The change from in-class learning to online classes has forced us to quickly change how we teach students as well as the way we usually communicate inside and outside of class. The adaptation to online teaching and distance learning was at times challenging for our department as well, although we have been engaged in distance learning through online simulations for quite some time. We have compiled a few challenges and lessons learnt mainly regarding communication with students in and outside of class, as well as some open points for discussion for future classes.

We hope that our colleagues will benefit from some of our points as well. We also hope to see similar posts in future newsletters so that we can share our experiences across the business school.

Communicating with students in and outside of class

We have seen that while students adapt easily to the online learning setting, effective communication in and outside of class is harder to ensure. In our department we have followed two approaches - direct (face to face) communication via Zoom and indirect communication via the Moodle forums. As most of our colleagues, we conducted our in-class sessions via Zoom. Below we outline a few hands-on suggestions to ensure effective communication while on Zoom.

• As it is challenging to stay focused and engaged while talking to the camera, we held 10-minute breaks after every 50 minutes of class time. Students were encouraged to stand up from the computer and refresh themselves in the break. That contributed to fruitful and engaging conversations both in the in the main, common zoom session and in the breakout rooms. In the breakout rooms, students were more inclined to activate their camera while working with each other. Based on their feedback, we know that especially for the exchange students these online sessions were the only face to face human connections they had to our campus as many of them had to leave shortly after the lockdown.
• In classes with group work, we have included ad-hoc group meetings via Zoom to clarify questions the students might have. These were not initially planned for the classes, but as our email workload had significantly increased due to student requests, we have adapted to Zoom-sessions for groups to answer their queries. These changes might seem obvious in hindsight, but it took us a few weeks to make use of the tools in an efficient way.

For one of our classes, we divided the sessions into Zoom sessions and into distance (self) learning sessions with active Moodle forums for each of the distance learning sessions. For these, the students initially received the relevant literature as well as a detailed slide deck. Then we had a session dedicated to the Moodle forum, where students could ask us questions on the forum in real time as well as comment themselves on the questions and remarks of their peers.

We have had very good experience with this format, for two main reasons:

• Students are able to ask questions in writing and see how their peers ask questions. This provides an alternative method of communication for those who might not be comfortable to talk in a Zoom session.
• Students are able to see what has been written in the forums for each session and can use the discussions for better understanding the topics. This stays online and is thus available throughout the semester.

The students have been very active in the forums. We have ensured participation by giving the students a small incentive in the form of active participation points for posting questions and addressing questions of others throughout the forum time. We post these points after each session on Moodle, so students can see how they are doing in comparison to their peers. For each forum, we finish after 90 minutes and send the students a quick follow-up forum message thanking them for their participation and reminding them of the next classes coming up.

In sum, our experience with the dedicated forums - meaning separate forums for each dedicated self-learning session - has been very good, as the students have been active throughout and have posted meaningful questions engaging with the learning material before each forum. We have thus ensured that the students have studied the material before our forum session and have a designated time for answering questions related to this material, thus avoiding answering many emails throughout the duration of the course.

Initially, we were dealing with a lot of student emails asking for clarification and other questions related to the courses, even after a live Zoom session. Therefore, we adapted our courses on the go and included more communication via Moodle forums. Outside of class time, we again try to utilise the forums as much as possible to avoid multiple emails addressing the same topic. Students are however less likely to ask a general question in the forum and rather send it via email. Hence, our work on making the forum more attractive is ongoing and remains one of the open points for future online classes outlined below.

The online teaching and learning environment: open points for future classes

The following concerns aim to address the fact that distance learning is a complex issue. Hence, we cannot just make some little adjustments to the existing practices we carried out. In this semester, we did not prepare the courses to be delivered via distance learning, but rather had to develop new approaches quickly and ad-hoc. If we continue with distance learning next semester, we have to be more conscious of different scenarios while planning such as issues arising and their solutions - e.g.: being a parent at home, having afternoon classes, yet still be able to teach/study.

Distance learning can easily become less personal, hence, students might feel the lack of connection to their own studies. Fading personal connection can lead to less commitment to the courses and decreased active participation. In the worst case scenario, students attend multiple classes at the same time, often recording either one of them. Furthermore, they might be checked into the online class but not be actively present. From our experiences outlined above, little adjustments can make students more active in class and contribute to an overall engaged teaching and learning environment.

As mentioned in the beginning of the post, we are looking forward to hearing from you and your experiences. We hope to build a toolkit, in which we describe our lessons learnt so that we can make our programs so agile that they can stand through tough times and continue to deliver engaging learning experiences to our students. This teaser post is hopefully the beginning of sharing our online (and offline) teaching and learning experiences!

Contact:

Almina Bešić, öffnet eine externe URL in einem neuen Fenster & Edit Juhas, öffnet eine externe URL in einem neuen Fenster

Institute of International Management