I am writing this piece to share my own experiences with transforming my own course for remote delivery, and also to report on how the course delivery has gone so far. I do not speak for other professors at DKU, who have had a range of experiences based on their course subjects and other factors. At least one other professor of history at DKU has also written an excellent piece on his experiences with remote teaching and learning, and I highly recommend this piece to readers as well.

Those who follow my blogsite know that I am currently serving as a professor and administrator at Duke Kunshan University or DKU, which is located in Kunshan, China not far from Shanghai. I have been working there for nearly five years now and have been part of its growth from a study away site for undergraduate students from China, Duke University, and elsewhere, into a full-fledged undergraduate degree program offering a range of majors (DKU has also operated Master’s degree programs in different subjects for several years now). Currently our first class of undergraduate students are in their sophomore year, and I am teaching both freshmen and sophomores, or first-year and second-year students in the more politically correct parlance. 

In late January, the Coronavirus (COVID-19) outbreak in China led all universities and schools to close and/or contain their campuses quickly so as to prevent the spread of the virus. DKU and its American partner Duke University made a quick decision to move all of our courses online.

At DKU, we work in two 7-week sessions. We were in the midst of the first session of the spring semester when the Spring Festival holiday in China took place, and most students went back to their hometowns in China. Many others, students and faculty and staff, were traveling abroad. Most students did not and were not encouraged to return to campus, and non-Chinese students were encouraged to leave China and return to their home countries. Only a small portion of students in our undergraduate program remained on campus (50 or so). The rest of the students were scattered around China and across the globe. 

Since we were in the middle of the session when the clampdown began, we had to revise our courses in midstream in order to teach them remotely. To complicate matters further, many of our professors and administrators, including me, left China during this period and eventually settled in our home countries, which are now undergoing the same process as schools and universities move to remote course delivery in order to mitigate the spread of the virus.

My course “HIST117: Sounds and the Chinese City: Live Music Scenes in Urban China” finishes next week, so I may later provide an update to this piece, but since so many people have asked me about teaching and learning online, I thought it best to share these experiences right now, since so many schools and universities in the USA and other parts of the world are now going through the same transformations.

First, it helped greatly that we had abundant support from our leaders at DKU and from the leadership at Duke University. We also had great tech support, and so they were able to set up Zoom, one of the leading platforms for holding meetings online, in record time. They also had to gain a license for Zoom in China. 

All this was done with impressive speed and agility. One of the most impressive things was how they integrated Zoom into our Sakai platform, which we normally use for course delivery. Sakai enables us to upload any documents, videos and other course materials for students to download, and we can also send announcements to students and collect, grade, and track their assignments and even calculate their final grades. I’ve been using Sakai ever since I first started teaching at DKU in 2015, and I have always used it for these purposes and others. So it was very helpful that I could now use our Sakai course platform to arrange Zoom meetings for my students as well.

With Zoom in place, here is what I did to move my course online quickly (we had around three weeks to do so):

First, I decided to adhere to the principal of keeping it as simple as possible.

I did not make any great changes to my course plan or to the assignments. I did have to change one or two assignments, which I will discuss below. But mostly, I stuck to the original course plan and schedule of readings and assignments, and I just adjusted it for the three-week delay in restarting the course.

Second, I decided to use Zoom to teach classes in real time.

This was challenging in a few ways. First, because we were now in many different time zones, some of us had to teach or learn in awkward hours. When I first arrived in the USA in February, I stayed in California for three weeks (see my previous blog post on the quarantine experience). The DKU leaders had decided to set up the new teaching schedule to align with China time and Eastern Standard Time in the USA. This made sense, since many of our professors and administrators were either at Duke University at the time, or elsewhere on the East Coast. They set up two one-hour time slots for my course, which normally meets two days per week for an hour and fifteen minutes each time (it’s a two-credit course, whereas a full course at DKU is four credits). My time slots were Monday morning 8-9 am and Wednesday 8-9 pm China time. This meant that on Wednesday I had to teach the class from 4-5 am. Also, one of our students was in central Asia and also had to wake up at 4 am for classes. But for most of the students, the times were reasonable. And when I finally flew to Boston, the same was true for me.

Third, I had to adjust some of the assignments, but I did my best to adhere to the spirit of the original assignments.

This was challenging because my course, “Sounds in the Chinese City” focuses on live music scenes in China, both historically and at present. For their final group assignment, the students were originally supposed to visit a live music scene, document that scene while interacting with people, and produce an in-class presentation as well as a public presentation on the DKU campus. Obviously, this couldn’t happen, so I had to change the final assignment. I instead asked them to conduct an interview with a person who plays an important role in China’s live music scenes, produce a transcript of the interview as well as a summary, and then give a presentation over Zoom to the rest of the class.

Once I had revised the syllabus, I shared it with students via our Sakai site. Meanwhile, I created a Wechat group using China’s social media platform, so that I could also keep students informed of what was going on. I used both the Wechat group and Sakai to make announcements to students and used Wechat to hold informal discussions and answer students’ questions. I also used Wechat with the smaller groups of 3-4 students to faciliate their group projects, and I connected each team to a person they could interview from the live music scenes in China via Wechat. Some students used Wechat for their interviews with that person, while others chose to use Zoom.

As for the Zoom meetings, they have gone as well as they can. Attendance is high, but not perfect. It helps that my class is small, only twelve students, so it’s easier for me to have a rapport with each student and keep their attention focused on the course. For each class, I run them basically the same as a live class. I have a PPT and I show them the slides as I go through the lecture, pausing now and then to ask questions or let them ask questions. Some slides are question slides, and as they answer questions based on the readings for that class, I keep notes on the PPT slide. To be sure, online meetings can be awkward. The participation rate isn’t always as high as it could be or what it might be in a regular classroom, but that’s to be expected. The important thing is that I can still get real-time feedback, and the students can also share ideas with each other. I haven’t felt the need to use the breakout function on Zoom, but other colleagues have done so and apparently it works well.

After each class meeting, we all get a link to the recording of the class, which we can then download and watch on our own time. This is helpful for students who for one reason or other cannot make the class time. The recording function was set up by the IT staff, so it automatically happens, which is huge, since I wouldn’t want to fiddle with this function as a professor. After each class is over, I go through the entire recording of the class in order to review it and make sure that everything went smoothly.

Speaking of that, it is important when using Zoom to check in with the students and make sure they are seeing and hearing what they need to see and hear. I’ve heard that some profs have ignored this (not at DKU but at Stanford of all places) and only found out later that their mics were muted or that the students didn’t see the PPT they were supposed to be presenting. Zoom has a “share screen” function, and you need to be careful with it, because it will only share what you ask it to share. If you move to another program or presentation, such as going from PPT to Youtube, and you don’t share the screen with them, they won’t see or hear it. I figured out all of this early on by holding a test class with my students before starting the real classes. I highly recommend this to all teachers who are new to Zoom technology.

Another important note: Every time I start a class, the first thing I do is to ask students if they can hear me. Then I tell them to mute their mics when they are not speaking, so that any extra noise is minimized. Every time I share a screen with them, whether a PPT, a website, or a video, I ask them to let me know if they can see and hear it. For these purposes, the “thumbs up” function is helpful as is the “raise hand” function. Students can press those buttons to indicate yes, so that they don’t have to keep switching their mics on and off. In reviewing all of my classes, there was only one occasion where I thought they were seeing a PDF file of one of the readings, when in fact they were seeing another reading. This is because I didn’t switch the screen from one PDF to another. Otherwise it’s all gone smoothly.

I have even shared video clips through Zoom with the students, showing them in real time. However, I do not recommend this, because the sound quality is not good. It is far better to upload the video for them to see on their own, or to send them a link to it if it is already on Youtube or another video-sharing site. For my course, it helps that I made several videos and also produced some documentary films on live music scenes in China over the years, so I was able to share those videos with my students. I did not do this through Zoom, but by either sending them the video file or sending them the link to my videos on Youtube.

For sending large files, I use Wetransfer, which is free as long as the video is under 2G. For large videos such as my doc films, I compressed them using Compressor (I am a Mac user and I use Final Cut Pro and Compressor to make videos), and then sent the file to the students. Nobody had trouble downloading and viewing them as far as I understand.

In sum, I have found that using Zoom, Sakai, Wechat, Wetransfer, Youtube, and other websites has been sufficient to teach my course. Obviously, this is a far cry from the real classroom environment and face-to-face meetings with students, but it has worked for us in order to move the course forward and keep students across China and the world engaged with the course materials. I’ve also promised them that as soon as we are able to do so, I will take them on a field trip to experience a real live music scene in China. 

That’s all for now. Once the final group projects are completed and the course finishes next week, I may write an update to this piece.