There is nothing ingenious in what I write here. My objective was to replicate my normal classroom, not to use tech for the sake of using tech, and it all worked out fine, at least for the language classroom. 

To summarize Communications for pedagogy, there are three things to attend to at any given moment: the student’s environment, your environment, and “the package” (the info you are trying to convey). Online teaching complicates this, since you have much less control over the student’s environment, and the means of “conveying the package”—the internet—is fraught with its own issues. That said, you have the great advantage of having yourself been a student in the Zoom room before. That gives you, now the teacher, more knowledge about how this works (and doesn’t) than those of us have who’ve only been on the teaching end. 

Any number of things will interfere with your student’s engagement online beyond your control and, in many cases, also beyond theirs. They share spaces with others, their spaces are multiuse, they are at home, their connectivity may not be great due either to poor infrastructure or multiple people sharing bandwidth, they have phones and computers and roommates around, they might have Covid. In short, there are lots of distractions on their end. They are also tired of this. Psychologically, “two weeks online” may suggest “free two weeks of class before the real semester begins.” For these reasons, we might be more emphatic about establishing proper Zoom etiquette while simultaneously being sympathetic to the situation they are in. 

What I advise the students to do is: do everything you can to treat your workspace as the actual classroom. This includes clearing an actual desk or table. It also includes coordinating with roommates so they don’t bother you, but also in case you both need to Zoom into classes at the same time. In short, you must treat your workspace as if it were the actual classroom (because it is) and conduct yourself as if you were in the physical classroom. Shower and get dressed. Keep the camera on (otherwise I will consider you absent), unless for bandwidth reasons you need to turn it off, and get rid of all distractions. Close all unnecessary windows on your computer and put away your phone. Personally, before logging into class I walk around the block, then walk around the block the other way when class is over. Somehow this helps me separate the Zoom classroom from my living space, even though they’re the same. At the very least it gets me outside. Yale should(?) have spaces available around campus for students to Zoom to class. Use them! 

On the teacher’s end, here’s what I recommend. These comments are largely exclusive to my personal experience teaching online. The Poorvu Center has loads of resources, though, and people ready to help if you need it. 

First, a teacher’s attitude is contagious. If you are clearly unhappy teaching online, the students will be unhappy, too, even if they hadn’t been initially. (This goes for everything you do, frankly. If you clearly don’t like Ovid, the students will also not like Ovid.) While acknowledging that this isn’t ideal, set the bar high by somehow being positive about it. The synchronous Zoom classroom can actually work well. Tell them that. For one, you actually get to see people’s faces. 

Ask the students regularly how the online setup is going. Something might not be working well on their end, but you don’t know it. They might also have a helpful suggestion. It also helps with community when they feel like it’s a team effort. It very much is, and they are part of it.  

If you can, open the Zoom classroom a bit early in case students want to talk before class (tell them you will do that so they know you are around) and stay until everyone’s gone. This is good practice in the normal in person classroom, too. Where possible, I made the time before class an open Zoom office half-hour. Students rarely came that early, but when they did it was worthwhile. They also appreciate knowing that you are available, even if they don’t make use of it. I set the Zoom classroom so any of the students can open it, whether you’re there or not. This way, as in the actual classroom, they can talk without you moderating. 

Record the class and make the video available on Zoom. There will be plenty of legitimate reasons why students are late or can’t make it to class at all. This resolves those issues. Even those that never miss appreciate having the chance to review class later. And for future reference: I have seen at least one job advertisement requesting video evidence of teaching. We should not be stressed about making the temporary Zoom classroom publicly presentable per se, but saving recordings is helpful just in case one day went particularly well. You now have video evidence of your teaching. Plus, as uncomfortable as it may be to do, watching yourself teach can be good for improvement. 

Whether we like it or not, we need to teach class synchronously, as we would if we were in person. We may need to modify assessments for the online format, but class itself shouldn’t change unless we have a really good asynchronous activity that allows for it. 

What I need in a classroom more than anything else is a docucam to project texts and write in them. Ideally students clear their desk except for a notebook, and we all read from the same projected text. I replace this, and thus the core feature of my physical classroom, with an iPhone attached to a cheap boom arm. I put the phone on airplane so I don’t project texts/calls/notices while teaching, turn off the automatic lock so the phone doesn’t turn off on me, turn on the camera, and screenshare. That’s really it. I now use the free Air Camera app because it doesn’t project camera functions like the normal iPhone camera app does. Be sure to connect the phone to your computer using an actual cable. This minimizes delay. 

Remember that the speed of Zoom is limited by the host’s bandwidth (or so I’m told). In other words, if your connection is moderate, the best the students will get is moderate. So however you choose to teach, be sure you are connected through an actual ethernet cable. And restart your computer before you begin class. This way you clear the background noise caused by programs that have been running for days. 

I like the Zoom docucam also because I can easily flip out texts, write on blank paper like a chalkboard, flip open a book, etc. If you would like to teach this way, I have extra iPhone boom arms you can borrow. I have also used an iPad with Apple Pencil and simply screenshared PDFs on my desktop, but they restrict my nimbleness. Of course, it is fine for students to read from their own physical texts, but this way you can quite literally be on the same page, and the Zoom chat function isn’t designed to work like a chalkboard.  

If you use the iPhone docucam setup, be sure you watch the projection on your screen to see what they see, not just the paper you are projecting. This avoids, for instance, pointing to something, or writing somewhere, they can’t see. 

And configure the lighting in your workspace so it minimizes the shadow cast by your hand if you are pointing to text and writing in/on it. I have extra mini gooseneck lamps you can borrow to improve lighting if you want one. 

The same advice above for students also goes for teachers. What’s nice about projecting texts is that the attention is taken off of you. Students will spend lots of time just looking at what’s in your background. If you use an image background, be sure you don’t disappear too much into it. The blur background setting is good. If you prefer a natural background, make it as bland as possible. 

Prepare for the situation in which your internet suddenly goes out before class. The pre-class office half-hour was a way I could tell if I would have problems or not. You might not be able to rush to campus and set up there in time for class. Do you have a backup plan? Assuming that we really will do this just for two weeks, cancelling class won’t be the worst thing in the world. But if the Zoom room is set so that anyone can open it, students can still come in and go over things together like a review session. This happened to me once. When eventually I was able to get into the classroom, students were already translating. Or perhaps you can assign them a follow-up to the homework they prepared for that day. Correctly, homework is the asynchronous classroom, so simply expanding what they did the night before is an adequate solution. 

Lastly, quizzes—or anything you had planned for closed-book assignments in class. I convert everything to take-homes and have done so with minimal tech support with good success. For instance, I have not bothered creating Canvas quizzes. Instead, I post a PDF of the quiz I would normally hand out in class, have students write their work on a piece of paper, take a picture of their work, and simply upload the picture to the Canvas assignment. (When you create an assignment, set it to “file upload.”) I grade it from my iPad as I would a normal piece of paper. (If you don’t have an iPad, we can talk about other ways to do this.) 

For morphology quizzes, I make up roots (e.g. conjugate aaō, aāre in the imperfect active subjunctive). For vocabulary quizzes, I used to have them just self-correct for a free 100. This was the one type of quiz I hadn’t found a good solution for, but since I give so many quizzes, so each is ultimately worth little, and their self-reported grades (I had them submit their work and corrections) ranged normally between 75-95, I though a few free quizzes wouldn’t hurt. If it’s translation, compose it yourself, or heavily modify something, knowing that they will use a dictionary. The take-home online format limits what you can do with quizzes, but I found this to be sufficient. The only thing I wanted to test but couldn’t was speed at sight, including vocabulary. We shouldn’t have to worry about exams, but I take it the online proctoring system we have here works fine if it comes to that. But even those I simply converted to take-homes.

—James F. Patterson