Digital Teaching Toolkit

Research and Instructional Technology Services, NYU Shanghai Library

NYU Stream

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. 

Three Ways to Share and Present Mathematical Proofs Online

Course:  Honors Linear Algebra II

Instructor: Leonardo T. Rolla, Visiting Assistant Professor of Mathematics

Students Enrolled:  35

Technology Used:  VoiceThread (VT), Gradescope, Google Forms, NYU Stream

One week before the first day of class, I experimented with an audio/video software program called VoiceThread (VT) with my students. I first shared a VT where I walked the students through the syllabus and they made their comments and questions. Then I shared another VT whose purpose was for me and each of the students to introduce ourselves. 

The last VT before the beginning of classes was one where I asked students to solve an exercise from Honors Linear Algebra I which most of them completed in the Fall 2019. I produced three sample video presentations they might want to use: capturing a video of a piece of blank white paper while I wrote a mathematical proof; capturing the same piece of paper with the proof previously written, just explaining the proof with a pointer (my finger or a pen); and using NYU Stream to record the screen of my tablet while I used effective software for handwriting. Finally, I shared the process of how I had created my videos so they would have at least one concrete technique on how to create their own videos (I also provided them flexibility to create videos in formats that they were already using).

Written proof

Pre-recorded Psychology Lectures: Short Videos with Embedded Quizzes

Course: Legal Psychology

Instructor: Pekka Santtila

Students Enrolled: 20

Technology used: NYU Zoom, NYU Stream, NYU Classes

Pekka Santtila is currently teaching Legal Psychology to 20 students in China, Europe, and the United States from Finland. He is using NYU Stream to pre-record lectures with embedded video quizzes to encourage student engagement. 

Instead of uploading one long lecture on NYU Stream, Santtila has broken each lecture into five to nine short lectures so that students can absorb the knowledge at their own pace. Santtila says that the subject of Legal Psychology has adapted well to a distance learning mode because he normally uses a number of video demonstrations in a classroom setting, and these demos can be adapted to pre-recorded video lectures.

When students are watching each video, they must answer multiple choice and open-ended questions to proceed with the video. Santtila says he always comments on student responses to open-ended questions so that they know that he is reading their answers.

Santtila video screenshot

Remote Learning Strategies for Teaching Computer Science to Large Class Sizes

Stock photo programmer

Course: Introduction to Computer Science

Instructor: Gu Xianbin, Assistant Professor of Practice in Computer Science

Students Enrolled: 80

Technology used: NYU Zoom, NYU Stream, Forums on NYU Classes, VoiceThread

Introduction to Computer Science (ICS) is a required course for all students planning to major in computer science. This semester, 80 students are enrolled in the class, with around 90% of them in China and the rest of them spread out across North America and Europe. With such a large number of students, the challenge for Gu Xianbin and his colleague Guo Li, Assistant Professor of Practice in Data Science, has been keeping the class on the same page and managing the course efficiently. 

ICS is composed of lectures, lab sessions, assignments, quizzes, and exams. To bring the class online, Xianbin and Li used NYU Stream to record and edit course videos and used VoiceThread to hold lab sessions. Students are able to interact with instructors, teaching assistants, and classmates by using video annotations on NYU Stream and VoiceThread, and they participate in discussions on Forums through NYU Classes. 

Information and class materials are scattered across multiple platforms, so in order to mitigate confusion, Xianbin and Li have centralized all course information on a single Lesson page on NYU Classes. They have structured the Lesson page to contain several blocks, with course information, instructor contact information, online studying tips, and key dates pinned to the top. The subsequent blocks of information contain the links to all course materials including videos, VoiceThread materials, and so forth.