Ruminations on planning CS222 for Spring 2021

I am scheduled to teach two sections of CS222 next semester. The pandemic situation contributed to a strange turn of events where the college took over scheduling, rather than having it be done by departments. The outcome is that the course is scheduled Tuesday and Thursday in-person, but in rooms that cannot safely hold the whole class at once. The assumption then is that we would adopt Rotational Hyflex teaching, where the class is split and half are expected to attend each day. My protestations about logistics and pedagogy fell upon deaf ears, and the faculty have been told in no uncertain terms that we are expected to teach in the manner that the college dictated.

I started looking at Spring plans over a month ago, then I successfully put that off in favor of less stressful tasks. Today, I got back into it, and I saw the last timestamp on my plan sketch was in fact November 8—exactly one month ago. 

The primary source of stress comes from trying to determine how to satisfy what seems to be an impossible situation. How can I meet the educational needs of the course while also meeting the expectations of the administration? I have found myself throttling between different options and unhappy with all of them. This has led to my decision to write about it, in hopes that either I will discover something new, divine an appropriate decision, or gain some insight from my readership.

First, let me identify the major complicating factors, most of which arise from requirements for physical distancing.

1. Students cannot pair program in person without Zoom screen sharing.
2. I cannot sit with students or teams to debug their code without Zoom screen sharing.
3. Students cannot go to the whiteboards to do collaborative design activities without using online simulated whiteboards.

As you can see, all the main activities of the class besides individual programming, writing, and discussion are better done online than in-person. Note that programming and writing can be done individually offline anyway and have no impact on contact hours, and I would argue that discussion is better mediated through Zoom, where you can see faces, than in-person, masked, and distanced.

Taking that into account, here are the options that I have identified:

Toe the line: Rotational Hyflex

The obvious problems here are the ones identified above: all the interactions I would do in person are better done online. Arguably, we could have some in-person discussions, but they would be hampered by an inability of students to show each others' code, or for me to see their code, in any kind of organic and realtime way.

This also puts a Tuesday/Thursday split into the class that has impacts on deadlines; to be equitable, one would need to balance deadlines based on whether it were a Tuesday or Thursday group. This would be a pain, keeping in mind that I would want to maintain my practice of regular assignments and allowance for resubmissions.

I cannot think of any advantage to taking this approach.

Rotated classroom meetings as recitations

One way to approach rotational hyflex would be as recitations for an online asynchronous class. That is, the main course content could be asynchronous online, and the in-person meetings could essentially be study or review sessions. This is a convenient metaphor perhaps, but it breaks down quickly in my mind. The review sessions would be hampered by the problems mentioned above, where I could not actually sit with a student to look at code or writing. Potentially worse, it would be throwing sophomore computer science majors, in a challenging course, into a fundamentally asynchronous online learning experience where small lapses in responsibility can lead to compounding deleterious effects. Of course, this inherits the Tuesday-Thursday deadline problem as well, although big research universities simply ignore this problem and let students struggle with the schedules they are given.

An advantage of this approach is that I could prepare the courses in a familiar way, given my experience teaching asynchronous online this semester. Students would have a consistent set of materials, assignments, and assessments regardless of their section.

Treat the course like four small sections with one meeting day per week

If I split the class, I can think of this as four classes rather than two split ones. I would repeat the same activities four times per week, using half the contact hours I normally would. This means pushing a lot of content into an asynchronous online modality and using the one meeting per week to pick up the pieces.

This would require fiddling with deadlines in a kludgy way as above so that students had the equivalent amounts of time between discussions and deadlines. I hate to imagine how messy Canvas would become!

The university introduced three "study days" during the semester, one of which is on a Tuesday. This means that, halfway through the semester, the sequencing of Tuesday and Thursday classes would swap, with Thursday leading and Tuesday trailing. This, too, will have a frustrating but not insurmountable impact on deadlines.

This still inherits all the problems of the straightforward recommended rotational hyflex approach: basically everything we would do in person is better done online.

Rebel: Teach entirely online synchronous

I could just do what my pedagogic sense is telling me to do: teach online synchronous regardless of what the college office cooked up. This would mean I get to see all my students at once and can maintain a regular pace of activities and assignments across them all. Discussions can be had via breakout rooms, and screens can be shared via Zoom. Meetings can even be recorded for students to review later in case they missed something in the presentation, for example, to see me walk through a technical or design process again.

There are some pieces here that are still a black box to me, though. This semester's online asynchronous classes actually went quite well. I'll have more to say about them in upcoming blog posts. I have never taught online synchronous, and so I am not sure about certain aspects of how it will go. Let's say for example that a student is in class, and we're dealing with source code. They would want to have Zoom and an IDE open, but the IDE really only works if it's fullscreen, and I know more students work on laptops than on two-headed displays. How could I possibly look out over the class and know if a discussion has hit home? Heck, they might just be on Instagram and not tuning in at all. 

Another conundrum I face is the relationship between online synchronous and my YouTube tutorials. It students just sit and listen to a demo, they may as well be watching a prerecorded session. Indeed, if it's recorded, I only have to do it once instead of twice! However, the important thing is that they ask questions to direct the demo. Will they be willing to do so in an online environment? I am hopeful that they will, but I don't know for sure. Again, I have blinders about what I will see in an online meeting, where students are supposed to essentially have two major things on their screens at once. Normally, in the classroom, I have something on the projector, stuff scattered around the whiteboards, and the ability to walk around, among, and behind students to see what they are doing and help keep them on track. That all seems to slip away when we're tethered only by the thread of one narrow shared window. Put another way, I am uncertain how affordances for learning are impacted by what aspects of the course get "flipped'.

So...

My inclination then is to take the last approach and accept the consequences. It's the only one that seems to actually use the available tools in a responsible way. I'm still really puzzled about how to facilitate learning in this modality. It may be the kind of thing that I can pick up as I go, but it may also be the kind of thing where the first time you do it, it's terrible. Perhaps I should reach out to my current students and solicit their feedback about what has worked well or poorly for them this past semester. They are probably all stressed with final projects now and unlikely to volunteer time for such an endeavor, and I cannot even offer Christmas cookies as compensation. 

I have some time to sort this out, of course, but I would like to get as much done in the next two weeks as I can. I gave up essentially my entire summer trying to create a good experience for my Fall students. I would rather not also give up my winter break so that Spring is passable. Tenure and promotion means that I need not panic if I don't get a grant or paper complete during the break, but I also feel a desire for some rejuvenation.

UPDATE (12/9)

I talked with a colleague about some of my planning conundrums, and he pointed out that the three complicating factors I mentioned in the opening are not quite right. The rule from the university is not that students must maintain six-foot social distancing at all times in the classroom, but rather that any closer contact be limited to less than fifteen minutes, as per CDC guidelines. This means that pair programming, debugging code, and whiteboard work are not necessarily out of the picture, but rather that they must be done with additional constraints. I am still mulling over the implications of this oversight in my original considerations, and I have reached out to those teaching on-campus this semester to try to get a sense of how comfortable or anxious students are around such in-class activities.