Digital Teaching Toolkit

Research and Instructional Technology Services, NYU Shanghai Library

Flipgrid

Silver Lining to Language Teaching Online: Better Attendance, Software Assisted Pronunciation, and Shyer Students Speaking Out

Daniels’ live discussion with students
Screen Capture of Daniels’ live discussion with students

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.

Student Engagement Beyond Real-time Interaction

Using Flipgrid to enable student e-meet each other

Course: Statistics for Business and Economics

Instructor: Grace Haaf, Assistant Professor Faculty Fellow of Business Analytics

Students enrolled: 40

Technology used: NYU Classes, Kaltura Capture, Zoom, and FlipGrid

Grace Haaf, Assistant Professor Faculty Fellow of Business Analytics, is teaching Statistics for Business and Economics from New York to a class of 40 undergraduate students this semester. This course introduces students to the use of statistical methods, including sampling, standard deviations, proportions, correlation, linear regression, and so forth, and to apply them to empirical situations.

The 40 students are spread out over different time zones with most of them are located in China, South Korea, and the United States, while others are located in South America, Europe, and Australia. Haaf uses asynchronous methods to deliver lectures in order to cope with time zone differences. She records instructional videos using the screen recording tool Kaltura Capture and screen capture on an iPad with a stylus, with which she is able to explain Powerpoints with annotations. All the videos are uploaded and organized on NYU Classes, and students are given 48 hours to watch them after the regularly scheduled class time.

Haaf breaks each lesson into a series of short videos which last no longer than 10 to 15 minutes, in order to maximize students’ attention spans. She also added questions to the end of each video to check students’ understanding of the lecture and make the experience more interactive.

Hands-On Practice with Electronics from Home

Course: Working with Electrons 

Instructor: Rodolfo Cossovich, Clinical Instructor of Interactive Media Arts, Working with Electrons

Students Enrolled: 17

Technology Used: NYU Zoom, FlipGrid, Google Jamboard, Google Docs, Discord

“Working with Electrons” is a project-based class which focuses on the discovery of electromagnetism. Along with lectures introducing major theoretical models that explain electromagnetic phenomena, students spend more than half of the class producing laboratory work, which includes assembling circuits, making self-oscillating inductive heaters, and so forth. 

Seventeen students from eleven different places around the world are enrolled in the class this semester. To ensure that the lectures and the experiments can be conducted with high quality through digital learning, Rodolfo Cossovich, Clinical Instructor of Arts, designed the class to be a hybrid of online classes with interactive experiments. With support from NYU Shanghai, each student has now equipped his/her home with a small electronics workbench with tools, instruments and materials to enable hands-on practice. Synchronous and asynchronous discussions are held via various digital platforms to guide students through the theories and the experiments. 

workbench
Left: Cossovich recording a workbench tutorial; Right: Students doing practice on their own workbenches

The students meet weekly using Zoom for synchronous interactions to discuss concepts and engage in group discussions. These sessions are recorded so that students who cannot attend can watch later.

Teaching Languages Online: Videos, Live-streaming, Student-made Websites, and Real-time Interactions

Mixtape

Course: Elementary Chinese II

Instructor: Chai Jing 柴晶, Senior Language Lecturer, World Languages Program

Students Enrolled: 16

Technology Used:  Zoom, NYU Stream Kaltura Capture, NYU Classes, VoiceThread, GoFormative, Flipgrid, Padlet, Quizlet, Kahoot, Google Docs, Google Forms, and more.

After many discussions in late January and early February, the World Languages faculty settled on a mixed model of language teaching which involved recorded videos, live-streaming, and mixed online/offline multi-platform interaction. Tools they are using include Zoom, NYU Stream Kaltura Capture, NYU Classes, VoiceThread, GoFormative, Flipgrid, Padlet, Quizlet, Kahoot, and more.

Chai Jing and her colleagues in the World Languages Program have worked together to produce 65 teaching videos for their students within a week. They are planning to complete nearly 500 videos this semester — an undertaking that would usually take a semester or an entire year to complete. The videos also include interactive quizzes that test students’ progress over time. The content includes real stories, news, and anecdotes from today’s China to link classroom knowledge with real life.