Digital Teaching Toolkit

Research and Instructional Technology Services, NYU Shanghai Library

Remote Teaching

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.

So Far, So Good: NYU Shanghai Completes First Week of Distance Learning

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Feb 21 2020

Signing on across oceans and time zones, more than 1,000 NYU Shanghai students and faculty successfully participated in the University’s first week of remote teaching and learning. Using state-of-the-art digital tools, students and faculty engaged each other in virtual lectures, discussions, and even dance classes from as far away as Brazil, India, and the United States, and as close by as the Jinqiao Residence Halls.   

“The first week of classes went much more smoothly than we even hoped for,” said NYU Shanghai Library Director Zu Xiaojing, whose Research and Instructional Technology Services (RITS) team worked overtime through the Lunar New Year holiday with the Information Technology team to ensure that spring semester classes could continue despite the coronavirus epidemic that has forced the closure of the campus through at least the month of February. “The vast majority of students this week were able to attend their classes with little to no trouble. Our work in the past few weeks with faculty on course design and technology preparation for the digital phase paid off.”

NYU Shanghai to Launch Innovative Remote Teaching and Learning Effort February 17

Remote teaching5

In a major effort to keep students on track and making progress toward their degrees during the COVID-19 epidemic, NYU Shanghai will be launching February 17 a digital teaching and learning program that is unprecedented both in size and scope for the university.

With the campus closed until at least the end of February to prevent the spread of the coronavirus, university officials have decided to deliver 293 courses slated for Spring 2020 using state-of-the-art digital tools. About 820 undergraduate students and 130 graduate students will be signing on for distance learning from as far away as Africa, the Caribbean, the United States, and Shanghai’s Xuhui district. Another 620 NYU Shanghai undergraduate students will be studying away in New York and at sites throughout the NYU Global Network.

“An extraordinarily high level of collaboration and coordination has taken place internally among all segments of the university,” said Provost Joanna Waley-Cohen. “Faculty and staff in both New York and Shanghai, the latter under the most trying conditions, have been working tirelessly to make sure that students’ needs can be met wherever they are.” 

In particular, the NYU Shanghai’s Research and Instructional Technology Services (RITS) and Information Technology Service Center (IT)  teams have been working throughout the Lunar New Year with their counterparts in New York to ensure that remote teaching can go on smoothly.