My 5 lessons learned from teaching bachelors online during the COVID fall/winter semester

Teaching bachelors can be challenging: Classes are usually very big and students can easily hide in the anonymity of the mass. They are young and often shy. Consequently, it can be tough to make them participate. Still freshly out of school they might not really be interested in what you have to teach, but just want to grab a good grade. And finally teaching "Business & Society" to management students can always create the classic "Why do I need this, I want to study business?!" kind of backlash.

Still, I love teaching bachelor classes, because I feel that I have a real impact with these young people who will be future leaders. It is very important for me to prepare them for the new challenges they will have to face if we all want to create a more responsible and sustainable way to do business. Exposing them to concepts of business beyond the mere profit motive at an early age is key! I also find it very inspiring to stay in touch with the young generation and learn what they are thinking about business, ethics and society.

So here I was in the beginning of the semester with a class of about 340 students and I had to figure out how to get their attention, make them do the work, get them to share their thoughts and dare to come up with their independent critical thinking...and all of this online!

Here is what I learned:

1. High tech needs high touch!

I had already learned from my past experience in teaching big groups, that it is key to connect with your students on a personal level, if you want to involve them. Of course, this is much more difficult in a virtual setting. Often students would not even switch on their cameras and you end up facing a lot of black screens with names on them. You cannot force them to switch on their cameras. Many students are participating in the course in a library or in a student flat with other people around, thus it is also understandable, that they want to keep their privacy. What helped? I tried out various strategies...I welcomed the students that did show up on the camera by name. I explained that I feel like talking to a black wall, if I do not see any faces. I was never using a virtual background, but let them all see my living room.

Later in the course, when I could recognize some of the student's names and knew details about them, I welcomed them and asked questions. e.g. one student had shared that she used to work in the fashion industry. When we talked about responsible supply chain management in the fashion industry, I knew I could ask her about her insider knowledge. As always the important thing is to have some first movers who dare to say something. Treat them like superstars (which they are!) so that their fellow students can see that participating is save, rewarding and fun. I think it did help that I also shared my frustrations and fears with the COVID situation and showed understanding for their situation.

2. Technical bugs are normal, deal with them with calm and grace and go with the flow.

I had done Zoom meetings before, but as always the devil is in the details. Fortunately, I had two very helpful teaching assistants that supported me out a lot (A big shout-out to Rim Bitar and Rebecca Elliott!). The small, but important details I learned are e.g. that you need to check a case to switch on the sound if you are sharing your screen to show videos. If you want to avoid bad sound quality of videos, do not show videos from your powerpoint embedded position, but go directly on Youtube. All of this is stuff that not-so-digital natives have trouble doing automatically and that annoy your millenial/gen-0 students, because for them it is oh so obvious. Another challenge is the fact that you cannot see the chat if your are sharing your screen and put your powerpoint into presentation mode. This makes you feel like talking into a black hole, because I cannot see any audience reactions. Here you can either just stay in non-presentation mode or have smart teaching assistants that let you know if important questions come up.

Finally, I had presumed that break-out rooms would be a great tool for participatory work. It turned out that they did not work very well, because many students were working form libraries where they could not talk. So after some frustrating experiments, I completley dropped break-out rooms. It turned out that the interaction where students would just share their spontaneous thoughts and questions or wrote them into the chat worked really well.

3. Use interactive tools like Mentimeter

My students and me became big fans of Mentimeter. It is a great tool that allows you to create interactive quizzes, surveys and word clouds in real-time. This was also helpful to get to know my students better by doing quick polls about their background, former jobs and opinions. Beyond that I mostly used Mentimeter to create short quizzes to review the content we had covered in class in the session before. That way I could get a feeling if students had understood the topics, I could clarify some concepts and answer questions. This was also very valuable, because I gave students a benchmark on what to expect for their final exam and where they stood in their learning. Students feedback on this feature of the class was very positive. I liked it so much, that I would even use it in face2face formats, because it is such a great and easy way to kick off the class, review contents and motivate students to ask questions. A no-brainer!

4. Over-communicate on basic rules of respectful communication

Even thought I did set up basic rules of respect in communication in the beginning of the class, it happened frequently that students wrote inappropriate and unprofessional comments into the chat and/or mentimetor. My guess is that this was a way to cope with the pressures of this COVID winter and that the anonymity of the virtual context unleashed the usual behavioral bounderies of face-to-face settings. My learning from this is that I would explain in much more detail what respectful and professional communication in class means, why this is important also for students' future careers and explain potential consequences.

5. Limit the time of your online live sessions

The total teaching time for my class was 3 hours. That is way too long for a online session. Yes, you could schedule breaks, but the risk is always that students will not come back at all or not in time. That is why I created 1,5 hours of self-study material with video-lectures, reading materials or TED talks that students should do in their own time. I "invented" the "session sneak-review" - a short video lecture where I explained the program for the live session and the preparatory materials. That way students had already heard some of the basic concepts of the live session through the self-study and could speed up their learning thank to this repetitive effect. With this kind of system I could do most of the knowledge transfer to the self-study video lectures and I could concentrate on the the interactive case study discussions and excercises in class.

In summary, teaching my first online class was a a lot of work. I think I never worked as hard for any other course before. But on the other hand, I certainly never learned as much as with this one.