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Teaching in the Digital Wild: My Experiences in Teaching University Online

One of the final grad school projects I worked on was identifying the best practices for online learning. I poured through research articles (the best ones are from the Chronicle of Higher Education) and learning science books. With unsubstantiated confidence, I was excited to try my hand at online teaching.

After a two-year pause, I finally resumed teaching in a Philippines university (I taught in this same university from 2013–2018). I was thrilled. I wanted to put all those learning theories to practice.

Now that the semester has ended, I rate myself a resoundingly mediocre 5/10 (6/10 on a good day). Some ideas worked, some tanked. There were some major logistical challenges too, since the Philippines is known for having staggeringly slow internet speeds.

Still, I hope that my documented attempts at online teaching will be helpful to other educators. Especially those teaching in countries with underdeveloped digital infrastructure. Here’s what I learned.

On Classroom Design

1. Provide structure to help your students cope in an ambiguous digital environment. I err towards overpreparation and overcommunication when teaching online, because context and nonverbal cues are missing. There’s no such thing as winging it in an online class, because time and attention is infinitely more precious than in a physical classroom (where students can’t just alt-tab to escape you!). Here are some ideas:

• The syllabus is a social contract. I wrote my class syllabus as a 20 page note with a personalized message, spelling out my expectations, my teaching style, and my aspirations. I feel it is critical to use every touchpoint you have to make your digital persona shine.
• Make timestamps. I took the cue from YouTube streamers, who can hold our attention for hours. I plotted the timing of my class to make sure I’m on pace. Make sure to calibrate the schedule after every class.

Here’s a sample of how I plan out my own class sessions.

• Build each class differently, but show your toolkit. Class formats are tools. You don’t have to use all your tools every class, and you should change it up. But telling students the different formats they can expect provides a balance of freshness and predictability. These tools include: 1) facilitated group discussions, 2) student-led breakout rooms, 3) open Q&A discussion, 4) student presentations, and 5) straight lectures.
• Write down your lecture notes in sufficient detail. While this seem excessive, it has numerous advantageous. You can 1) see gaps and redundancies between different sessions, and 2) provide your students a way to catch up.

2. Design for digital equity. Less than a fifth of Filipino households have access to their own home broadband lines. As most students are likely on unreliable, prepaid mobile internet, you must design for digital equity. Even small tweaks in classroom design make a difference:

• Cameras off: This policy saves a lot of internet bandwidth, and allows students to focus on the teacher and the class materials.
• Treat it like a podcast to reduce cognitive load. You need to let the audio do most of the work. Unless visual aids are necessary, allow students to focus on listening.
• Design time for group meetings and socialization. Using part of official class time for group meetings and casual discussions reduces scheduling complications. It’s also a great way to build relationships.
• Overcommunicate and explain the rationale for your class structure. With the challenges of the online classroom, additional changes (whether good or bad) are stressful. You need to explain to your students that the changes you are making are for their own mental and emotional health.
• Be countercyclical to their aggregate class load. Most classes give heavy final exams or projects, accumulating stress levels at the very end. Ask your students how their workload is, and design your requirements to be countercyclical. You’ll get more engaged and appreciative students.

3. Scale the online format to your advantage. The trade-off of tech-enabled learning is gaining scalability while losing personal human interaction. Maximize the advantages of online learning to facilitate a better experience:

• Use spreadsheets to facilitate class discussions. I use Google Sheets with question prompts so students have a way to goalpost the progress of class. They also have an avenue to answer my questions without having to turn on their microphone (useful for introverts).
• Solicit feedback online. In a digital format, my students feel less intimidated to deliver feedback. I was surprised at how much feedback I got by using mediums like email and Google Forms.
• Ask what they want, and make the learning process a shared journey. Ask students what questions they have (even if not directly related to class), and weave it into your lecture. Ask them to share personal insights and interesting articles. Shift the learner’s role from a passive receiver to an active participant in their own learning.

4. Practice small teaching. The most useful books I’ve read in 2020 were James M. Lang’s Small Teaching and Small Teaching Online. I recommend it to anyone conducting synchronous online classes. Here’s what stuck:

• Don’t try too many changes at once. ‘Best practices’ don’t work if students find them overwhelming. Adapt one change at a time and give your students time to ease into a new class format.
• Meet them where they are. Filipino students are not used to active class discussions and case studies, and behavior is hard to change. My compromise was giving them the guide questions ahead of time and doing warm spotlights instead of cold calls. Nudge them; don’t scare them.
• Keep a steady pace. I dislike the norm of having just two major requirements — a midterm and a finals, with no opportunity for interim feedback. I prefer a small but steady stream of requirements so students remain constantly engaged (with manageable stress levels).

5. Help them synthesize and connect the dots. The goal of education is not to go through material. Holding students’ attention with content is a losing proposition, becomes you are competing with Netflix, YouTube, and Disney+. You need to help them take a step back and create space for reflection:

• Use signposts and sound bites. One of the lessons from an amazing media training session I took was the importance of signposting (“here are the three topics we’ll tackle today”) and memorable sound bites (“one point I want you to remember is…”). You need to deliver key messages that stick, and provide natural dividers during your long lectures.
• Create a framework to map out an ecosystem of learning. In my syllabus, I drew a framework of how the class sessions connect. I brought that map up again during my final session, and gave a one sentence key takeaway for each class session.

I flashed this map at the start of class to help students frame their learning.

• Reimagine the role of assessments as opportunities for reflection. Students view assignments as challenges to test their mastery of the content. Grading is not the end goal of assessments, however. I prefer positioning assignments as ‘pauses’ — an opportunity to synthesize and reflect. Try recorded videos, short reflection papers, or an online communal white board (like Miro) to make assignments less intimidating.
• Let your students do a ‘learning journal’. Writing is an effective tool for prompting reflection, so I assign frequent but short assignments to form the backbone of a ‘learning journal’. I also use reflective prompts (“what do you think of, what would you have changed”) rather than “objective” questions (calculate this, solve that) to promote critical thought.

Beyond Classroom Design (Reflecting on the Roles of Students and Teachers)

Beyond my micro-experiments on class design, my own experiences in teaching and learning online allows me to reflect on the evolving role of the student and the teacher in the 21st century classroom.

Students listen and show up for you. Classroom content can easily be replaced by a compilation of YouTube videos and Medium articles. What encourages students to show up and listen is you. They are, even through passive listening, trying to foster a relationship with you.

So take every chance to build up your digital persona. Show up 30 minutes before classes start and hang around after class. Check-in on them, and address their career and life uncertainties. As you become more than a face on the screen, your Zoom room will start feeling like a classroom.

A teacher’s goal is to inspire students towards purpose-driven mastery. You cannot distill information better than the internet, and you shouldn’t. If students want to learn content, they’d be better off scouring the internet.

Transferring knowledge is only a secondary objective. Your primary goal is to start a spark. Students face three problems: 1) they don’t know what they don’t know (perspective), 2) they don’t know what they want to learn (passion), and 3) they don’t know why are they learning (purpose).

These are individual problems that you cannot solve for each student, but you can equip them with the tools to start — the tools to inquire, to scrutinize, and to discover. Show them the vastness of the world, the curiosity and humility to roam the unknown, and a problem worth dedicating their life to solving.

Most students are equipped with the capacity to enjoy learning, so long as you show them just how fulfilling of an adventure it can be. Drive them to a lifelong journey of purposeful mastery.

You are doing better than you think. I delivered my closing speech to class to rows of black screens and silence. That’s to be expected. I told my students they can turn their cameras off, after all.

Because of this phenomenon, it’s easy to feel as though you’re doing a more terrible job than you are. That sinking fear of underperforming starts a vicious cycle that makes online teaching emotionally draining.

So to all my fellow teachers, know this: however you think you are doing, you are doing better than you can ever imagine. Stay hopeful and positive, because self-doubt is your biggest enemy.

Your students know you are doing your best.