Zoom Synchronous? No thank you!

Synchronous Zoom? No thank you.

The spring 2021 semester begins in 12 days for me. Hmm, that could be a song. On the first day of class prep, my true love gave to me…a fully written syllabus! What a gift that would be!

But to be fair, it’s not the first day of class prep. I’ve been thinking about the upcoming semester since early December. And for the first time I’m thinking about questions that many of my colleagues teaching college and high school classes have already been wrestling with for 10 months. For the past three semesters, I’ve been teaching exclusively labs. When COVID struck, I did not need to figure out how to transition from in person lecture classes to an exclusively online experience in one week (or three days!). I just needed to record some video lab experiments. And I didn’t need to figure out how to organize a class for the new fall semester that might be in person sometimes but not others, or might have some completely remote students, or might get moved completely online at the first sign of spiking cases on campus. My colleagues and I found ways to hold labs in person with minimal new prep.

An Opportunity

I probably could have remained in a purely lab teaching role for the upcoming spring semester as well. But I jumped at the opportunity to teach the Physics II “pre-med” lecture class. I couldn’t help myself! I am completely immersed in the Introductory Physics for Life Sciences (IPLS) community. I contribute materials to the Living Physics Portal, I just published a paper on circulatory system physics, and my podcast has focused on multiple guests who are leaders in this field. Yet I haven’t taught an IPLS course since Spring 2018. As the Hamilton College physics department faculty discussed teaching assignments for the spring semester, there was an opening that I could step into. I just needed to raise my hand and say: “Yes, I could do that. In fact, I’d be thrilled to do that!” So…I raised my hand. Even though it means I now have to answer the same hard questions that everyone else is trying to answer.

Zoom: Yay or Nay?

The first big question seems to be: Should my Zoom lecture be synchronous or asynchronous? And considering what I’ve heard from colleagues near and far, and what I’ve heard from education podcasts, my answer came quickly. No. No thank you.

Wait, no to Zoom synchronous or no to Zoom asynchronous? No to ZOOM…period! There’s nothing that I have heard that makes me want to give Zoom any attention at all. I see everyone around me learning how to broadcast themselves live on Zoom to half of their students while teaching the other half live in class. And that is because Hamilton College was lucky enough to retain in-person classes. Those educators in the fully remote world may have the opportunity to reach their students entirely through synchronous Zoom classes.

Why Not Zoom?

But there’s no part of me that wants to do this. I’m not averse to learning new things. I’m not averse to technology or even to Zoom. I’ve had many excellent podcast recordings through Zoom and quite productive work meetings. But to offer class this way? No thank you.

My intent is not to disparage ANYBODY’S teaching. Everyone is doing what they can in a really, really challenging situation, and they are doing things that best match what their in-class experience already looks like. For a majority of science educators, that means chalk-talk or PowerPoint lectures. But that’s not what my classes look like. I do some mini-lectures, but I try to focus my attention on group problem solving, polling, discovery labs, and other sense-making activities. I don’t spend most of my time lecturing. The education research has pointed me toward other approaches.

You might say: “You can do polling on a Zoom session, and you can do group problem solving in breakout rooms.” Yes, I believe those are true statements. But I don’t want to do it. I can’t actually pinpoint why I feel so averse to using Zoom…but I do.

I know that one influence was an episode of the podcast “Teaching in Higher Ed.” The host, Bonni Stachowiak, was speaking with David Rhoads about Hyflex Learning. I won’t try to recap it; you should go check it out. I can’t even say that I plan on creating a Hyflex course, per se. But one message I heard loud and clear was that synchronous Zoom was not the way to go. Honestly, I didn’t need to hear it from a podcast. It felt obvious for me personally. Synchronous Zoom is a great way to keep the lecture-style of teaching alive. Trouble is…I want it dead.

Now what?

So here we go. Twelve days until the new semester. I have a lot of scratch paper and Word document pages filled with ideas and erase marks already. But I think I have a plan. And at the moment, Zoom is completely off the table. Well, maybe some office hours, if I must. But as far as I know, the college is starting with in-person instruction, and I have a plan that eliminates the need for Zoom. Even though I cannot have all of my students in the classroom at the same time, a mixture of interactive in-class activities and at-home flipped-classroom-style activities can lead to, what I hope, will be a pretty darn good course, given the worldwide circumstances.

In my next post, I’ll outline the details of what I intend to do. For the moment, I just want to tell everyone that I’m simply saying NO to Zoom this semester. (Nothing personal against you, Zoom. I’m saying no to all of the other Zoom-like interfaces as well.)

Leave a comment below or send me a message at brad@physicsalive.com and let me know what you think!    Am I crazy? Do you think I can do it? Any helpful hints? Have you tried something similar?