Personalized learning through a single screen

How one US professor finds a teaching moment in COVID-19 while dealing with the new norm of remote education

Yu Chen is an Assistant Professor at the Lucas College and Graduate School of Business, San Jose State University. Her innovative style of teaching and the Innovation Farm asking students to develop solutions to COVID-19 was recently covered by her local news station, ABC7 News.

For more on Yu Chen and the involvement of her class in the Call for Code Education Innovation Case Competition, check out this post.

We recently caught up with Yu to understand more about what it means to educate and inspire students when learning happens remotely.

What are some of the bigger challenges you see for students having to study at home? Does this differ by age or ability?
Before we moved to teaching online, I sent out a survey asking about student situations, needs, and requirements for online teaching. Based on the survey results and conversation with a few students, here are the biggest challenges for students studying at home:

• Lack of face-to-face interaction with classmates and teachers compared to screens
• Loss of structure compared to a more structured study schedule
• Collapse of diversity of location compared to moving to different classrooms, labs, library, etc. on campus
• Family duties, such as childcare and care for older parents, especially when children’s schools are closed or moving online
• Managing study and work (for essential business and hospitals)

Age might play a role in the types of difficulties students are facing. For students in their early twenties, the lack of structure and time management and the need for socialization might be a common barrier for them to study at home. For students with family responsibility, studying at home with childcare seems to add quite a bit of stress and anxiety to them.

Are there certain subjects that are more difficult to learn at home?
Fortunately, I am mainly teaching technology-related subjects which could do without face-to-face interaction to some extent. But I can imagine subjects such as lab work in chemistry, biology, manufacturing, etc, might become difficult subjects where the lab environment could be challenging to replicate in the home environment.

Are there methods you would use in a classroom to keep students engaged that are more difficult to achieve at home?
I used to use the IBM Design Thinking toolkits for group work, where students each individually write their answers on post-it and then discuss around a whiteboard collaboratively. This is becoming more difficult when classes are moving online. So far we are using the breakout room functions from Zoom to facilitate student team work and try to leverage cloud-based collaborative tools, such as Google Drive for presentation and documents and Balsamiq for design.

How important is personalized education and understanding and delivering what a student needs to know at a given point in time?
Personalized education is definitely crucial in education in terms of leveraging student’s interests, skills, personality, etc. But never has personalized education been more important than current times when the dimension of education suddenly collapsed into much lower degrees. For example, multiple diverse classrooms and labs on campus collapse into one (never-changing) office (or bedroom, or living room, or even dining room) at home; the multi-modal physical interactions suddenly collapse into one screen; the diverse ways to express oneself suddenly collapse to broadband limited by the capacity of devices and internet providers; the learning styles suddenly collapse into individual mode due to staying at home; the multiple dimensions of life, e.g., studying, social, personal, etc, all collapse into one space.

Therefore, different from the conventional personalized education, the concept of personalization becomes more visible in terms of each individual’s situation of accommodating technologies at home and their individual preference of technology-mediated learning. You will see very different modality of interaction offline and online. For example, some students who hardly spoke in class might become active in sending messages in chat in online class; students who were active in the classroom might not want to speak up due to the noise at home or less-than-ideal speakers.

When studying at home, a student’s learning experience becomes fully blended with their living experience. Therefore, personalized education is more complicated when considering the full picture of each student. What helps me a lot is a pre-online-learning survey to understand where students are at in terms of their expectations, needs, and requirements for online learning.

What other advice would you have for developers building solutions in this space?
One thing came to my mind to try to restore the rich dimensions that exist in the physical classroom to online education while leveraging the advantages of online education.

In terms of enriching the dimensions of physical classrooms, can we increase the sense of location from just one room to the concept of multiple “classrooms” or “labs”? Can we increase the sense of only one screen to the concept of multi-modal interaction? Can we break the individual mode to a more social mode? Can we enhance the equality of students who have more constraints in technology or home environment?

Meanwhile, technology does bring some advantages to education. For example, some students are more willing to express themselves online than in person; some students find it easier to share information online; some students feel more relieved when they don’t have to be stuck in traffic during the commute every day.

So the question is how to use technology to bring back the “goodness” of in-person classroom teaching, while amplifying the merits of online learning.

Yu Chen shares more on her teaching at the Innovation Farm.

Think you can build solutions to address remote education? Check out these Call for Code resources.