The everyday blog of Richard Bartle.
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6:36pm on Wednesday, 9th February, 2022:
Anecdote
My online classes are currently Zoom webinars. One group I teach are second-year undergraduates (CE217) and the the other group are third-year undergraduates (CE317) with some MSc students (CE817, but the lectures are shared with CE317).
The second-years are a joy. They interact with each other and me in chat, they ask questions, they make jokes, they argue about points — they're great! The third-years and MSCs say practically nothing. One of them is brave enough to put comments in chat, but none of the rest are, even though there's the option of doing it anonymously (which should in theory override their fear of not looking cool in front of their frends-for-the-next-three-months). I had a CE317 class today that is normally highly interactive, in which I discuss Julian Dibbell's classic A Rape in Cyberspace article, but only the one student made any comments. The current second-years would have been all over it.
I don't know why this is. It could be that the second-years have only ever known online lectures, so they think that's the norm. Then again, it could just be the make-up of the students. Sometimes, you do get a cohort with creative or passionate students who want to know more to to share their opinions, and if there's a critical mass of them then it all takes off. Otherwise, it's not going to happen unless students are in groups of six or fewer, when they will interact with me or each other.
I expect that next year my classes will be live in lecture theatres (unless I catch COVID-19 and am no longer live myself). It will be interesting to see if the current second-years are as perky in person as they are online.
Some students don't like online lectures. Some love them. I certainly prefer them for lectures, but classes are a different matter.
Needless to say, the attendance of live webinars is roughly on a par with that of live in-a-lecture-theatre lectures — abyssmal.
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