Transitioning from COVID-19 on-line towards post-COVID-19 hybrid?
The COVID-19 pandemic pushed me, a computer scientist, to do the digi-leap from on-site lecture room teaching to on-line video teaching – and I am not the only one with this experience. Now it appears that COVID-19 is finally soothing down, and one should ask, what will the new normal become. How much will we fall back to the old routines? Certainly, the human presence is a vital thing to be cherished. But that doesn’t mean that we have to fall back to amphitheatres drawing calculations on clay and sand. Like always, we must harness the new technology to support us in our activities and in sharing the presence of each other.
At the beginning of this annual instance of my course, Principles of Interaction Design, I chose to apply Discord as the media for on-line teaching. I had good experience on it on a short project course last summer and I like the way that the text chat persists on the system. As we write notions in text on the chat during and between teaching sessions, those remain available for the students to return to review when e.g. preparing to take the course exam, as well as to come and read through, if they weren’t able to attend a particular session. Albeit participating in the discussion is the most efficient way to learn to understand new concepts, being able to read other people’s notes is still better than nothing.
On my course we are having small group discussions. The students are given 3–5 questions before the teaching session, which they will have to come up with an answer in their group and post this answer to the lecture specific chat. At the beginning of the course there were several groups, and I was quite happy with how I was able to help the students to form the virtual discussion groups of 3–5 people each. At this point, everything was still on-line. the students appeared to be comfortable and efficient in discussing in these groups, each of which I visited a couple of times throughout the teaching session to observe and mentor. There were some rather quiet students, most probably because of challenges with cultural difference and language – even though, I believe, none of the students is a native speaker of the course language, English, there is still some lack of equality with some students mastering this foreign language better than others. Alternatively, without video, a student may not be really interested or paying attention, although the participation is not obligatory. The university policy is that video must not be required from students in on-line teaching, due to interpretations of privacy legislation. Also, the video image is an extra technical challenge – first encounter on this, on my 40 student course, was when I discovered at the start of the first lecture that Discord only supports a videoconference with 25 participants at most. I had to first fall back to Zoom lectures, then Discord broadcast video lectures (where only my video image was sent), until I ended up in having the students discuss in small groups, where they could choose their own media – eventually they only used audio.
Going to hybrid was exciting, even though I had just before it gotten a good experience of it on another course, where I am a co-teacher. I had heard the scary story of a mass course, where the teacher started hybrid teaching, videostreaming his lecture from a big auditorium, where everyone could come on-site (in the good old way), as well as attend the lecture on-line. Not a single student appeared in the auditorium, where the teacher then ended up giving an on-line lecture in a big, empty, echoing auditorium, instead of their cosy office room or home – the story doesn’t tell which. I myself had, at the previous teaching session, asked the students and gotten two of them mentioning that they would be coming on-site. At this time, on lecture 9/14 there were 5 students attending the teaching session any more. There is typically a decline in the amount of participating students throughout the course, but now there had been a drastic drop from half a dozen small groups, first to two groups during the time when the elementary education at Finland has their winter vacation week. The university doesn’t have this vacation as such, but many of the student’s younger siblings do and they spend the week with the family – most of the study participation at university is non-obligatory. The following week, though there was just one group, when the Russian troops had marched into Ukraine which shocked everyone. As I believe this global crisis effected the drop in attendance, I was motivated to push towards hybrid teaching to enable personal human face-to-face contacts for students in these times.
At the morning of the hybrid session, on my way to the campus, I was quite nervous. I was going through the worst case scenarios in my mind, as well as how I would like this to go. Most selfishly for me, the best option would be 2–3 students both on-line and on-site. This would give a single 4–6 student small group with half of them on-line and half on-site, and doing the session in hybrid would be at it’s best. It would be even easier if there were only one student at one of the ends – one local student would then just be like the teacher in the horror story I told earlier, with the situation really being like the previous week – only now sitting in a lecture room with the teacher. One remote student would then be impersonated in a voice on a single digital device in the room and could be easy to consider as a “cyborg student on-site”. The easiest would have been with all the students either on-line or all of them on-site. The worst case would be 2 students on-line and 5 on-site, as then there would be one complicated hybrid group with 2 online participants and one on-site group loudly disturbing the hybrid group and being privileged by not needing to be concerned by the remote presence problem – perhaps in this case it would be best to have two hybrid groups with one remote participant – I trusted that this would really not become an issue. I was hoping to get two or three groups with either all or some of them hybrid and wondering, if I should really just prefer having only on-site and only on-line groups, no hybrid groups at all if possible.
I ended up with 2 students on-site (we all three being delighted to eventually seeing each other face to face) and 3 on-line. I was happy with this. Both on-site students had brought their own digital devices with them and I invited them to join the Discord voice chat room with one device, where the on-line students also joined. I put my headphones on my left ear to listen to the Discord voice chat room, leaving the other ear out to listen to the lecture room.
This room was not equipped to facilitate remote presence. There was a projector and loudspeakers available that could be connected to a laptop computer. I had tried out the loudspeakers before the teaching session, thinking if I could have the on-line students present with their voice louder that what a small laptop computer can generate. However, the volume level was fixed and on an overly loud level, and OSX didn’t allow software based audio level adjustment. Also the connection to the loudspeakers was rattling and kept breaking off. That equipment would have served no use. The students used their own laptop, but they had issues with network connectivity, as well as echo cancellation, especially in such an echoing room, which was designed mostly so that a person’s speaking voice would be as audible to everyone else in the room as possible. This design principle would have rendered it impossible to have more than two small hybrid groups in the room, if even that. I ended up giving my own trusty laptop to the students for an interface to the Discord voice chat room – and it served it’s function there as well as possible. Good quality audio and no issues at all.
The issue that was there was that this room now had a single “wormhole” – a portal through which voices were heard. The three on-line students felt minuscule and distant. You really had to nurture them, so that they could get their word in. As such, this wasn’t a problem, because most usually when a student on-site had said something, there was a long pause, during which the bandwidth of trust* was stressed – had the on-line students heard what was said? Was there a technical issue? Were they just gathering their thoughts, or were they visiting their kitchen for some snack? As a matter of fact, when we extended the session at the end to discuss this experience, one on-line student excused themself, because they had to really attend another event which they said they had been partially attending already during the teaching session – on their credit I must say, they had been paying attention to the teaching session too and even actively participated the discussion, and one of the benefits of hybrid teaching, in my opinion, would be to facilitate the participation of students who have complicated circumstances that make it impossible for them to come and sit on a particular room for one hour every week. My teaching sessions are not something obligatory to the students so that they will show up for my pleasure – the sessions are there to help them learn the course content so that they will be A) more expert in the subject, and B) able to pass the course exam, and through that the course (assuming they also pass enough of the bi-weekly exercise assignments).
*The bandwidth of trust is a concept familiar to me as described by Rousseau et al. (1998) and Sitkin&Roth (1993). The model states that people have maximal bandwidth of trust, when they are working at the same location together. They can trust each other to behave productively and in an expectable fashion. However, when a person or a group is transferred to work in an off-site location (such as in on-line), they are no longer constantly present and doubt begins to creep in, whether they have received and understood their instructions and will deliver what has been requested. There will be mistakes here, as there will be mistakes in fully on-site circumstances as well, but in the fully on-site circumstances, when everyone is present, it can be seen if these people are tired or busy or actually efficiently working on what was requested. In an on-site circumstances, it can be trusted that the person will deliver, or it can be trusted and understood that the person will not deliver. With off-site circumstances, it is unknown. There is also the quite a natural cynicism – people fear for the worst and assume that others are being mean and lazy. People can’t be trusted so much – the bandwidth of trust becomes narrow. According to the model, the bandwidth of trust can be boosted by having everyone meet each other on-site. After that, the bandwidth will start narrowing down gradually again, but it can be then restored again by arranging another on-site meeting.
The central factor here is the sense of presence. Both, the sense of them being here with me, as well as the sense of me being there with them. This sense is poor, when three people are each where ever unknown location, in contact only through this small laptop computer and their voice. It’s absurd that, although their voice can be heard from the same single point, and they can hear you through the same single point, they are likely to each be actually kilometers away from each other, all in different places and circumstances. And you all know this. Within the classroom you can quickly discuss between the three of you (me and the two students), but then, when wanting to communicate with “Alice” behind the “portal” on the desk, we really have to concentrate on “Alice” and address them clearly and verbally – establishing that they are actually present there and can hear us. If I ask a quick question: “does everyone agree”, I can just glance on the faces of those present on-site, effectively simultaneously, but for the three people behind this magical portal, we have to listen to each of them in turn. (Benford et al., 1998 – page 195: Dimension of Spatiality)
To glance on faces – to work on gaze perception, if not even eye contact.
To concentrate on others – to sense the spatial presence of those people. In this case, the spatiality comes through turntaking in audio participation, and observing the user name that has been highlit as the active speaker, as well as identifying the voice.
The on-line presence is facilitated quite minimalistically in the typical rooms provided for teaching, which is why hybrid teaching often feels so distant and “cold”. In BIT::TIP, we want to enhance the facilitation of (human) presence and eradicate distances, both physical and mental.
References
Benford, Steve, Chris Greenhalgh, Gail Reynard, Chris Brown and Boriana Koleva: Understanding and Constructing Shared Spaces with Mixed-Reality Boundaries, ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction, Vol. 5, No. 3, September 1998, Pages 185–223.
Rousseau, Denise M., Sim B. Sitkin, Ronald S. Burt and Colin Camerer: Not so Different After All: A Cross-Discipline View of Trust, Academy of Management Review 1998, Vol. 23, No. 3, 393-404.
Sitkin, Sim B. and Nancy L. Roth: Explaining the Limited Effectiveness of Legalistic “Remedies” for Trust / Distrust, Organization Science Vol. 4, No. 3, August 1993.
In Turku, 24.3.2022
Tomi “bgt” Suovuo