Synchronous Online Learning

Teaching a class online requires teachers to find ways to shift to student-centered approaches, a process I've been working on in my face-to-face classroom this year.  There is significant evidence that students learn physics best from lessons based on discovery learning, where they are asked to construct their own knowledge rather than absorb information from lectures.  I've significantly reduced my use of lecture, instead providing students with open-ended lab experiences and opportunities to work together to find strategies for solving problems.

As I've started thinking about what online learning may look like for a physics class, my biggest hurdle is not to envision what student-centered learning may look like, but to find ways to replicate meaningful lab experiences when students do not have access to the kind of equipment in a typical science classroom.  There is evidence that simulations can provide a meaningful substitute for traditional lab activities and websites such as PhET and the Concord Consortium provide free, high-quality simulations that make it possible for online science teachers to give their students worthwhile labs.  With some creativity, simulations could be supplemented with labs using materials that students can find at home.

As part of my shift to constructivist, student-centered approaches, collaboration has become an important part of my classroom.  Many of the collaborative activities I've been using would be well-suited to synchronous meetings.  For example, I've borrowed the approach to cooperative group problem solving developed by the University of Minnesota's physics education group.  In this process, students take on set roles such as manager, recorder, and skeptic to collaborate on solving context-rich problems too difficult to solve independently.  This process benefits from all members of the group focusing on the problem and sharing ideas in real-time.  Each group would need their own space to work, which could easily be accomplished through the use of breakout rooms in many web conferencing tools.

Another tool that would translate nicely into synchronous meetings are the sense-making discussions many physics teachers conduct after labs.  I've made limited use of these so far, but the idea is students share their results and observations, then have a discussion to come to an agreement on the big ideas contained in the activity.  In the classrooms where teachers do this well, students question each other, argue about the meaning of graphs, and build off each other's observations to reach a final consensus.  While this process could work on a discussion board, the immediate feedback of a real-time discussion can lead to more engagement in this type of discussion, making it a good fit for a synchronous meeting.

The last activity I'm considering for a synchronous meeting is a version of Kelly O'Shea's Mistakes Game.  Rather than providing solutions or correct answers when her students work problems, she has each group put their solution to a problem on a whiteboard with at least one intentional mistake.  The groups them present their solution to the rest of the class and their peers ask questions to make the mistake clear.  This process can lead students to a deeper understanding of their misconceptions, but requires real-time give and take that simply cannot be replicated asynchronously.  The main challenge would be finding a good way for students to display, and change as they discuss, their solutions.  One option would be to have students simply use a sheet of paper and a webcam, then mark corrections with a different colored pen or pencil.  Depending on the web conferencing tool, it may also work for students to upload a photo of their solution, then use markers built into the tool to make changes as the group discusses.