How I Teach Classes Remotely

I’ve been teaching classes remotely for over a decade now — mostly to adult learners — and so I thought I’d share what I’ve learned. With a lot of schools and universities having to switch to remote classes, here’s what I can suggest:

• One of the most useful tools is krisp.ai  — this automatically removes background noise, so you can be delivering a class in a noisy coffee shop and it sounds to your listeners like you are in a quiet recording studio. It is free to students and educators at this time.
• The second most useful tool is a good quality microphone. I use this Blue Yeti  and it is very, very good. You can then use cheap earphones to listen, because the Yeti has a good phone-out audio monitor.
• If you have a modern laptop, you can use it to remove the background behind you automatically. Otherwise you can make a green screen very cheaply: tension wire . Either way it means that you can run a class from your bedroom (or wherever) without much invasion of privacy.
• If you are presenting a computer desktop (e.g. I teach programming classes, so I do a lot of this), then get your IT department to organise an Amazon Workspace for you. Join the conference call from twice — once from your laptop, and once from the Workspaces session. Share the Workspaces screen, not your home laptop. That way, if a message pops up on your screen, the students won’t see it.
• If you are low on bandwidth (which shouldn’t be the case, as Optus and Telstra have lifted their link speeds for everyone), you can use Workspaces & phone in to the call. Your telephone voice has priority over data, so your voice will be clear and crisp. Your Workspaces computer will never be affected by low bandwidth.
• Remote classes scale up better than face-to-face. It is a brave teacher who would be willing to teach a 60-person face-to-face, but it can be done remotely. So ideally, pair up with another teacher teaching the same class at the same time: one of you will deliver the lesson, and the other teacher will handle audio muting, responding to comments in the chat channel and keeping the class on track. I’ve generally done this with a model of senior instructor + junior support teacher.
• Depending on the class, you can do open-mike for everyone, or otherwise do a structured question asking: e.g. if you want to ask a question, flag in the conferencing tool, or ask the question in the chat channel. Then your support instructor can interrupt the class with the question.
• It is OK to watch a video (e.g. from Khan Academy  who have got daily schedules organised) together, and then discuss it afterwards. It’s OK to admit that there is a resource on the internet that can be better than you at explaining something through a computer screen.
• You need to have some kind of “exit tickets” from each lesson (or at least each week) where students tell you what the lesson was about, and any questions that they have. It is often quite enlightening.
• The chat channel in Zoom and google hangouts doesn’t quite work; but they are definitely the right choice for running the video session as you can mute participants, create breakout rooms and so on. Slack or Discord can work better as a chat channel, particularly if you have a co-instructor monitoring it for you.