How teachers are responding to online classes

After COVID-19 hit, all of a sudden teachers and students celebrating Spring Festival were now stuck in their hometowns with nothing to do but eat dumplings, sleep and eat more dumplings.

Some students report being quarantined inside their home for weeks, but this is a time when we should not only stay healthy, we should keep learning too! Although there is a crisis, we can try to make the best use of our time and learn as much as we can during this special period. Thankfully, we have technology at our fingertips and online courses provide a logical and innovative solution for classes to resume as “normal” as possible, and I’m confident that students and teachers will learn a great deal from this experience. However, as the spring term approaches, everyone is rightfully concerned at just how well online courses are going to work.

I am an American professor who has spent the last seven years in China teaching various courses from law to spoken and written English at university level. When the news of online courses first broke, my colleagues and I were scrambling to test out various virtual online classroom platforms to determine which would be the most efficient. What major challenge did we face? We needed to figure out how to find a suitable platform that would allow maximum bandwidth, but also accommodate teachers who are spread out all over the world in different time zones, while students are spread throughout China, with access to different internet sites and speeds. After the major platforms were tested, they all appeared to have one thing in common: none of them worked as well as we needed. Since we were faced with imperfect options, I urged myself to think outside of the box and decided to turn to trusty WeChat for a viable solution. If WeChat can do everything else, why can’t it be a virtual classroom too?

I’ve always used WeChat groups for my classes, as a way to deliver course materials, check homework and class work and communicate with students, but could I actually run a course in real-time via WeChat? I was up for the challenge! First, I made a new group chat QR code, sent it to my previous students from fall term and asked them to pass it around to any of their friends who may be enrolled in my spring classes. Within minutes I was in contact with over 100 new students and within 24 hours I had pretty much located 90 percent of my roster. Yay for technology and diligent students!

Some would say a disadvantage of using WeChat as an online classroom platform is the inability to see the teacher or students on a live video feed and maximum file transfer capacity is limited. While WeChat does have some challenges, I argue that live video lectures and/or long recorded videos are archaic teaching methods and not the best tools for delivering material in a manner which will allow tech-savvy Generation Z students to absorb the most information as efficiently as possible. It seems that as technology increases, our attention spans decrease. Therefore, the idea of sitting on a live feed for 100 minutes or sending a 30+ minute video lecture with the teacher alone in a room is just not practical in this era. In fact, I’d be willing to bet it would be extremely difficult for the majority of students to commit 100 percent of their attention to a long video lecture where they are just staring at the teacher talking to the computer the whole time. It is 2020, we have so many novel ways of communicating and this special situation is setting both educators and students up to adapt and evolve new teaching and learning methods.

For example, instead of longwinded videos, I’m creating a series of shorter, core-concept targeted videos under five minutes each, which are much more palatable and user friendly for the student. Remember the goal is not to be physically present in the classroom for some arbitrary amount of time, but instead to ensure that students are absorbing what is taught, and not just studying material to pass a test but rather lessons they can retain and apply in real life. In fact, this special situation has inspired me to design an entire new WeChat English course with hopes to reach more students in the future, especially those in remote areas who may not have regular access to a foreign teacher in a classroom setting.

An example of one lesson I created involved the students first uploading introduction videos to the WeChat group, after which they were assigned to watch each video and answer some questions about their classmates in a scavenger hunt format. This lesson proved to be a great tool for my students, who usually never see themselves on video speaking English. Watching themselves on camera and studying how their lips move and what they look like when they speak can help the students correct mistakes they would otherwise never see, if not for this unique video assignment in my online course.

Another new function WeChat provides is the ability to convert audio into text. This means I can not only leave audio notes for my students in real-time, but I can swipe up and my voice note will be transcribed into English, giving them both the audio and written transcription of my speech. This tool is useful for students who have poor listening skills or may be distracted by their friends in class because instead of carelessly missing something important, now all the messages are in the chat log for the student and teacher to review as many times as necessary, so nothing will ever be missed. Additionally, the chat logs provide an excellent way for the teacher to actively monitor the students’ participation levels.

Finally, online courses are advantageous because they give shy students, who normally feel anxious or scared to speak out in class, an opportunity to express themselves, build more language confidence and interact more with their teacher and peers behind the privacy of a computer screen in the comfort of their own home.

This isn’t to say that physical classroom teaching doesn’t have obvious advantages, but when faced with a unique situation such as this, we must think outside of the box and come together to deliver the best learning experience possible in the face of such difficulty. We must adapt, evolve and overcome. 加油!

Kymbra Li is an American comedian, writer, lyricist, actor and recording artist currently living in Beijing. The opinions expressed here are those of the writer and do not represent the views of China Daily and China Daily website.