Professor David Mix Barrington on Planning to be Partially Online this Fall

Professor David Mix Barrington of the University of Massachusetts Amherst shares how he is gearing up for the upcoming fall term with takeaways from the spring semester’s transition online.

Preparing for the Fall

We can’t go back to normal, there is no way that is happening. Our classrooms will be at least partially online. We need to think more seriously about what we are doing next fall. That means that we will probably have to do some classroom flipping. Replace the lecture with 15 minute video segments, but the problem is: how do you get the interactive space needed for a flipped classroom?

Conducting discussion sections with break-out rooms

Breakout rooms on Zoom are a big win for discussion sections. In retrospect, it was a mistake to make the discussions ungraded when we went online because fewer students showed up. We had some great sessions with those who were there but we just weren’t reaching that many students. Moving forward, I think we keep breakout rooms for graded discussion sections.