Course: Crime, Punishment, and Atonement
Instructor: Marcel Daniels, Lecturer at English for Academic Purposes (EAP), NYU Shanghai
Students Enrolled: 12 * 2 sections
Technology used: NYU Zoom, NYU Classes, NYU Qualtrics, Google Drive, Google Docs, Doodle, Flipgrid, Podcasts
Marcel Daniels, a lecturer in English for Academic Purposes program, is now teaching the course “Crime, Punishment, and Atonement” in Atlanta to two groups of 12 freshmen spread out across China. It’s his first time teaching this course, which focuses on training students’ listening and speaking skills in academic English.
Usually in his language class, Daniels conducts a lecture, shows students a live talk, divides students into small groups for discussion, and then asks them to report key points of their respective discussions back to the class. When all the activities were migrated online, Daniels’ previous teaching experience with digital platforms and technologies helped him adapt quickly to harnessing online tools and managing virtual classrooms.
Daniels says he has been able to find equivalent solutions online for nearly all of his teaching activities. Every week, he prepares one or two asynchronous lectures and uploads the recordings and other supplementary videos or handouts to Google Drive and NYU Classes before class. During class, he moderates live discussions through Zoom, monitors notes that students take in group discussions on Google Docs, and uses Doodle polls to help students schedule group discussions outside of class. He also used NYU Qualtrics to administer an anonymous online survey about students’ familiarity, and comfort and experience level with remote learning.
By embracing unprecedented challenges, Daniels has discovered some of the advantages of online classes versus face-to-face ones. The recorded lectures and discussions enable students to review the instructor’s lecture and other students’ contributions at any time. They are also able to review their own performances and compare them with that of other classmates in this way. The instructor is also able to review group discussions afterwards and provide detailed feedback. “This is not possible in a physical classroom,” says Daniels. “I noticed some shy students gaining confidence and becoming less embarrassed after they watched their classmates perform.”
Daniels also sees the automatic transcription function in Zoom as an additional asset for language learning. “If AI cannot or wrongly identifies certain words that students pronounce in their live discussions, students may take advantage of this discrepancy and work on correcting the error to improve the clarity or quality of their pronunciation.” Daniels also notes that, compared to in-person classes, the students seemed more engaged, and participated more actively online.
“Participation rate has actually reached the highest it has ever been in all my NYU teaching experience,” says Daniels. “Maybe because the outbreak kept students confined at home, and they are starved to ‘meet’ people, to talk and share ideas.”
Challenge and Lessons Learned
Despite the technological convenience of online classes, Daniels still considers distance learning to be a considerable challenge for language learners “because the most important part of teaching English to non-native speakers is to provide students an opportunity to apply their language in real-life situations.”
“Normally, this is one of the greatest advantages of NYU Shanghai, where the campus setting is English-dominant and each Chinese student can be accommodated with an English-speaking roommate,” Daniels explains. “So in order to offset the loss of this environment, I put a lot of effort in designing optional activities to encourage students to interact and communicate with each other.”
Some of his experiments include assigning students to write summaries and analyses to podcast episodes that feature a variety of accents. Another is using Flipgrid, a website that facilitates video discussions, to offer students a weekly “soapbox” where they can interact and openly voice their opinions on the week’s themes in the form of 1 to 2-minute video clips.
“Online teaching is quite time-consuming but definitely rewarding,” says Daniels. In order to partner with students in the transition to remote teaching and learning, Daniels says he seeks students’ feedback constantly, and responds to and adjusts the teaching tools accordingly, even though this is more time consuming to do in an online setting.
“In this modern era where students are more digitally-inclined, I am definitely trying all the tools available in order to keep up with them. If it wasn’t my first time teaching this course, I would surely have spent more time making my lessons more visually appealing too.”
Daniels’ efforts have paid off, as students gradually adapt to and even start enjoying the online platform.
