Online conference success – a perfect small package

 

Last week, I participated in an online conference presented by ILETA (International Legal English Trainers’ Academy) and organized by Sofia Parastatidou. Curiously, it was the best online conference I have ever attended precisely because it was organized so differently from an in-person conference. The factors that contributed to its success were the limited but highly coherent content, the small number of participants and its short but flexible schedule. In practice, the conference left the impression of having physically attended without all the logistics.

In general, online conferences, however economical and convenient they may be, suffer from issues of downtime, lack of intimacy and mental fatigue. As most online conferences have only one track and try to reach the largest potential audience, many of the lectures are irrelevant to a certain percentage of the participants. In a physical conference, this dead time is ideal for networking but online conferences do not offer such opportunities. A more serious issue is that the audience in larger remote conferences is literally a sea of faces. It is very clumsy to interact with other participants during the conference. As many cultures consider efficiency and timeliness virtues, the host keeps the schedule moving more or less on time, leaving very little time for open discussions while everybody is present. The consequence is a large quantity of intellectual material but very few connections.

In this conference, the lectures related to a narrow topic, specifically legal language, and, most importantly, complemented and supplemented each other. Each lecturer went into depth on an aspect mentioned by a previous presenter, thus creating a complete picture. For example, I spoke about the rules of Plain English in legal writing while Anna Sobota and Anna Setkowicz-Ryszka, respectively, analysed its actual implementation using statistical methods and showed how the difference between how attorneys and linguists view proper legal language. The presentations built on each other.

This online conference highlighted the strength of distance learning. It would have been completely impractical to bring together all of the participants as each of us lived in a different country. Thus, Zoom allowed all of us to participate. More importantly, given the relatively small number of persons involved, everybody could easily see each other's faces, ask questions, make comments and have their say. There was more than enough airtime for everybody. Clearly, less is more in online events.

The strangest aspect, surprisingly positive, was the lack of a firm time structure. The host ran it on Italian time, meaning she let discussions continue until they died a natural death. Thus, we had the opportunity to discuss issues raised in the presentation before going on to the next segment. The “price” was that there were only a limited number of lectures in the day-and-a-half long conference. However, the benefit is that it is far easier to retain the content. As an analogy, seeing one museum in a day is memorable while visiting three museums in a day creates a muddled picture.  Again, less was more.

In summary, the ILETA conference virtually felt like an in-person conference. It provided both content and interaction, feeling like a conversation in a cozy salon rather than a distant event. The keys were highly focused content, similarly engaged persons and flexibility. It was a perfect day, showcasing the potential of a properly organized online conference.

Zoom lessons

 

[Faces*}

The first semester of the 2020-2021 is thankfully over. I, like most teachers worldwide, used Zoom from the first day to the last day and never actually met my students. After the shock and confusion of the previous semester, both teachers and students began this semester with awareness of the situation and the understanding of the technology. Thus, an intuitive analysis of this Zoom semester has merit in terms of grasping the impact of Zoom on material selection, student-teacher interaction and student performance.

As a matter of background, I teach advanced English (Levels B2 and C1) to engineering students at the Braude College of Engineering in Karmiel, Israel. I taught two groups of 30 students from all departments. I am thoroughly familiar with the material as I have taught the course for more than a decade. Most of my students are in their first year, with their ages ranging from 19-27. A few of them are even married with one soon becoming a father. They come from all sectors in Israel, including Jewish, Muslim and Muslim as well as native-born and immigrants. Consequently, the background English level is very heterogenous. Despite falling into certain level categories, they have varying degrees of proficiency in specific language skills, with writing generally being the weakest and reading the strongest. Thus, my two groups collectively are a fairly representative.

The limitations of Zoom required an adjustment of the course tasks. First, online teaching does not allow the teacher to see whether students are truly paying attention or learning. For the most part, all see a series of gravestones (names in the grey background) or unclear headshots without facial expressions. Thus, online teaching is like throwing a line in the river and hoping the fish will bite (often with the same success rate). Therefore, explanations were minimized and breakroom session maximized to allow students to actively learn and teachers to better assess actually understanding. Furthermore, it is effectively impossible to prevent students from sharing knowledge during quizzes and tests, especially in regards to objective answers. Consequently, the grading emphasis switched from a statistically important final with an unseen to a minor element involving a seen text with interpretive questions and a writing task. During the semester, more time was invested in writing and, curiously, speaking as they involve individual student activity as compared to general learning. The result for the teachers of the staff was significantly more time work.

Student-teacher interaction on Zoom is defined by the technical limitations that only one person can speak at a time and the time required to get from one break room to another. In a normal classroom, the teacher can ascertain which students wish to participate and encourage others to join them. In Zoom, the first to speak controls the microphone. In practice, I heard very few students while I was in the general group mode, an unacceptable situation in normal times. Moreover, even when I broke them up into small groups, the time and effort required to switch from one room to another is significantly greater than that of moving around a room, where it is also possible to monitor which groups are on task, unlike in Zoom. Given the lack of communication with the vast majority of my students, I invested more time outside the lesson. First, I always opened the session 15 minutes before the start of the lesson and stayed online until the last student left, giving them a chance to ask questions. I also provided much specific feedback on their writing assignments and initiated email where I felt that the students were “out of it” based on their performance. Timely, detailed written feedback partially replaced the personal contact typical of effective teacher-student interaction.

That said, albeit the academic results reflect only one semester, performance was noticeably below the level of previous years. The number of failures was higher but that may be just a statistical anomaly. More seriously, the number of students whose final paragraph reflected a complete or significant lack of comprehension of the course material was unusually high and very distressing to both parties. I had the impression that I truly had been too often teaching to gravestones. Granted it may be one of the causes is my explanations. Also, these students were clearly less advanced having lost most of the previous year. However, it is highly probable that the most important cause is that the 30+ hours that students spend on Zoom, not including their HW, reduces their capacity to absorb, especially given most have none enjoy the reinforcing effect that actual social interaction with their fellow students provide. Not only that, the home environment poses much more threats to their concentration. Clearly, the attention issue must be addressed in some way.

As said, these conclusions are entirely intuitive. Yet, as Zoom will continue to serve as the medium of teaching for the next semester if not longer, it is vital to analyze and strive to overcome the limitations of the tool. These are my Zoom lessons from the previous semester.

* Give access to the blind by providing captions to pictures.

Picture: Image by <a href="https://pixabay.com/users/geralt-9301/?utm_source=link-attribution&amp;utm_medium=referral&amp;utm_campaign=image&amp;utm_content=995558">Gerd Altmann</a> from <a href="https://pixabay.com/?utm_source=link-attribution&amp;utm_medium=referral&amp;utm_campaign=image&amp;utm_content=995558">Pixabay</a>

Zooming on the silent minority – Reaching passive learners despite technology

 

[Zoom image*]

There is the maxim of 80/20 stating that 20 percent of your effort goes to achieving 80 of the results and vice versa. Besides being a translator, I am an English lecturer, with more than 25 years of experience teaching English to engineering students at the Braude College of Engineering in Israel. We strive to teach all first year students the four basic language skills, specifically reading, writing, speaking and listening. In teaching, given a heterogeneous class, the challenge is not reaching the vast majority of active and/or knowledgeable students but instead the minority suffering from passive behavior and weak backgrounds. The forced use of Zoom as the means of teaching has only made it more difficult to reach these students, forcing all teachers to reconsider how to impact those students.

To define the problem, every class has a certain percentage of students that suffers from both passive learning habits and a deficient background knowledge, creating the conditions for failure in terms of grades and, more importantly, a damaging lack of knowledge in the future. Passive students fundamentally accept their lack of understanding regardless of the psychological cost. In terms of behavior, they sit in class and seemingly pay attention but in fact understand very little of the lesson. They avoid asking questions in front of their peers, whether as a result of personality, culture or both, thus hiding their lack of comprehension. At home, on their own, they make an attempt to apply the taught material, generally with poor results as they did not understand it in class, but do not seek additional help. They often consult with students in the same boat because of a shared culture or to avoid appearing stupid to socially distant peers. This same behavior would not be academically disastrous if the students retained sufficient knowledge of the material from previous courses. However, in too many cases, poor schools combined with ineffective work habits have created a serious knowledge deficiency that requires extraordinary effort to overcome. Thus, these challenged but silent students either fail the course or continue on without the knowledge they require in the following courses and their future careers.

In normal times, i.e., physical classrooms, teachers can identify these students through observation and quiet interaction. Experienced educators quickly notice those students that tend to avoid participation and asking questions. A discrete assessment of student comprehension during class exercises by looking over the student’s shoulder or asking questions makes it clear that the student’s silence is not golden. In other words, the student neither understands nor is taking action to rectify that situation. Repeated occurrence should turn on a red light signaling that this student needs extra help. In this case, the most effective technique is a quiet conversation before or after the lesson in order to identify the specific problem and suggest solutions or provide additional opportunities for further explanation. In practice, the success of this method, granted partial, is premised on transmitting the feeling of “I care” to that student, which, in turn, creates the motivation to make a greater effort to work through the difficulty and fight fatalism. The teacher generally must mentor these students on an ongoing basis to fundamentally change the situation but any progress is important to the future of that student.

Zoom removes many of the diagnostic tools and limits the ability of the teacher to communicate empathy and assess understanding. A lecturer using Zoom sees at most some 20 faces regardless of the size of the class. Even that amount depends on the issue of forcing students to keep their cameras on, not a simple matter. Furthermore, only one student can talk at a time, with a short but annoying gap between the transfer of speech right to another student. Any  dialogue is public, limiting private conversation to a written from on the chat, far from an ideal manner to communicate. Even worse, it is impossible to glance at a student’s answers during an assignment, leaving the teacher completely in the dark in regards to the level of actual understanding. Break rooms of various sizes allow more personal communication. However, there is an interplay between the size and number of groups, i.e, the smaller the groups are, the more jumping from group to group is required, which eats up time. So, breakout rooms alleviate the communication issues to a certain degree but are far from being equivalent to being there physically. Even quizzes, considered a practical even if flawed method of knowledge assessment, often express nothing since the students can share knowledge or copy at ease sitting in front of their own computer. In short, in Zoom, teachers often throw the knowledge into the cloud and hope for rain.

I, like most teachers, have tried to learn from the successes and failures of last semester’s Zoom teaching. I have two groups of 30 students this semester. Already some six weeks into the semester, I have identified several students that are “out of it” and merely attend class. In several cases, I have asked them to talk to me on Zoom at the end of the lesson when everybody has “left”. The results in terms of communication and establishing a bond have been far from acceptable. I do not feel that these conversations have created any momentum in terms of changing the learning approach of the student. More successfully, I have been much less tolerant, on the verge of brutal, on early assignments regardless of their actual weight in the final grade. From the start, I have been returning compositions and assignments back to the students to redo, providing specific instructions on what to fix in a private email message. In a few cases, I have warned students that they are in danger of failing the course if they do not make more effort, again specifying what is required in the email. When they have applied the constructive criticism, I have quickly praised their effort, of course. This honest but less emotionally communicative approach, forced upon me by the requirement to teach in Zoom, will hopefully lead to better results at the end of this semester as compared to last semester.

Viewing my efforts this semester, I have been spending almost 80% of time on these passive students, which represent more than 20% as a result of the difficulties of Zoom learning. Strong students almost always survive but the goal of education should be to reach all those with the potential to learn, not only those with the current ability. It is distressing to know that intelligent people will have their ambitions stalled because they were unable to overcome the block of an ineffective learning strategy on their own. As the ad on UK television says, teachers can make a difference if we only can figure just how to do so.

*Captions are vital for the blind.

Image: Image by <a href="https://pixabay.com/users/alexandra_koch-621802/?utm_source=link-attribution&amp;utm_medium=referral&amp;utm_campaign=image&amp;utm_content=5231389">Alexandra_Koch</a> from <a href="https://pixabay.com/?utm_source=link-attribution&amp;utm_medium=referral&amp;utm_campaign=image&amp;utm_content=5231389">Pixabay</a>

Rezooming the academic year

 

 

[Lens*]

In a one month, after the Jewish holiday of Sukkot, I will begin another year of teaching English to engineering students, my 28^th year, at the Braude School of Engineering in Karmiel, Israel.  Unlike last autumn and those previous, I will not be meeting them personally as circumstances require remote teaching through Zoom. Last semester, both students and teachers worldwide got acquainted, as intimately as possible, with this technology but it was like a first date, fraught with tension and nervousness. This time, we will be meeting as old friends, with some knowledge and comfort with each other. As it is considered wisdom to focus on the blessings you enjoy rather than the momentary shortcomings, teaching through Zoom does have its advantages for teachers and students.

Teachers will certainly enjoy the both the familiarity with the technology and distance from the students. After one full semester experimenting with the options and techniques for presenting various types of material, it will be a pleasure to begin a semester with reasonable certainty in regards to the pedagogical approach. In simple language, starting every lesson fearing potential technical issues is quite tiring. Teachers now have the basics down. Furthermore, while non-traditional, the physical distance from the students is also non-emotional. Zoom teaching is vedi, vici, exii, I came, I conquered, I exited. Teachers have very little emotional contact with the students. While this lack of human touch reduces the effectiveness of teaching, it also significantly reduces the weight of personal preferences in issuing grades, i.e., the students are mainly just faces. On a more important note, at least for college students, it places almost the entire responsibility for learning on the students in terms of their focus during and beyond the Zoom sessions. The role of the teacher is heavily limited to preparing proper explanatory material and providing understandable explanations. The rest is on the students.

They also gain in terms of being allowed to study according to their personal style. Every student has a preferred way of learning and reviewing material. Some requires extreme focus to grasp and remember while others learn more through osmosis, their brain absorbing the material as they play with their phone or do crosswords (the latter was my particular style). In the latter case, as this seeming distain tends to annoy flesh-and-blood lecturers, Zoom lessons allow them to do whatever they want during the lesson without causing offense. Moreover, they are able to go to the bathroom or get a sandwich without asking permission or disturbing other students. For slower-grasping learners, the recorded Zoom lessons create an opportunity to absorb one point at a time or reinforce key points. Clearly, Zoom is a boom for certain types of learners.

Both teachers and students benefit from the convenience and economic impact of Zoom. Nobody can argue that commuting to college is fun, whether in terms of time or parking spots. Most colleges suffer from a terrible lack of parking spaces. As for the hours, how many students really enjoy 8 o’clock classes, morning or evening? Even when the classes are being given at those hours, once the camera is turned off, students do not have to be present, whether physically or mentally, nor do teachers have to enforce active presence, a relief for both parties. Most importantly, Zoom allows the show to go on despite the Corona.  Even one year without schooling, regardless of the level, would be an educational and professional disaster for students and financial disaster for teachers. Zoom allows a semblance of continuity.

I am fully aware of the disadvantages and difficulties involved in Zoom teaching both for teachers and students. However, I am also aware of the millions of people that have lost their livelihood and businesses due to the Corona virus. I therefore choose to join Bing Crosby, the Andrew Sisters and Johnny Mercer, to name a few, and accentuate the positive and resume teaching with a smile.

* Caption pictures to allow the blind to fully enjoy your posts. Picture: Image by <a href="https://pixabay.com/users/PhotoMIX-Company-1546875/?utm_source=link-attribution&amp;utm_medium=referral&amp;utm_campaign=image&amp;utm_content=3151078">Photo Mix</a> from <a href="https://pixabay.com/?utm_source=link-attribution&amp;utm_medium=referral&amp;utm_campaign=image&amp;utm_content=3151078">Pixabay</a>