The Small Successes from 2020 Online Teaching

By Elizabeth Mojica

During the COVID-19 pandemic, I was a TA for an online biochemistry class of 400 students. As expected, we faced many challenges this quarter. But now I want to take a moment to reflect on all of the good things that came out of this unique online class.

 

Accessibility: First of all, lectures and office hours became exponentially more accessible. Because asynchronous lectures videos were the norm, students were able to watch and re-watch lectures as many times as they pleased, even at a speed that worked best for them. Similarly, office hours were just a click away. Between the professor and TA’s, we held two to three office hours every weekday. We were even able to pick times that all students could attend, whether in California, New York, or China. As a result, some students attended >5 office hours every week without fail.

 

Community: It was encouraging to see the online community build as the course progressed. The professor offered extra credit for participation in synchronous Kahoot challenges, which are competitive quizzes were the speed in which a student answers boosts their score. It was not only a good tool to help students study the material, but it also brought students together because they could complain in the Zoom chat about how they answered too quickly, misread a word, etc. Even the students acknowledged that the chat brought them together.

 

Live Help: On the occasions where we held synchronous classes over Zoom, the four TA’s monitored the Zoom chat to answer any questions that came up. It was incredibly useful! We would get around 20 questions each class. If this class were in person, the professor would not be able to answer all of these questions while lecturing.

 

Student Initiative: What impressed me most about this quarter was the students. The students created a Discord and Facebook pages so that they could talk among themselves about the material and form study groups. Midway through the quarter, they announced to the class that they would start holding daily lecture viewing parties through Discord. They wanted to have the option to treat asynchronous lectures like live lectures, so they made it happen!