Digital Teaching Toolkit

Research and Instructional Technology Services, NYU Shanghai Library

Group Discussions

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.

Writing Classes Across 16 Timezones — Facilitating Small Group Discussion Online

header image writing as inquiry

Course: Writing as Inquiry (WAI II)

Instructor: Amy Reed Goldman, Senior Lecturer, Writing Program

Students Enrolled: 43

Technology used: NYU Zoom, VoiceThread, NYU Classes, Google+ Communities, Shared Google Docs, StoryMaps

Amy Goldman is currently working from India. She is teaching Writing as Inquiry II (WAI II), a first-year writing workshop that is mandatory for all NYU Shanghai students. In this class, which emphasizes university-level critical inquiry and rhetorical strategies, students write essays focused on works of non-fiction typically addressing contemporary issues across a variety of disciplines. WAI stands in contrast to NYU Shanghai’s required sophomore series Perspectives on the Humanities (PoH), content-based writing seminars that emphasize engagement with the questions and methods of the humanities’ disciplines. In her three-section WAI course, Goldman is currently teaching 43 students spread across 16 time zones, from Asia though the Near East, Europe and the Americas.

Depending on time zone, students are grouped into three different color-coded Google+ communities that act as virtual classroom spaces: Blue (Americas UTC-8 to -4) Green (Europe UTC +0 to +2) and Purple (Asia UTC +4 to +8). In these communities, students analyze course texts, think critically about the issues they raise, consider responses to study questions, query and respond to one another, and debrief in small group discussions.

Google Groups 3 timezones