Improving the Virtual Classroom

Presentation and paper on efforts at improving the virtual classroom.

How To Improve the Virtual Classroom

By University of California, San Diego, June 21, 2021

Researchers at the University of California, San Diego studied the shift to virtual learning precipitated by the COVID pandemic to better understand where remote education fell short and how it might be improved.

"'It Feels Like I am Talking into a Void': Understanding Interaction Gaps in Synchronous Online Classrooms,"   presented at ACM's 2021 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, examines faculty and student attitudes towards virtual classrooms and proposes several technological refinements that could improve the experience, such as flexible distribution of student video feeds and enhanced chat functions.

"We wanted to understand instructor and student perspectives and see how we can marry them," says senior author Nadir Weibel, associate professor at UC San Diego's Department of Computer Science and Engineering. "How can we improve students' experience and give better tools to instructors?"

First author on the study is Matin Yarmand. Co-authors are UC San Diego Professor Scott Klemmer and Carnegie Mellon University Ph.D. student Jaemarie Solyst.

From University of California, San Diego

Full Article

Google Assignments and More

Here is something I was not expecting.  Google sets up a system called 'Assignments' which works in combination with Learning Management Systems (LMS).    Was unaware they were doing this.   Its workflow management for teachers.    I can not longer use this directly, but there were some times where it would have been very useful.  Can do the regular grading stuff ... and even some originality checking.   Templates for feedback.   Might it even be used for business information crowd sourcing or crowd checking?  Thinking that.

Google Assignments, your new grading companion
Instructors lose valuable time doing cumbersome tasks: writing the same comment on multiple essays, returning piles of paper assignments, and battling copy machine jams. These frustrations are most often felt by instructors with the highest teaching workloads and the least time. For the last five years, we’ve been building tools—like Classroom and Quizzes in Google Forms—to address these challenges. Now you can take advantage of these tools if you use a traditional Learning Management System (LMS). 

Assignments brings together the capabilities of Google Docs, Drive and Search into a new tool for collecting and grading student work. It helps you save time with streamlined assignment workflows, ensure student work is authentic with originality reports, and give constructive feedback with comment banks. You can use Assignments as a standalone tool and a companion to your LMS (no setup required!) or your school admin can integrate it with your LMS. Sign up today to try Assignments.

If you're one of the 40 million people using Classroom: you've got the best of Assignments already baked in, including our new originality reports. For everyone else, Assignments gives you access to these features as a compliment to your school’s LMS.   ... "