Adapting Interactive Learning to the Virtual World
The Ethics Lab went virtual as of March 16, 2020, following Georgetown University guidance. Ethics Lab team members Dr. Maggie Little, Dr. Elizabeth Edenberg, Dr. Marcello Antosh, Dr. Mark Hanin, Jonathan Healey and Sydney Luken are now working virtually with other Georgetown faculty and students to carry out Ethics Lab activities. A happy surprise to come from this quarantine is the discovery that many Ethics Lab methods work well virtually in addition to in person.
Ms. Luken, Ethics Lab designer, said that she and Mr. Healey quickly got up to speed with Zoom’s offerings in order to use those features with Georgetown faculty.
“We’ve been working with the course instructors to leverage existing tools for increased engagement. It’s a stressful time for everyone, with lots of uncertainty for many of the students, so we’re opting to make the most of the basics rather than asking them to work with unfamiliar software,” Ms. Luken said.
Dr. Antosh, an Ethics Lab Postdoctoral Fellow who is teaching PHIL 124: Ethics and the Environment, said that he has adapted the final project of his course to incorporate new resources due to the pandemic. He and Mr. Healy and Ms. Luken had originally designed the project to be interactive, and were going to have students work in the same groups they had been working with all semester.
“That wasn’t going to work given the timezone issues and challenges some students are having with internet access,” Dr. Antosh said.
Instead the students are interviewing family members or other people they are quarantined with, or people via Zoom, to get added perspective. The specific questions they are dealing with are how climate change and the coronavirus epidemic compare, and what people can learn from the response to the pandemic that can help them later deal with climate change.
“The project was going to be just on climate change, but this pandemic gave us an opportunity to adapt the focus and pull from some of the tactics we used in last semester's Social Media and Democracy final project to this one,” Dr. Antosh said.
Dr. Antosh also said that one other thing that has made a difference in his course is the Zoom chat feature, which allows students to text chat concurrent with the video group discussions.
“It’s useful to then integrate those chats into the discussion that we had,” he said. “So that's been interesting, like, ‘Hey, this is a new way forward for how courses are taught.’”
Prof. Nicole Bibbins Sedaca, an Ethics Lab faculty affiliate, has also incorporated Ethics Lab methods into her virtual courses. In her MSFS 603: Democracy in the World course, Prof. Bibbins Sedaca took exercises that the Ethics Lab team had previously created and adapted them for Zoom.
The exercise that Elizabeth, Jonathan and Sydney developed was a stakeholder mapping exercise on large whiteboards with scores of Post-It Notes where students have to name stakeholders for their client projects and map them on the board based on interest, power and relationships,” Prof. Bibbins Sedaca said.
“The exercise that Elizabeth, Jonathan and Sydney developed was a stakeholder mapping exercise on large whiteboards with scores of Post-It Notes where students have to name stakeholders for their client projects and map them on the board around based on interest, power and relationships,” Prof. Bibbins Sedaca said.
She agreed that it did show that Ethics Lab’s input into her class was adaptable to the virtual environment.
The Ethics Lab team plans to continue adapting to the changing educational landscape. Ms. Luken mentioned that, should virtual learning extend to the Fall semester, they are exploring how to incorporate more visual means of online collaboration through apps like Miro and Milanote to promote learning. For now, they have successfully crossed the first hurdles of moving their courses to a virtual environment.
A little goes a long way with these simple tools:
Zoom - Whiteboard: Professors can type notes on a shared whiteboard; students can also annotate and make notes on the board—great for brainstorming and +1’ing.
Zoom - Breakout Groups: Small group discussions, which are a key component to many Ethics Lab exercises, are possible using Breakout Groups. Each group can work with their own shared whiteboard or collaborate in a shared Google Slides template to capture notes from their conversation.
Zoom - Polls & Chat: Polls and chats are a great way to encourage broad participation.