

Students give me audible applause after I wrap up the session and kick off project time. Credit: Amy J. Ko

Project time (25 minutes). The last part of class is set aside for students to work on their project with their teams, giving them some guaranteed collaboration time without having to schedule it outside of class. Teams break into rooms I’ve created for each project team, each with video chat widgets, chat, drawing and screen sharing enabled. The TAs and I go to our Ohyay offices, where teams come to ask questions and get feedback. After class, the TAs and I huddle in a special access-restricted teachers lounge, where we addressed any concerns with homework, classroom policy, or teamwork issues.

In addition to using Ohyay lectures, students also join Ohyay for their lab section, a 50 minute session between the week’s two lecture sessions. We also held office hours in Ohyay. Students are also free to come to the Ohyay workspace for class at any time to meet with their teammates or socialize. I don’t really monitor how much this happens; it is more like a dedicated workspace on campus that was there if they needed it, like a student union or library.

At the time I’m writing this, I’m actually only half way through the quarter, and but I’ve been having so much fun teaching that I just couldn’t resist sharing and reflecting on why it’s so much fun. I think the joy it brings reduces to the following:

• The barriers to student participation are exceptionally low, but seamlessly scale. The smallest possible thing students can do is join a room and listen, and I can see them there and when they leave. But they can anonymously react with emoji at any time, anonymously post a question, anonymously post in chat. And the levels of engagement increased stepwise from there, including non-anonymous versions of any of those, joining stage to speak, to joining stage to speak with their video on. Any of these were acceptable, and so a large number of students—as many as a hundred in any given class—engaged in some way. And out of my 175 students, I consistently have 120 students attend (out of the 130 who weren’t in Asian time zones). And halfway through the quarter, due to the student presentations, I feel like I’ve had a conversation with at least 60 of them, far more than I’ve ever had in person.
• Due to the many forms of engagement, I receive continuous immediate feedback about my instruction. Emoji reactions in particular have been invaluable in giving me insight into students’ experiences in class, even more so than students’ far less expressive faces in a physical classroom. And because of the many ways this feedback is aggregated (waves of rising diverse emojis, emoji reactions in chat, or upvotes on a question, impromptu yes/no polls with emoji reactions), I felt like I’ve a strong sense of students’ level of engagement at all times.
• The ability to precisely customize the learning space allows me to tune the environment to my exact needs. When I notice something not working about classroom, I can usually just customize the room in some way to make it work better. For example, at some point, I realized there were no thumbs up/down emojis in the reaction bar, which was slowing impromptu down polls, so I just added them to the default set of emojis. I got bored staring on video rectangles, so I made the videos much more engaging circles with white borders, “freshening up” the room and re-engaging students. I moved the photo of my cat around to different places just for fun, personalizing the space.
• The clap emoji. It’s silly how much of a difference this makes, but actually hearing the rising sound of applause (and woo whoo’s with enough emojis on screen) really is a strong form of positive feedback. It makes me feel good about my teaching and I think it makes students who present feel good about sharing.
• Emoji diversity. The diversity of emoji that students use brings a strong sense of playfulness and student voice to the learning. I’ve seen glimpses of this in the past when using PollEverywhere: students would include jokes or share a bit of their personality in responses. But in the way I’ve used Ohyay, student voice is far more prominent—if a bit ambiguous, due to the vague nature of emoji—which fundamentally changes my sense of connection to a large group.

While I’ve had more fun than in Zoom, I can’t say for certain that students had more fun. But I can say with certainty that they are more engaged than in Zoom, that I’ve had conversations with many more of them, and that I know far more of their names. I think all of these are even true of when I teach this class in-person, because the barriers to participation are so much lower.

There are also many things I don’t yet know. I’m not sure how students who watch the recordings instead are experiencing class. The baseline accessibility of Ohyay is sufficient for screen readers, but I haven’t heard from any students reliant on screen readers about their actual experience. Some students on older computers have noted how taxing Ohyay is on their computers, rapidly draining their laptop batteries and triggering their computer’s fans. And of course, as a tool that seems only barely out of beta, its full of bugs, usability problems, and other limitations. So it’s far from perfect.

However, it’s good enough that I’m not sure I want to go back to teaching large lecture classes in person. In Ohyay, I feel like we’re so much more connected and in conversation than when I’m speaking at 175 people in a large room. I also feel like students are so much more capable of sharing themselves due to their anonymity, giving them many more ways to share beyond raising their hand and speaking in class. Ohyay, plus how I’m using it, might be one of those rare cases where online teaching isn’t only as good as in-person, but perhaps better.

Could one approximate all of the above Zoom? The shortest path would probably be to fully expand the emoji options in Zoom, animate them, and allow individuals to react with more than one at once. Having some of them make sound would help a lot. But I’m not convinced that this alone would be enough to bring me back to Zoom for synchronous teaching. The power that comes with being able to design the classroom I need for the pedagogy I’m using is just too critical. Zoom would have to become something fundamentally different to serve the diversity of pedagogical needs in teaching, and neither it, or any other generic video chat platform is showing any signs of offering its users that expressive power.

Are you using Ohyay? How are you using it? Do you see similar benefits? If you’re just hearing about Ohyay, what are your fears and concerns?