Hi! Nice meeting you! Could you introduce yourself? What department are you from? What courses are you teaching or have been teaching? What are the classes you teach like, such as format or class size? Is there anything you want to tell us about your teaching, research, or other projects?
Hi Everyone, my name is Stefanie Gisler Larsen, and I am a 6th-year student in Baruch College’s I-O Psychology program. My research focuses on employee well-being and recovery from work.
I have been teaching since Fall 2017, and I have taught Social Psychology, I-O Psychology, and General Psychology. I first taught all my courses in-person, but switched to exclusively teaching General Psychology online asynchronous in 2019. My courses have always had 25-30 students. This Spring, I will teach Social Psychology in an online synchronous format for the first time, which will be a completely new experience for me. I feel like I will be one of the only instructors who have never taught an online synchronous course, and I hope that I will be able to learn from your experiences!
Could you talk a little bit about that course you’ll be working on during this seminar?
I taught Social Psychology in-person from Fall 2017 until 2018, and I will teach if for the first time in an online synchronous format this Spring semester. It will also be the first time that I teach it in one block per week (2h55m).
In my in-person courses, students took weekly short quizzes and two exams. They also wrote two papers and delivered a group presentation at the end of the semester. Further, the course had many in-class activities. I plan to completely revise the course in order to make it more compatible with an online synchronous format, but I hope to still include plenty of engaging activities/assignments.
What are the listed learning goals of your course? They could be ones provided by the department, or ones that you have written for your syllabus? Please list them (pasting is fine!).
These were the learning goals for my in-person Social Psychology course, but I hope to revise them and/or add some new ones for my upcoming course:
- Understand social psychological concepts, theories, and findings
- Relate social psychological concepts, theories, and findings to current events, society,history, pop culture, and your everyday life
- Develop effective skills in written communication through application papers
- Effectively deliver a coherent presentation to the class using presentation software
- Consider how diversity and technology influence social situations as well as the field ofsocial psychology
What class materials are you planning to develop? What goals do you have for them?
I would like to develop new in-class activities and assignments that work well in a synchronous format. I hope that students will find them interesting and engaging. I have heard from my colleagues that it can be tricky to keep students engaged in synchronous courses, especially when each lecture spans multiple hours.
10 replies on “Blog 1 Post”
Hi Stefanie – great to meet you! I enjoyed reading about your course format and how you’re thinking of revising it for the spring – can’t wait to get to know more about your work during this seminar!
Hi Jen, great to meet you too! I look forward to learning more about your teaching experiences at Baruch and other places.
Stefanie–that’s a full plate of teaching and learning you have! My first thought, in answer to your question for suggestions, is to create enduring zoom breakout cohorts, or enduring (my word, don’t know the technical work–fixed? stable?) cohorts that shift every 3 weeks or so. The problem I had with that, one I never overcame, was that many students multitask with zoom classes, so they’re at work/doing other stuff/not paying (full) attention, so in breakout rooms, they say and do nothing, leaving 1-2 people holding the bag and talking at rectangles that offer nothing in return. Also, I think students who dial in over zoom can’t get put into fixed breakout cohorts; maybe that’s been fixed. For my jumbo, all of the above, after putting in tons of work creating stable breakout cohorts and designing assignments, meant I had to throw that strategy out the window. I basically haven’t been back to breakout rooms since. Too many students just don’t really show up and participate–other faculty have had a lot of success, however, with breakout rooms, and I’d love to know how.
Ditto – Breakout Rooms seem like they should be great, but they are so hit or miss (and usually miss). I’ve tried both stable cohorts and random groups, and in both cases the feedback is all over the place but usually skewing toward ‘waste of time’.
Hi Robin, thank you so much for sharing your experience with breakout rooms! I have been thinking about incorporating them, but I have heard mixed things from my colleagues. One potential solution could be to get students to have their cameras on, but I am not sure if that would be enforceable.
Hi Stefanie! Thanks for your post. I’ve been trying to get group presentations and other similar projects going and would love to hear more about what you’re doing there.
Hi Benjamin, in my in-person Social Psychology courses, I had students present on a topic that was covered in the second half of the course. Students tended to like the project because it helped them prepare for the final exam. However, I have never incorporated a group project in my online courses.
Syncronious lecturers can be challenging fir students due to the fact that they are not always prepared
Hi Stefanie! Some things that have helpful for me with student engagement in a synchronous setting are 1) Padlet, 2) Kahoot, 3) Google slides for class activities, and 4) exit tickets where students work on an interactive assignment throughout class and submit it via Google form. Happy to chat about this too!
Hi Kaitlin! Wow thank you so much for these great tips! I have not used any of these resources, but they seem great. I might reach out to you to learn more about how you used them.