Michael Epstein from online classroom space provider ClassIn joins me to talk about interactions in online classes. We talk about the potential of getting learners working alone in breakout rooms, preparing learners to work in groups online and making the best use of online tools like chat boxes during whole class interactions.
Interactions In Online Classes (with Michael Epstein)
Ross Thorburn: Hi, everyone. Welcome back to "TEFL Training Institute Podcast." I'm Ross Thorburn. This week, we are talking about online classes and the interactions that take place in online classes and how teachers can make the most of them.
My guest is Michael Epstein. Michael is vice president of education at ClassIn. Michael's worked in education in China since 2002. ClassIn is an education platform provider which provides online classroom spaces, specifically for teachers. Michael's job there is basically running an experimental school, where he and his colleagues research best practices in teaching online.
In today's episode, you'll hear some of Michael's insights about the best ways to get the most out of online interactions with your students. Before we get into the podcast, a quick plug. If you're a teacher, and you're looking to take a teacher training course, visit our website www.tefltraininginstitute.com for information about studying the Diploma in TESOL.
If you're a longtime listener, you enjoy the show, and you'd like to support us, you can click on the link to buy us a coffee. That's both on the website and on the show notes. On with the interview, enjoy the episode.
Ross: Hi, Michael. Welcome to the podcast. To begin with, can you tell us a bit about getting students to work by themselves? I feel this is something that happens very commonly in offline classes, but it's something that I think happens much less online. Tell us a bit about getting students to work solo online.
Michael Epstein: How they work online, doing individual work, will depend of course on what your platform allows you to do with individual work. A lot of platforms have things like private blackboards, which is a pretty easy way to get students working individually, like by setting the writing prompt and asking them to write to it for whatever period of time.
Other platforms have breakout rooms. Usually, when we think of breakout rooms, we think of, "Oh, group work." You can have groups of one. Depending on what the task is if a student needs to be working with a text and have the ability to go back and forth at their own speed and according to their own way of completing the tasks, they need to be able to interact with that courseware individually.
Those are two ways of doing individual work. In terms of keeping them on task, it's similar to an offline classroom. Students need to know what the expectations are, and they need to know how to operate in the online environment.
Two of the biggest perils or challenges, I guess, to individual work or any work in an online classroom is, just like an offline classroom, "I don't know what's expected of me, and I don't know how to interact with the platform. I don't know how to use it. You've got me doing something. I know what you want me to do, but I don't know how to do it because time hasn't been taken to show me how to do it."
Ross: Tell us a bit more about that then. What do you think teachers should be doing before to set accurate expectations for students and show them how to participate in an online classroom?
Michael: I think you want to roll that into a proper orientation that orientation is more than just teaching people how to use the functions.
If you've ever attended a training session for an online platform, usually the training you get is, "Here are all the tools." You're like, "OK, but how do I use them in specific situations in order to accomplish a task? How do I integrate these tools into classroom routines and common classroom activities?"
An online classroom, especially if you're dealing with students new to the platform or even if you're not because you might be doing new things with continuing students, you want to run at least a couple of classes where they're not expected to learn any new subject knowledge. They're more learning how to operate in your classroom. This is best practice for offline classrooms as well.
I just think that the need for online classrooms is a bit greater because you may not be able to transfer knowledge of how you do things in a classroom from previous experiences because that wealth of experience isn't as great.
Ross: I'm really glad you brought that up. I think another interesting aspect of this is thinking about the language that we use and how it's different in different classrooms.
If you think about the first couple of units in an offline course book, it often tends to be things like, how are you? What's your name? Where do you come from? Pencil, bag, desk, whiteboard, chair. It's all the language that students need in order to be able to participate in a class, in a physical space, in English.
When classes move online, the need is the same. You still need to be able to participate in that space in English, but the language that you need in order to be able to do that is different. There's words like circle, click. For example, earlier when we were setting up this call, the word "drop‑down" came up.
Those are not words that you would typically find in an offline course book. This is a sort of language that needs to be included at the beginning of an online course.
Michael: Absolutely. You can see this with the evolution of that Chapter One in your beginner English course book that 10 years ago or 15 years ago, you wouldn't have seen the word tablet. Now, tablet appears. It's even a starter's word for Cambridge. It's that ubiquitous.
As the education environment evolves, of course, what needs to go into that first chapter is going to change, and you have to make considerations. Where is my class being taught? What are the things in my classroom in an online space? Eraser, maybe not an eraser tool, but paper may not be high on your priority list.
You'll want to get through it eventually, of course, but something like you said, "Click, circle, drag." Drag is one of those words that gets taught immediately in an online classroom because especially with all beginners but especially young learners, it's one of the easiest things you can do to make the classroom more tactile even though it's not in a exactly tactile space.
Ross: Let's bring this back to talking about interactions and breakout rooms. Obviously, getting students to work in pairs and groups is very, very common offline. It's sometimes a bit more tricky online. Tell us about breakout rooms. How those can get used, and what sort of interactions go on there?
Michael: Breakout rooms are interesting because every platform's breakout room is a little different. Some platform, it's just a discussion space. There's four of us in a room, and we can talk to each other. In other platforms, you may have the ability to use the electronic whiteboard space that we're actually sitting in right now.
Whereas on other platforms, you may have someone who is a given authority. He's like a leader. They have functionality available that other students do not. They may have a limited number of tools available to use. Furthermore, the other students may have tools available as well but not as many as the leader who might be able to mute students or drag them or upload files and so on and so on.
What's possible in your breakout space, of course, depends on what your breakout space allows you to do. How you prepare students for it depends upon the roles that they'll be able to assume in that space and how they'll be able to operationalize those roles through the platform.
Especially if you've got a leader that can actually give or take away authority to other students, that is a lesson unto itself, just learning how to do that and learning how to do that responsibly. It's also fantastic because it brings in a very practical way all those things we talked about, like 21st‑century skills and character building. How do I collaborate? How do I lead?
Ross: It's really interesting here to think about the differences between offline and online classes. Something as simple as muting someone in an online class, you really can't do that in an offline class. You can't mute someone unless you put duct tape over their mouths. [laughs]
There's a much bigger responsibility for students who might be made the leader of a group, for example, in a breakout room in an online class than that would be making someone the leader of a group in an offline class.
Michael: You bring up an interesting point. We can do things online that for the person doing it, it feels very innocuous. "Hey, I've muted you," but for the person who has been muted, suddenly you've lost all agency, all ability to participate.
I think online classrooms ‑‑ and this speaks to a broader issue of online interaction in general ‑‑ requires greater training in empathy. When I do something to you, how does it feel from your perspective?
I don't have that immediate experience of it, and that can have deep‑seeded negative effects on students and on their involvement in the classroom, especially if you're that kid that [laughs] always gets muted.
When you're preparing students to work in a breakout room, you might want to do something and how you would do this without being carried out somewhat sensitively, but an activity where people are sharing their hobbies or some such and you mute somebody, or you mute a few people.
You ask them to share how it felt not being able to participate so that we can all learn from this experience and be mindful of how we're interacting with others.
Ross: You mentioned whole class interactions. In terms of whole class interactions, there's obviously a lot of tools available online that aren't available offline to teachers and students. Some things like hand‑raising, typing in the chat box, screen sharing. Can you tell us about some of those, and how teachers might be able to use those in whole class settings?
Michael: I think that some of the tools you mentioned like the chat box, the hand‑raising, and so forth are actually essential because if you've been in an online classroom, one thing you might notice that is different is audio. It's just the two of us here talking, so we don't really notice it. In a class of even say four or five students, everything comes through your speakers.
Everything is at best stereo so that you can't hear that kid over off to the left or hear that student behind you because everything's in front of you. It's harder to localize sound. Using the chat box or using the hand‑raising tool to visually get attention, maybe as you're interacting with one group of students simultaneously using the chat box to deal with some issue that another one is having.
If you've worked with them and through effective orientation to get them to understand how the chat box can be used productively, it becomes a space where we can share work, where you can get the teacher's attention.
Some chat boxes are more than just chats, but they've got the ability to send questions through. You know that your questions' been asked, and the instructor goes along, and when it hits a stopping point, that question could be addressed.
Maybe if the speakers talking about an experience they had and someone's like, "Oh, wait. I had an experience like that." Of course, you don't want to disrupt the person talking. You don't want to interrupt them.
But you've got this thing on your mind, and you want to throw it out there. Because online classrooms are multimodal, you can have sound, and text, and images, running all at the same time and have multiple streams of communication going on.
Ross: I've got to say, what I like about the chat box idea is that nowadays we spend so much time typing as opposed to writing.
We're using a keyboard of some kind rather than the pen and paper at least 90 percent of the time in the real world. Yet in language teaching, this is often flipped in the other direction. Students in classes are using pen and paper probably 90 percent of the time.
I think having that chat box is a great way of getting students to practice typing, which is now a much more useful 21st‑century skill than writing with a pen and paper.
Michael: It's funny you bring that up because it got me thinking. One area where typing is going to be an issue is working with very young learners because they're a lot more comfortable with touchscreens. Touchscreen is the first thing that three or four‑year‑old is going to regularly interact with.
It's not till a bit later that hand‑eye coordination develops such that the mouse becomes comfortable and then later the keyboard. Looking at a keyboard, the keys are what? They're about a centimeter and a half by a centimeter and a half roughly. Whereas for young children, you want things to be at least two centimeters by two centimeters, and you want adequate space in between them.
Keeping in mind like the motor skill development of your students and UX research has to say about how children interact with online spaces, not only informs design which is what we commonly think about but also hardware interaction.
Ross: One more time everyone, that was Michael Epstein. If you'd like to find out more about ClassIn where Michael works, you can check out our website at www.classin.com.
For more podcasts from us, check out our website www.tefltraininginstitute.com. If you'd like to support the podcast, you can now buy us a coffee using the link in the show notes. Thanks for everyone who's done that. If you're interested in doing a teacher training course with us also, check out our website and click on the link for Diploma in TESOL.
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