Digital Teaching Toolkit

Research and Instructional Technology Services, NYU Shanghai Library

NYU Zoom

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.

Choosing the Right Technology and Using it Well

PrometheeSpathis

Course: Computer Networking 

Instructor: Promthee Spathis, Visiting Associate Professor of Computer Science

Students enrolled: 16

Technology used: Zoom, VoiceThread, and NYU Classes

Teaching remotely from Paris, France since the outbreak, Promethee Spathis says he has made it his personal responsibility from the start of the semester to be present for his students on a daily basis. His routine includes waking up at 3 or 4 AM to hold class three times a week for his 16 students — 15 of whom are currently based in China and one student in Tel Aviv.

Spathis says his goal is to recreate a learning environment similar to a regular classroom. Therefore, he has designed his synchronous sessions to include in-class interactions through discussion or open questions. Mondays are for lectures, Wednesdays for labs that include reports submitted as tests and quizzes via NYU Classes, and Fridays are for recitations which include answers to weekly home assignments. Each session is 75 minutes long. 

Live-streamed classes are conducted via Zoom. He finds that live interactions provide valuable feedback for adjusting lectures as he delivers them. For those who cannot attend lectures in real time because of a time zone difference, Spathis records all lectures for offline viewing or after-class review. Chat messages sent during class are included in the recording. Students also have access to a transcript of the entire lecture, which they can download, print, and review at their own convenience. 

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 Piano with a Dual Camera Set-up

at the piano

Course: Group Piano 

Instructor: Chen Wei, Clinical Assistant Professor of Arts, Group Piano

Students Enrolled: 42

Technology Used: NYU Zoom, Quicktime screen recording, WeChat groups, Google Drive Folders

Chen Wei usually teaches her Group Piano courses in NYU Shanghai’s piano studio, with students sitting in front of their own individual upright pianos while she demonstrates at her own instrument.  A camera captures her hand positions and projects the image on a screen at the front of the classroom.

When Chen heard that NYU Shanghai would move to digital instruction two weeks before the start of the semester, she assumed that many in the class would drop out. It seemed like a class students would only want to take live. But only a handful withdrew. So with two weeks to the start of the semester, she set about recreating her live class online.

First, she sent out a survey to registered students to find out which time zones they were in and whether they had access to a keyboard or piano. 65% said they would need help procuring a practice keyboard. To solve that problem, Chen searched online and found a “handroll” piano that could be purchased for 200 RMB or less than US$30 on Taobao or Amazon. The NYU Shanghai Arts department offered to reimburse students for the “handroll” pianos after they returned to campus.

Chen quickly realized that she would need more than a single camera — since an effective piano class depended on students being able to see both her and her hand positions as she played. So she bought a tripod that she had seen YouTube stars use to film themselves at the piano, attached it to the music stand of her piano, and mounted her cellphone camera. 

But how could she capture video of both herself and her hands? 

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.

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

Digital Tools for Re-Creating the In-Classroom Experience

Course: Creativity Considered

Instructors: Adam Brandenburger, Faculty Director of the Program on Creativity & Innovation and Jeff Lehman, Vice Chancellor of NYU Shanghai

Students Enrolled: 12

Technology Used: NYU Zoom, NYU Classes, Slack, Skype

Adam Brandenburger and Jeff Lehman designed their course, Creativity Considered, to be a collective journey on which students go to enhance their creative selves. To this end, the course involved extensive in-class discussion and one or more in-class exercises per session. Each session is two and a half hours long, with two mini-breaks during the class. It also includes student presentations supplemented with slides and commentary.

To move the course to digital instruction, Brandenburger and Lehman began by determining that, with students in China and the U.S., they could only maintain the feel of the in-person experience by teaching synchronously. So they decided to teach the course late in the evening in New York City 10:00 PM, with Lehman joining from Shanghai at 10 AM.

Zoom class