While every precaution has been taken in the preparation of this book,

the publisher assumes no responsibility for errors or omissions, or for

damages resulting from the use of the information contained herein.

TEACHING EFFECTIVELY WITH ZOOM

First edition. July 1, 2020

Copyright © 2020 Dan Levy.

Written by Dan Levy.

Zoom is a trademark of Zoom Video Communications, Inc. The author

is not affiliated with Zoom Video Communications, Inc. and this guide
was written without endorsement from Zoom Video Communications,
Inc.

ISBN
Ebook: 978-1-7353408-0-7
Paperback: 978-1-7353408-1-4

1
2
The COVID pandemic has forced millions of teachers in elementary
schools, high schools, colleges, and universities around the world to re-
think their basic craft. How can we facilitate learning through a thin
stream of electrons that produces fuzzy images and delayed audio?
Every single one of us should read Teaching Effectively with Zoom.
Written by one of the most effective teachers in the business, Dan Levy
offers highly practical guidance about how to utilize the many features
of the ubiquitous Zoom platform — from polling to chats to breakout
rooms — to achieve a wide range of pedagogical objectives. This book
will certainly make you a better teacher on Zoom, but it will also make
you a better teacher in the classroom when we don’t have to rely on
Zoom anymore.
– Archon Fung
Winthrop Laflin McCormack Professor
and former Academic Dean at the Harvard Kennedy School, Harvard
University

Thank you, Dan Levy, for taking us beyond backgrounds and breakout
groups – and for putting the student experience at the center of the
online learning discussion. The sudden COVID-induced shift to e-
learning has been a ferocious jolt; in a blink, the methods used by K-12
teachers to assess student understanding in real-time, get students
collaborating on rich and meaningful problems, and keep the learning
exciting and engaging have been ripped away. In his guide, Levy
combines a strong base of the science of learning with real-life
examples from his classroom and those of his colleagues to put those
learner-centric goals within reach again. And the techniques are doable!
As I read, I kept thinking, “I can do that.” Check out chapter 4 on the
variety of ways to use polls to get a quick check on student
understanding. In my career as a K-12 classroom teacher, instructional
leader, and teacher developer, I’ve always wondered about how much
attention higher ed professors pay to teaching outcomes. In 15 years of

3
“talking shop” with Dan, I can say with great confidence that he’s an
outcomes geek, and I’m grateful that he’s directed his energy toward
this absolutely essential guide. Read it today, and reach more students
tomorrow!
– Dave Meyers
CEO and Co-founder of Teachers Connect

This eminently practical, reader-friendly guide offers instructional

wisdom that will make newcomers’ entry into teaching online easier,
and gives even seasoned instructors some fresh strategies and tips. As
Dan Levy pulls back the curtain on his own teaching journey, he shares
a wealth of detailed explanations, frameworks, and grounded practice.
His approach to the book mirrors his commitments as an educator and
colleague: when learning comes first, effective teaching will follow.
– Allison Pingree
Senior Instructional Coach, Harvard University

4
To my family, for your love and support.
To my students, for constantly inspiring me to become
a better teacher.

5
6
Foreword
As you come across this title, you may be asking yourself: “Who exactly
is Dan Levy, and why is an economist who teaches statistics at Harvard
qualified to write a book about online teaching? Is it a book worth
reading?” Those are fair questions. And I’m going to do my best to
answer them.
I first got to know Dan in 2009, when he allowed me to audit his
Quantitative Methods and Empirical Analysis class to fill a gap in my
statistical knowledge. In the first class session, I was excited by the
content but blown away by the teaching. An elegant lesson plan.
Students leaning in to participate. Questions that invited deep reflection.
Technology used to engage and make thinking visible. A seriousness of
purpose, alongside humor and joy. It was something to behold.
Dan caught me at the end of class, and knowing that I studied teaching,
asked me if I had any feedback. I shared some things that inspired me
and pushed myself to come up with some elements that might be
tweaked or changed. He asked me if I’d be willing to provide this
feedback every class, and I agreed. The statistics quickly became
secondary as Dan and I engaged in a semester-long dialogue about
excellent instruction. And we have been talking about teaching ever
since, through my time then as an instructional coach at the Harvard
Kennedy School (HKS) and now at the Harvard Graduate School of
Education (HGSE).
One way to define and identify teaching excellence is to look at the
product. How well-crafted is the syllabus? How do students and peers
evaluate the quality of the teaching? How much do the students learn?
Dan excels in this realm. I use his syllabus as one of my exemplars
when working with new faculty. Dan’s students consistently rate his
course off the charts. In a required statistics course with 60 students,
where both “required” and “statistics” are elements not in the
instructor’s favor, Dan once had every single student give him the top
rating (on a five-point scale) for overall quality of instruction –
something I have not seen before or since. He has won school- and
university-wide teaching awards, and is a featured faculty in
Instructional Moves, a project started at Harvard to help educators all

7
over the world to incorporate and refine high-leverage teaching
practices. He has been elected to chair high-profile pedagogical and
programmatic initiatives at HKS, and has conducted workshops on
instruction throughout the U.S. and the world.
Another framing of teacher excellence is as a process, one of
continuous improvement. In its essence, it’s a process of identifying
goals for you and your students, measuring how well the goals were
met, and then tirelessly working to close the gap between the
aspirational and the actual. I can honestly say that I have never met an
educator more committed to continuous improvement than Dan. He
analyzes student performance, combs through student evaluations,
solicits additional student feedback, and reads books on pedagogy. He
engages in extensive conversations with colleagues around teaching,
pays numerous visits to classrooms across the university, and has an
open-door policy for peers to observe him. When grappling with a
particularly important pedagogical challenge, Dan turns his scholarly
approach to his own teaching. He has conducted and published studies
about the best way to get students to prepare for class, how to elicit
student opinions through different polling mechanisms, and how to
make exams themselves into significant learning experiences instead of
just a means to measure learning. He then applies these new
understandings into the next iterations of his teaching in the service of
his students’ learning.
Dan also applies this approach to teaching with technology. He has
worked to incorporate hybrid elements into his in-person classes. When
he couldn’t find the right tools to get to know his students and their
participation patterns better, he co-founded Teachly, a web application
aimed at helping faculty members teach more effectively and
inclusively. He volunteered to serve as the Faculty Co-Chair of the
HarvardX Research Committee, which focused on promoting research
about online learning, and he currently serves as the Faculty Director of
the Harvard Kennedy School’s flagship initiative on online education.
Then the global pandemic hit, turning the world and the world of
education upside down. Dan was ready to respond.

8
He began to work through the problems that arose: Do I need to modify
my goals and my assessments? How should I balance synchronous
and asynchronous approaches? What tools should I use? How do I
create experiences that build a sense of community and unity when
people are by themselves on their own devices? How do I create the
conditions for quality engagement and intellectual rigor? How do I
attend to issues of access and equity for all of my students?
Dan consulted the existing literature. Although he found a lot of good
ideas, he also found some notable gaps, particularly about how best to
leverage synchronous teaching tools like Zoom to create effective
learning experiences. These gaps are understandable. The online tools
at our disposal and people’s facility in using them continue to evolve at
lightning speeds.
So Dan dove deeper. He tried to digest and make sense of the deluge
of advice columns and tip sheets that emerge on a daily basis. He
consulted online learning experts across campus and beyond. He
brainstormed new ideas and bounced them off colleagues. He
experimented and gathered feedback on the approaches. He
interviewed students to get their perspective on the various approaches
their instructors were taking. Eventually, when he and a colleague
transformed a highly rated executive education program into an
exceedingly well-received online offering in short order, the idea to write
this book was born. As he said to me: “A book that can be a one-stop
shop for busy instructors who want to teach well using something like
Zoom needs to be out there, and I couldn’t find it. So I feel like I should
be of service and do my best to write it.”
The fruits of that commitment, and all the labor that followed, resulted in
this guide, which embodies Dan’s approach to teaching. Focus first and
foremost on the learning. Start with your goals and work backwards.
Attend just as carefully to the details as to the big picture. Treat
teaching as a profession by helping instructors expand the tools at their
disposal and the discernment of when and how to use them. Be
thoughtful about variations in context and their implication. Do
everything you can to have students feel engaged, included, and
empowered.

9
As someone dedicated to helping higher education instructors improve
their practice, I am thrilled to have this book to share with my
colleagues. As someone who previously taught in middle and high
school and who is married to a middle school instructional coach, I am
similarly excited about how the ideas in this book can add value to PK-
12 educators. The gift I first had as an observer and thought partner in
Dan’s statistics class – sharing in his insights, his curiosity, and his
humanity – is now available to you. I hope and trust you will benefit
from it as much as I have.
Josh Bookin
Associate Director, Instructional Support and Development
Harvard Graduate School of Education

10
11
Preface

In early 2020, because of COVID-19, many colleges and schools

around the world closed, and many teachers, instructors, and faculty
members had to learn how to teach online in a hurry. Since then, a lot
has been written about how we instructors should teach live online
sessions and how we should master the different aspects of the
technology involved. How do we set up windows on our screens when
we teach online? Should we use the chat function? Do we use breakout
rooms, and if so, how? For many of us, it was overwhelming. Even
paralyzing.
This book is an attempt to help educators take a step back and make
sense of all the chaos. My hope is to provide you with some useful
pedagogic principles and practices that have served me and some of
my colleagues well, and that I hope will guide you in your journey to
develop your online teaching skills. To help ensure that you can
immediately apply the ideas in this book, I have included screenshots to
illustrate how to implement some key practices in Zoom. But because
the technology is evolving quickly, some of the instructions on how to
implement these practices (including links to videos and screencasts)
are described in the companion site
(https://www.teachingeffectivelywithzoom.com/), which can be updated
more quickly than the book. The companion site also contains links to
additional resources, including readings and checklists.
Whether you are new to online learning or a veteran, I hope you will find
something of value in the book. If you are new to teaching online, my
hope is that you will find a few ideas, try them out, and then experiment
with additional ideas later in your journey. I also hope that this book will
help you focus on what is important and provide a roadmap in your
efforts to learn how to teach online. Hint: Spending 15 hours arranging
monitors on your desk, wondering how to set up the various Zoom
windows, and experimenting where to put your microphone is not an
efficient use of your time. I learned this the hard way! If you are an
online teaching veteran, I hope that some of the meta-advice here will

12
be helpful and that you will pick up a few tips to improve your already
well-developed practices.
The book is based on my own experience teaching online, observations
of several colleagues teaching online, research-based principles of
effective teaching and learning, and, perhaps just as importantly,
interviews with dozens of students who recently experienced online
learning for the first time and also had to adapt to this way of learning in
a hurry.
Who is this book for? I teach at a university, so one natural audience for
this book is people with teaching responsibilities in colleges and
universities (faculty, instructors, instructional coaches, teaching
assistants, etc.). But after observing my daughters go through more
than a handful of classes over Zoom in these past few weeks, I am
convinced that K-12 teachers can also find value in this book.
The book’s main focus is how to conduct effective live classes online. I
am aware that a live class session – the activity you and your students
synchronously engage in together – is only part of the larger ecosystem
of teaching online that typically includes asynchronous assignments
and activities before and after class. And I am a big believer that the
best online teaching happens when we combine synchronous and
asynchronous approaches, and use each of these to their comparative
advantages (see chapter 10). But there are already a lot of good
general references for online teaching and my sense is that what is
most needed at the moment is guidance on how to effectively design
and conduct live online sessions that are compelling learning
experiences for our students.[1]
Why Zoom? It’s the predominant platform right now. It will make the
advice in this book more concrete and grounded. Nevertheless, a lot of
the advice here applies to many other platforms used to teach live
sessions, such as Webex, BigBlueBotton, Google Hangouts, Microsoft
Teams, and others.
The book is organized as follows. Part I provides an introduction and a
brief overview of the key overarching principles that I hope can guide
your online teaching journey. Part II reviews ways in which students can
engage in a live online class (speak, vote, write, work in groups, and

13
share their work) and the corresponding Zoom tool(s) involved. Part III
reviews ways in which you can engage when you teach a live session
and the corresponding Zoom tool(s) available to you. It focuses on
presenting (slides or other material) and on annotating. The choice of
addressing ways students can engage before ways you can engage is
a deliberate one. It reflects an underlying belief of this book, and my
own teaching, that the student comes first. It also helps combat our
natural tendencies as teachers of spending most of our time thinking
about what we will be doing in class rather than what our students will
be doing. Part IV is meant to help put some of the things you learned in
a broader context and to pull things together.
Over the past few years, I have read a few books on teaching and
learning that have influenced the way I teach. I would like to mention
two in particular: Derek Bruff’s Teaching with Classroom Response
Systems (2009) and Jim Lang’s Small Teaching (2016). While I was
reading these books, my brain was constantly coming up with ways of
applying, adapting, or tweaking some of their ideas to my own teaching.
It was exhilarating. My hope is that your experience reading this book
will be similar. I hope you will come up with many ideas to implement in
your online teaching.
If this book inspires you to do something you find interesting or exciting
when teaching online that translates into your students engaging and
learning more, please send me a note telling me about it. Nothing would
be more rewarding for me.
Dan Levy
Cambridge, MA.
June 2020

14
15
Acknowledgments
I would like to acknowledge the help of many people who have made
this book possible. Five people deserve special mention. First, my
friend, colleague, and Harvard Business School professor Mike Toffel,
who gave me insightful feedback on every chapter of the book, helped
refine my thinking, and supported me in numerous ways throughout the
writing process. Second, my student Ruth Hütte, who committed
wholeheartedly to this project and contributed to the book in many
ways, including figuring out the process of publishing to make the book
accessible to as many educators as possible. Third, Yamile Nesrala
was an excellent and careful editor, and committed to being a partner
on the project beyond what a regular editor does. Fourth, Teddy
Svoronos, a colleague and friend whose use of technology to teach
effectively is second to none, and who kindly and patiently answered
many questions while I was writing this book. Last but not least, Victoria
Barnum, who led the effort to produce the companion site and helped
me have the time needed for writing.
I would like to thank all the educators that allowed me to learn from their
online teaching practices by observing them teach and/or speaking with
them, including Carrie Conaway, David Eaves, Terry Fisher, Marshall
Ganz, Jim Honan, Dutch Leonard, Zoe Marks, Rebecca Nesson, Rem
Koning, Shoshanna Kostant, Kathy Pham, Allison Shapira, Mark
Shepard, Teddy Svoronos, Mitch Weiss, and Julie Wilson. Some of
them are featured in the “In Practice” sections of the book.
I am also grateful to many colleagues who have influenced my teaching
perspectives, including but not limited to Alberto Abadie, Bharat Anand,
Matt Andrews, Arthur Applbaum, Chris Avery, Mary Jo Bane, Matt
Baum, Erin Baumann, Bob Behn, Joe Blitzstein, Iris Bohnet, Derek Bok,
Peter Bol, Josh Bookin, Jonathan Borck, Dana Born, Matt Bunn,
Sebastian Bustos, Filipe Campante, Gonzalo Chavez, Suzanne
Cooper, Jorrit de Jong, Akash Deep, Pinar Dogan, Jack Donahue,
Susan Dynarski, Erin Driver-Linn, Greg Duncan, David Ellwood, Doug
Elmendorf, Mark Fagan, Carol Finney, Maria Flanagan, Jeff Frankel,
John Friedman, Archon Fung, Alan Garber, Steve Goldsmith, Tony
Gomez-Ibañez, Josh Goodman, Merilee Grindle, John Haigh, Sarah

16
Hamma, Rema Hanna, Frank Hartmann, Ricardo Hausmann, Ron
Heifetz, Andrew Ho, Daniel Hojman, Jim Honan, Kessely Hong,
Deborah Hughes Hallett, Anders Jensen, Doug Johnson, Tom Kane,
Felipe Kast, Steve Kelman, Alex Keyssar, Adnan Khan, Asim Khwaja,
David King, Gary King, Mae Klinger, Steve Kosack, Maciej Kotowski,
Michael Kremer, Robert Lawrence, Henry Lee, Dutch Leonard, Jennifer
Lerner, Jeff Liebman, Dick Light, Rob Lue, Erzo Luttmer, David Malan,
Brian Mandell, Jane Mansbridge, Janina Matuszeski, Quinton Mayne,
Eric Mazur, Tim McCarthy, David Meyers, Matt Miller, Nolan Miller,
Francisco Monaldi, Mark Moore, José Ramón Morales, Juan Nagel,
Angelica Natera, Tim O’Brien, Rohini Pande, Tom Patterson, Allison
Pingree, Roger Porter, Samantha Power, Lant Pritchett, Todd Rakoff,
Fernando Reimers, Hannah Riley-Bowles, Juan Riveros, Chris Robert,
Chris Robichaud, Dani Rodrik, Todd Rogers, Lori Rogers-Stokes, Eric
Rosenbach, Jay Rosengard, Soroush Saghafian, Tony Saich, Miguel
Angel Santos, Jeff Seglin, Kathryn Sikkink, Judy Singer, Malcolm
Sparrow, Rob Stavins, Guy Stuart, Federico Sturzenegger, Arvind
Subramanian, Karti Subramanian, Moshik Temkin, Dustin Tingley,
Tamara Tiska, Rodrigo Wagner, Jim Waldo, Steve Walt, Michael
Walton, Lee Warren, Rob Wilkinson, Julie Wilson, Carolyn Wood,
Michael Woolcock, Josh Yardley, Andrés Zahler, David Zavaleta,
Richard Zeckhauser, and Pete Zimmerman.
Many students provided me with valuable insights for the book,
including but not limited to Diego Auvert, Nicole Carpentier, Roukaya El
Houda, Jossie Fahsbender, Maria Fayos Herrera, David Franklin,
Sophie Gardiner, Catri Greppi, Fatine Guedira, Varun Gupta, Anastacia
Kay, Casey Kearney, Chris Kranzinger, Shiro Kuriwaki, Julia Liniado,
Megan Linquiti, Zainab Raji, Eki Ramadhan, Alicia Sikiric, Racceb
Taddesse, Jiawen Tang, Montse Trujillo, Beatriz Vasconcellos, Hannah
Wang, and many who participated in focus groups and informal
sessions I conducted. Their perspectives, insights, and candor
tremendously shaped my views and thinking.
I am grateful to others who helped me with research, advice, insight,
access to key information, and/or encouragement, including Manuel
Alcalá, James Brockman, Piet Cohen, Kate Hamilton, Andy Levi,

17
Horace Ling, Anne Margulies, Maddie Meister, David Meyers, Anna
Shanley, Kristin Sullivan, and Ian Tosh.
Finally, I am very grateful to Josh Bookin, Allison Pingree, and Carolyn
Wood for shaping who I am as a teacher, for supporting me in so many
ways over the last decade, for helping me throughout the process of
writing this book, and for not saying to me “this is a crazy idea” when I
first told them that I wanted to write this book and that I had to do it in
one month for it to be useful to the world.

18
19
Table of Contents
Part I – Key Ideas
1. Introduction
2. Guiding principles

Part II – Ways your students engage

3. Speak
4. Vote
5. Write
6. Work in groups
7. Share work with class

Part III – Ways you engage

8. Present
9. Annotate

Part IV – Putting it all together

10. Blending synchronous and asynchronous online material
11. Building community
12. Next steps in your journey

20
 PART I – Key ideas

This part provides the broad frame for the rest of the book. Chapter 1
introduces the book, explains what it is about, its key sources, its
approach, and how it is organized. It ends with a section on how to get
started with Zoom. Chapter 2 lays out the key pedagogic principles that
underlie the teaching practices and a lot of the advice provided in this
book.

21
22
Chapter 1 – Introduction
Most people reading this book did not choose to teach online. Most of
us were forced to do so by Covid-19. I hope that by the end of this
book, you will have gained skills to improve how you teach online, and
perhaps even some appreciation for the things that you can do online
better than in person. But I want to start this book by acknowledging the
profound sense of loss that many of us as educators are experiencing
as we transition from teaching in a physical classroom to doing so in a
virtual one.
The experience of teaching a class in person can be profoundly human.
Before class begins, we might chit chat with some students near us,
warmly welcome others as they come in the room, notice a student who
seems tired or sad and go and check in on them, have a student stop
by and tell us something that happened to them over the weekend that
reminded them of our class, and so on. As the students come in, they
say hi to each other, sit down, and start speaking with the other
students around them. It is not unusual to observe laughter and joy, and
sometimes tears. You can feel the energy in the room; sometimes high,
sometimes low, but you can feel it.
As class begins in a physical classroom, you might start presenting or
explaining something, and perhaps take for granted that being with your
students in the same physical space helps define both the spatial
geography at your disposal and the boundaries of your learning
community. You know that Maria, who sits at the back of the room, had
a difficult week and you might try to engage her in a different manner
today. As the class progresses, you might refer to an observation that
Pat, who sits on your right, made a few minutes ago. And you can walk
around the room and use verbal and non-verbal language to
communicate with your students. You might approach John with a
gentle smile, or a stern look (depending on your style), when you want
him to stop doing whatever he is doing. John will notice this; he can see
you are looking at him and not anyone else. As the class progresses,
the students interact with you and with each other in natural and human
ways. They might laugh at something funny, and everyone in the room
hears that laugh. And yes, they might interrupt or disrupt the class in

23
ways that you might not like. But it is a human experience, similar in
many ways to the ones you might have when you get together with a
group of people anywhere. There is no need for anyone to unmute
themselves or click a button to spontaneously express their reactions to
what is happening live in the classroom.
As class ends, you stay in the classroom for a little while longer, and
might have some students come and ask you a question, make a
comment, or simply say goodbye. As you leave the room, you might
bump into a colleague or two and catch up with each other.
Despite the remarkable technological advances over the last decade,
the experience of teaching a live online class at this time feels very
different. The physical classroom seems to have been flattened onto a
computer screen. If you have more than a handful of students, they
typically mute themselves and only unmute when they talk to the class.
Dialogue feels less natural. You cannot hear the spontaneous laughter
in the room. And despite your best intentions, John cannot feel that you
are looking at him and only him.
So while many educators and education leaders might rightly
encourage us to see the opportunities brought about by online learning,
I think it is hard to do this without first acknowledging the loss.
Another loss that it is important to recognize is the one that our students
are experiencing. Again, many of them did not choose to learn online.
And while they may be more digitally sophisticated than many of us,
they too will miss many of the things described above and more. They
will miss the interactions with each other, and the spontaneous
connections that are so integral to a well-rounded education.
So my first piece of advice before you continue reading this book is to
pause for a moment to reflect on these losses and what they mean to
you in particular. Doing so will allow you to clarify the values that you
want to advance in your online teaching, and will put you in a better
position to embrace its challenges. It will also make your reading of this
book more productive and enjoyable.

24
What this book is about
This book is about helping you teach effective live online sessions with
your students using Zoom. Whether you chose to teach online or were
thrust into it due to school building closures, I hope this book will
provide you with some guidance and ideas on how to teach effectively
remotely. There is so much advice out there that it can be
overwhelming. And on top of it, there is an increasing amount of
technology to master. Part of my goal in writing this book is to help you
focus on what’s important. You have limited time. You cannot spend
countless hours aimlessly googling how to teach on Zoom. I tried to
keep this reality in mind as I wrote the book.
The book is not a comprehensive guide to everything you can do on
Zoom to teach an online live session, but rather a guide on where to
focus your attention and limited time. The overarching theme is that at
the end of the day, you are there to help your students learn. Period. It
is that simple. The technology is just the vehicle. You need to master
some of the technology so you can focus on that goal. But you don’t
need to become a Zoom master to do this well.
The book focuses on some useful pedagogic principles and practices
that have served me and some of my colleagues well, and that I hope
will guide you in your journey to develop your online teaching skills. I
use the term “develop your online teaching skills” deliberately. I would
like to nudge you to think of this as a process where you will get better
with preparation and practice. Just like you have done with other
aspects of your job.
In sum, my goals in writing this book are to give you some ideas,
empower you, and ultimately inspire you to teach effectively with Zoom.
My goal is not to overwhelm you or try to convert you into a Zoom
expert.

25
What this book is not about
This book is not about online learning in general. I recognize that live
classes are only one part of the larger ecosystem of teaching online.
And I am a big believer that the best online teaching happens when we
combine synchronous and asynchronous approaches and use each of
these to their comparative advantages. In fact, chapter 10 is devoted to
how you can integrate online live sessions with other material you
provide (e.g., online modules, videos, quizzes, readings, etc.) for
students to engage with on their own time. But there are many good
general references for teaching online,1 and my sense is that what is
most needed at this moment is guidance on how to effectively design
and conduct live online sessions that are compelling learning
experiences for our students.

26
What this book is based on
The book is based on my own experience teaching online, observations
of several colleagues teaching online, research-based principles of
effective teaching and learning, and, perhaps just as importantly,
interviews with dozens of students who recently experienced online
learning for the first time and also had to adapt to this way of learning in
a hurry.
Although many of the approaches and practices recommended in the
book are backed by research-based principles of effective teaching and
learning, the focus will not be on the exposition of these principles and
research findings. If you are interested in them, I recommend exploring
the sources listed at the end of the book that pique your interest. The
following books might also be of use to you if you are interested in
learning more about some of the underlying research base of the
learning sciences:
How People Learn: Brain, Mind, Experience, and School (2000) by
the National Research Council
How Learning Works: 7 Research-Based Principles for Smart
Teaching (2010) by Susan A. Ambrose, Michael W. Bridges, Michele
DiPietro, Marsha C. Lovett, and Marie K. Norman
Make it Stick: The Science of Successful Learning (2014) by Peter
C. Brown, Henry L. Roediger, III, and Mark A. McDaniel
Multimedia Learning (2009) by Richard E. Mayer

27
What is the approach of this book?
This book is designed to be practical. I want you to gain some concrete
ideas to use in your live online classes. I have included screenshots to
illustrate how to implement some key practices in Zoom. But because
the technology is still evolving quickly, some of the instructions on how
to implement these practices are described in the companion site,
which can be updated more quickly than the book. I also want to invite
you use the companion site to share your own practices and see what
other readers have shared. I hope the next edition of this book will
feature practices from the readers in the “In Practice” sections (see
below).

28
How is this book organized?
To help ground your learning, the following sections appear in most
chapters of the book:

Table 1.1 – Chapter sections

Title Goal

In Describes how a real educator has used

Practice an innovative practice to teach effectively
with Zoom.

Checklist Provides a sample checklist of the

concrete steps you need in order to
implement the ideas of that chapter.
Editable versions of the checklists are on
the companion site to enable you to
customize these.

Tech Tips Provides tips on the aspects of the chapter

that are more technical in nature.

Chapter Summarizes key takeaways from the

Summary chapter.

29
Context matters
I have tried to write this book to help educators in all sorts of institutions
teach better with Zoom. In doing so, I have sought to recognize
differences between institutional contexts. Some of you will have IT
departments to consult with, teaching coaches to guide you, resources
to meet digital accessibility guidelines, and teaching assistants to help
you. Others will just have a Zoom account and be pretty much on your
own in figuring things out. Moreover, some of you can expect all or most
of your students to be able to connect to your online live classes via
video using a laptop from a quiet place, whereas others will be teaching
students who might be able to connect intermittently by phone. While I
have tried to write the book in a way that, whatever your circumstances,
you can get valuable ideas for your teaching, I recognize that context
matters and that you will likely need to tweak and adapt some of these
ideas to your institutional setting. My goal is for you to find some ideas
useful to improve your teaching.

30
How to read this book
The book is meant to be read in order, as there is a logical progression.
But the chapters are fairly self-contained, so if you are particularly
interested in a chapter, you can skip ahead. My advice is that
regardless of the order in which you read it, you keep a notebook (in
paper or electronic) near you so you can write the ideas from the book
that you want to try out, and perhaps some ideas not in the book that
occurred to you while you were reading the book, that you also want to
try out. Otherwise, it is too easy to forget these ideas. After you are
done reading the book, you can review these ideas and see which ones
you most want to pursue. If you are new to online learning, you might
want to re-read (or skim) some sections of this book after teaching for a
few weeks, as you will likely have a new perspective and be ready to try
some new approaches.

31
Getting started with Zoom
The book will assume that you have some familiarity with the basic
Zoom interface from having participated in some Zoom meetings. In
particular, it is important that you be comfortable with what Zoom calls
the “Host controls,” which are located on what I will refer to as Zoom’s
main toolbar (see below), and that you know how to set up a meeting in
Zoom so that others can join. If you are unfamiliar with these aspects of
Zoom, please check some introductory videos on the book’s companion
site.

Figure 1.1 – Zoom’s main toolbar (main items only)

Tweaking Zoom settings

Zoom has many settings that you can change to make some features
available or to change the defaults in some features. Which features
are available and which defaults are in place might depend on the way
that your institution has set things up. To make full use of the advice
presented in this book, it will sometimes be necessary for you to
change your Zoom settings so that some features become available in
your Zoom main toolbar and/or so that some defaults are consistent
with your preferences. The “Tech Tips” section in several chapters
provides guidance on how to make these changes, or will refer you to
the companion site for further instructions. Below is one example of a
Zoom toolbar with some additional features including polling and
breakout rooms, which will be discussed in chapters 4 and 6,
respectively. Your current Zoom bar will not necessarily look identical to
this.

Figure 1.2 – Zoom’s main toolbar (with full set of items)

32
Organizing Zoom windows
Zoom has many windows and possible views, which is great in
providing you with a lot of information useful to teach a live session, but
can sometimes become hard to manage. Below are two typical views
showing your students, the participants list, the chat window, and
Zoom’s main toolbar. The first view shows your students in Gallery View
(which maximizes the number of students you can see at once),
whereas the second one displays Speaker View (which has the student
speaking in larger view). The exact view that you prefer will depend on
your personal preferences, the size and number of monitors, the
features most important to you, and the activity you are doing at that
moment (e.g., sharing slides, leading a discussion, etc.). I think the only
way to figure out your optimal setups is by experimenting and
practicing, but being able to see many of your students while you are
teaching is probably a key part of any setup.

Figure 1.3 – Zoom’s windows arrangement under “Gallery View”

33
 Note: Students consented to appear in this picture.

Figure 1.4 – Zoom’s windows arrangement under “Speaker View”

Note: Students consented to appear in this picture.

34
The maximum number of student thumbnails Zoom can display in a
single screen depends on your computer’s processor. If you exceed this
number, Zoom will show you left and right arrows to navigate to
additional pages where you can see additional students.

Equipment Needed
A natural question you might be asking is what kind of equipment you
need to teach effectively on Zoom. The answer will depend on your
preferences and resources available, but here is a list of equipment that
would be useful, along with my sense of how important each item is.

Table 1.2 – Equipment needed

Equipment Notes Importance

A computer Ideal device is a desktop or Very high

laptop computer. Pure
tablets (like iPads) are good
as an annotating device but
not ideal for driving your
Zoom class.

A good Ideally an ethernet Very high

internet connection. If not, a
connection reasonably fast and stable
wi-fi connection.

A device to For pedagogic reasons, this High

annotate is helpful. See chapter 9 for
what students details and to help you make
say (e.g., the choice.
blackboard,
flipchart,
document
camera,
tablet)

35
 Headphones These are important so you High
can listen as clearly as
possible. Might be combined
with a microphone if needed
(see below).

A How much you need this Medium

microphone depends on how good your
current one is.

A second Very helpful to enable you to Medium

monitor see your students on one
screen and other materials
(e.g., your slides) on the
other one.*

A video Video cameras that come Low

camera with computers don’t tend to
be very high quality.
Depending on your budget,
this might be a worthy
investment. You could also
use your smartphone
camera.

A lamp Depending on how much Low

light you have in your
setting, an extra lamp might
be helpful for students to see
you well.
*Zoom has a specific “dual monitor” mode that allows for gallery view, speaker view,
shared screen, chat, and participants in different windows. See chapter 8 for details.

The companion site has links describing how some educators have set
up their workspace to teach in Zoom.

36
Disclaimer
The Zoom platform is likely to evolve quickly over the next few years.
This book was written based on Version: 5.0.2 (24030.0508) of Zoom
for the Mac OS, the latest version available in mid-June 2020. It is
based on the version of Zoom’s product designed for conducting
classes, not webinars.
While some of the images on the screenshots will look differently on a
Windows computer, the functionality across Mac and Windows is
almost identical. I have tried to write the book so that most of what is in
it will remain true for some time. This is certainly true of the pedagogic
advice. And I have relegated most of what I think will evolve over time
to the companion site. But there are aspects of what’s written here that
will need to be updated in the future. So you can assume that every
description of a Zoom feature or its default settings in this book should
be preceded by “As of the time of writing, …” I will be keeping close
track of the changes to the platform that affect the advice in this book,
and invite you to alert me to these changes in the feedback section of
the companion site.

37
 Tech Tips
Zoom’s features and default settings vary by what type of account you
have and by your institution’s default settings. As you discover features
you like, I recommend that you tweak your default settings to conform
to your preferences. As a reference, the table below has the current
features and default settings related to teaching for my institution and
for Zoom’s basic (free) account. One limitation of the basic account is
that the polling feature is not available.

Table 1.3 – Variations in Zoom features and default settings

Item My institution Basic

Audio Type Telephone and Computer Audio

Comp. Audio

Join Before Host On Off

Co-Host On Off

Polling On N/A

Whiteboard – On Off
Autosave

Nonverbal Feedback On Off

Breakout Room On Off

Closed Captioning On N/A

Waiting Room Off N/A

Allow Streaming of On (FB, YouTube, N/A

Meetings Custom)

38
Note: I am very grateful to Ian Tosh for his help producing this table.

39
 Chapter Summary
Transitioning from a physical classroom to a virtual one
represents a loss. Acknowledging this loss is important to be able
to move forward with online teaching.
Remember that you are there to help your students learn. The
technology is just the vehicle.
You need to master some of the technology so you can focus on
helping your students learn. But you don’t need to become a
Zoom master to do this well.
My main objective in writing this book is to give you some ideas,
empower you, and ultimately inspire you to teach effectively with
Zoom.

40
41
Chapter 2 – Guiding Principles
If you are transitioning from teaching in a physical classroom to a virtual
one, it might be helpful for you to think about the pedagogic principles
that underlie your teaching practices, and how best to apply or enact
these principles in your live online classes.

To help you do so, this chapter focuses on five key principles that
underlie a lot of the advice provided in this book:
Principle 1 – Be student-centered.
Principle 2 – Plan for active learning.
Principle 3 – Begin with the end in mind.
Principle 4 – Use online teaching to its comparative advantages.
Principle 5 – Teachers are made, not born.

Maybe the principles seem so obvious that you will want to skip this
chapter. Or maybe some of the advice contained within each principle
might be inconsistent with your own principles, or perhaps with your
teaching practices. Regardless, I hope this chapter will be helpful to you
by making you aware of the underlying beliefs that drive this book, and
by helping you put the practices contained later in the book in a broader
framework that you can use to come up with your own online teaching
practices.
In the rest of this chapter, I briefly describe each of these principles and
how I think they make teaching and learning more engaging and
effective.

42
2.1 Principle 1 – Be student-centered
Below is my favorite cartoon of all time:

Figure 2.1 – Teaching how to whistle

Source: Tiger © King Features Syndicate Inc.

The notion that you teaching something is not the same as your
students learning it seems so obvious that you might think it does not
even deserve to be mentioned. Well, I think that while most of us
recognize this notion, our actions are not always consistent with it.
When designing courses (or individual classes), we tend to focus more
on figuring out what topics we will address than on what our students
will be able to know/do/master as a result of their learning. In other
words, we tend to focus more on what we will cover than on what our
students will uncover. We tend to spend a lot of our class preparation
time planning what we will do in the classroom (deciding how we will
explain things, designing and tweaking PowerPoint slides to no end,
etc.) and not as much time thinking about what our students will be
doing in the classroom. When teaching a class session, we often start
executing a class plan without really understanding what background,
skills, and misconceptions our students bring that might affect their
ability to learn what we are trying to teach them. Or we might rush
through a lot of slides at the end of class when we are running out of
time, thinking that doing so means we “covered” that material, even
though we know that’s not really so. And so on. If you have not fallen
prey to some of these tendencies, hats off to you. But I think most of us

43
have because as human beings we tend to spend more time on things
that are under our control (the teaching) and less time on the things that
are not (the learning of our students).
Being student-centered is not just about recognizing that teaching is not
the same thing as learning. It is also about seeing teaching as a human
enterprise where your connection to your students, their connection to
you, and their connection to each other are at the core. This implies a
deliberate effort to learn about students (their names, their
backgrounds, etc.), to get to know them, and to try as best as you can
to understand what is going on in their lives that might be enabling or
impeding their learning.
I remember a conversation early in my career with Lee Warren, a
legendary former teaching coach at Harvard University, where she was
telling a group of faculty members that it was important for us to
understand everything that could affect our class, whether students
were tired or stressed, what else was happening in their program or at
the university, the weather outside, etc. I thought this was absurd and
told her, “I cannot control any of these things; I am there to teach the
students!” Over the years, I have come to realize how wise her advice
was. It is true that you cannot control these things, but they do affect the
way your class will go, and learning to acknowledge and to adjust to
these circumstances is, in my mind, part of what teaching is about.
During the spring of 2020, students at my university reported several
challenges related to the transition to online learning, including getting
easily distracted, difficulty staying motivated, and feeling socially
isolated. While none of these challenges were under the direct control
of the instructors, I think those who acknowledged these circumstances
and tried to help students address these challenges were likely more
effective at stimulating their students’ learning. The particular
challenges faced by your students might be different than these, but if
you are interested, the companion site has a link to a presentation with
these challenges and the solutions that students themselves proposed
to overcome them.
In sum, empathy for your students is at the core of teaching. No amount
of technology will change this. Technology is just a tool to help you in

44
this endeavor. As Derek Bruff argued in his recent book Intentional
Tech,[2] teaching and learning goals should drive instructors’ technology
use, not the other way around. And as Bharat Anand, Harvard’s Vice-
Provost for Advances in Learning, argued, “Ultimately, what’s far more
important in creating impactful learning experiences, whether in-person
or online, are the principles of effective pedagogy. How do you spark
curiosity, challenge assumptions, enable discovery, and inspire
learning?”[3]
One of my concerns with our move to online learning is that in our
efforts to master the technology, we forget that teaching is inherently
human.

In Practice 2.1 – Focusing on what’s important

Mitch Weiss teaches at the Harvard Business School and serves as
the course head for a required course called “The Entrepreneurial
Manager.” His faculty team spent countless hours during spring
break 2020 preparing to transition their course from in-person to
online. After all the training, he wrote to his faculty team:
“We’ve spent so much time on the technology of all of this, that I
wanted to remind us of the original technologies for teaching well in
the case method: curiosity for what the students think and
empathy for what they want to know. If you can still have ample
stores of both, you will be fine. So, my advice is to do your best at
not letting the screen get in the way of really listening and
wondering, and thereby ultimately teaching.”

Applying this principle to teaching online

45
Get to know your students. Getting to know your students
online is generally harder than getting to know your students in
person. It will require more deliberate effort on your part. See
chapter 11 for some ideas.
Build community. Building community online is crucial and also
requires more deliberate effort than doing so in person. See
chapter 11 for some ideas.
Understand your students’ circumstances. Understanding the
circumstances your students are facing in their online learning
journey is crucial for designing learning experiences, establishing
norms, and enforcing these norms. Find ways to connect with
your students and learn about their circumstances, and try to
adapt your approach to these circumstances.

46
2.2 Principle 2 – Plan for active learning
Years of research have shown that students don’t learn much when
their role is conceptualized as passive receivers of knowledge.[4]
Instead, effective teaching requires creating meaningful learning
experiences for our students that support their playing an active role in
their learning, including opportunities for active processing, application,
inquiry, and interaction with others and with the course material. “The
one who does the work does the learning” is one compact way to
encapsulate this principle.[5]
Yet despite this research and statements by many educational experts
– including Nobel laureate Carl Wieman, who once argued that the
college lecture is the educational equivalent of bloodletting[6] – urging us
to employ teaching methods where our students are active learners, too
many of us still employ teaching methods where students are not
playing an active enough role in their own learning.
If your teaching approach is driven by active learning principles and
practices, please feel free to skip ahead to the next principle. If you are
not there, but are open to making some changes in your teaching, a
great place to start is by reading Jim Lang’s excellent book Small
Teaching, where he suggests small changes you can make to
incorporate principles from the learning sciences into your teaching. For
an inspirational video on incorporating active learning methods into your
teaching, I recommend watching “Confessions of a Converted Lecturer”
by Harvard Physics professor Eric Mazur. Links to both of these
resources are on the companion site. I recently asked a student how
online learning was going for her, and she replied in frustration, “it’s like
watching YouTube videos all day.” Whatever we do as educators, we
must create a better learning experience for our students than this!
If you are not convinced about how ineffective it is to have students play
a passive role in their learning, I suggest you do one thing: sit in a
straight lecture and see what it feels like. You can do this online. I have
three predictions. First, I think you will realize how hard it is to stay
engaged and especially to remember what the speaker said an hour
after the lecture. Second, I think that you will convince yourself that, in
your classes, you don’t speak as much as the lecturer you just saw. If

47
this is the case, I urge you to measure in your next class the fraction of
class time when you are speaking. You can do this by having someone
time you with a stopwatch or by using technology (see companion site
for details). My third prediction is that you will severely underestimate
the percent of time you are speaking in class. I certainly did!
One common piece of advice for teaching online is that you should plan
for interaction and that students should not stay in any activity for more
than 5 minutes. While I applaud the effort to get us to employ more
active learning approaches in our classes, I fear that this advice might
be construed as “plan for hyperactivity” and might end up being less
effective than it could be. The goal is not just to get students to be
active, but to do so with a clear intention of what you are trying to
achieve (see next principle).

Applying this principle to teaching online

Design for engagement in live classes. For every online live
class session you teach, think about how your students will
engage (see part II of this book for a list of ways they can
engage) and plan a variety of activities that will lead them to
make meaning of the material, and ultimately achieve your
learning objectives.
Design for engagement outside of your live classes. When
designing asynchronous materials (ones that students will
engage with on their own time outside your live classes), think
about actively engaging students with activities that require them
to answer questions, do things, and/or reflect on their learning.
See chapter 10 for more details.

48
2.3 Principle 3 – Begin with the end in mind
When I was a Ph.D. student at Northwestern University, I signed up to
be a teaching assistant and attended a one-hour training session by the
person who headed the teaching and learning center there. The fact
that more than 20 years later I still remember several things I learned in
this session is a testament to how effective it was. The person
conducting the training was Ken Bain, who later went on to write What
the Best College Teachers Do, one of the books that has most
influenced my teaching and that of many other educators. One of the
main lessons I learned from Ken that day is to start the design of any
learning experience (course, class session, workshop, etc.) asking
yourself the question: “What should my students be able to do
intellectually, physically, or emotionally as a result of their learning?”
This led me to discover “backward design,” a widely used framework for
designing courses and content units proposed by Grant Wiggins and
Jay McTighe in their book Understanding by Design.[7]
A full treatment of the backward design framework falls beyond the
scope of this book, but it essentially involves three stages:
Stage 1 – Establish your desired results: what are your enduring
understandings and learning goals of the lesson, unit, or course?
Stage 2 – Evidence and criteria: what criteria will you use to
evaluate whether your students have achieved the desired results?
Stage 3 – Learning plan: What learning activities and instructional
strategies will you employ?

Apart from the book, there are a plethora of resources on how to

implement this method in your teaching. The companion site contains
links to some of them.
Using backward design in your teaching has profound implications for
how you conceptualize not only the design of your courses but also
their execution. It helps you decide what is really crucial for you, and
plan and manage your class time accordingly.

49
Applying this principle to teaching online
Establish your learning goals. Before every online class, I
suggest asking yourself: “What are the two or three things that I
would like my students to be able to master by the end of this
class?” Answering this question can be tremendously helpful in
deciding what material to cut from your class plan (before class)
and/or what material to skip (during class) if you are pressed for
time.
Use your learning goals to design your class. For each of the
activities you conduct in class, ask yourself “how is this activity
contributing to helping my students master the two or three things
I would like them to master?

50
2.4 Principle 4 – Use online teaching to its comparative
advantage
As indicated in chapter 1, transitioning from a physical classroom to a
virtual one represents a loss in many dimensions. One tempting way of
dealing with this loss (or at least adapting to it) is to try to reproduce
what you were doing in your physical classroom to the online
environment. This is what newspapers did when they first transitioned
to online by simply creating PDF versions of their print product. But as
Bharat Anand described, “that model evolved where now publishers
have expanded their audiences by leaning in to digital’s unique
benefits: making news available anytime and anywhere; creating rich
multimedia content; drawing on a wide range of sources in addition to
staff journalists; sourcing readers for comments and facilitating
conversations among them; and personalizing news feeds.”[8]
In the same way, teaching effectively online requires going beyond
merely adapting the face-to-face experience in the online classroom, to
actually using the online medium to its comparative advantages. For
live online classes, these include:
Students have more ways to contribute in class, which could
potentially lead to a wider range of participation in your sessions.
See part II for more details.
You and your students can collaboratively create documents
(Google Docs, Google Slides) more easily during class. See chapter
6 for more details.
You can more easily stimulate interactions between students who
might not normally interact with each other.
Students who cannot leave home for some reason (illness, taking
care of someone, etc.) can still attend and participate in your class.
You can more easily record classes to enable students to watch
these recordings (in case they missed class) or re-watch them at
their own pace.
Guest speakers are easier to include in your class because they
don’t need to physically come to your classroom; they can simply
join online for part of your class.

51
As we recognize the comparative advantages of the online
environment, it is also important to recognize some of its
disadvantages. Some of them – related to the human and emotional
consequences of you and your students not being in the same physical
space – were acknowledged earlier in this book. I would like to add four
more, informed partly by conversations with instructors and students:
It is easier for students to get distracted. They are just a click away
from checking their email, Facebook, Twitter, etc., and you have no
way of knowing that this is what they are doing.
It is harder for you to “read the room” and pick up non-verbal cues,
and communication can sometimes get lost (in both directions).
For you and for many students, learning online is a relatively new
experience. There are no long-established norms like they exist in a
physical classroom.
There can be more for teachers to keep track of when teaching a
live online class (and all of it is in a screen or two), and it takes a
while to adjust to having to manage so many things in a different
environment than you are used to.

Applying this principle to teaching online

Do things to leverage the comparative advantages of online
classes, including:
Leverage the many ways students can engage in – and
contribute to – an online class.
Consider recording classes for students who cannot attend.
Consider having guest speakers to complement and/or enrich
what the students are getting in your course.
Do things to address the disadvantages of online classes,
including:
Have a more detailed plan for your online sessions. It’s harder
to “wing it” during class when you are online.
Be more explicit online. For example, when you ask a question
on which you plan to spend some time or when you give

52
 instructions before sending students to work in groups, it is
helpful to write the question(s)/instructions so that all students
can see them.
Establish norms. It is important to establish norms about how
you expect students to engage in your online class. For
example, how do you expect them to signal that they would like
to talk? Do you expect them to use their video? See sample
slide below for a simple set of norms for the beginning of a
class, and more details in chapter 12.
Simplify or get help if you can. There is a lot to manage when
teaching an online live class session in Zoom. See chapter 12
for more details.

Figure 2.2. – Example of slide establishing norms at the beginning of a

class

Source: “Making the Most of your Online Learning Experience” online workshop at
Harvard University organized by Anastacia Kay, Dan Levy, and Teddy Svoronos. April
2020.

53
2.5 Principle 5 – Teachers are made, not born
If you work hard at your teaching, you know better than anyone that
teaching is not just a natural talent. Of course, natural talent helps, but it
is the commitment to continuously develop the many skills involved in
the craft of teaching that I believe makes the greatest difference. The
point might seem trivial, but when you hear expressions like “she is a
great teacher” or “what he is doing is not scalable” or “we need to fire
the bad teachers,” you realize that engrained in the attitudes of many
people is the notion that you are either good or bad at teaching and that
this is immutable.
Learning to teach online requires deploying skills you already have and
developing new ones. Perhaps because of the sense of urgency in
which many of us transitioned to online teaching in the spring of 2020, I
saw too many colleagues approach it with a sense that everything
needed to go perfectly on day one. This approach might provide us with
useful aspirations but unrealistic expectations. When Harvard Business
School transitioned to remote teaching in the spring of 2020, instructors
immediately focused on creating what they called a “Minimum Viable
Classroom” (mirroring the term “Minimum Viable Product” often used in
the software industry when creating a new application). They worked
very hard to create a great first class when they came back from spring
break. But they knew it was not going to be their final product. And
given their commitment to excellence in teaching and to continuous
improvement, they will undoubtedly offer a better learning experience
this fall.
This strikes me as a good way to approach your online teaching
journey. It won’t be perfect on day one. But think of this process in the
same way that you think about the process you employed to develop
any of the skills you now excel at. Your optimal process will likely differ
from mine, so I hesitate to offer advice here, but below are three
approaches that I think could be helpful as you develop your online
teaching skills.

Applying this principle to teaching online

54
Practice a lot
It takes a while to get used to the different tools (participants
list, chat, sharing screen, etc.).
If possible, try different approaches with friends, colleagues, or
family members before you try them in your online classes.
This will help you relax and focus more on helping students
learn.

Observe others teach

It’s easier than ever. All you need is an invitation to a
colleague’s class with a Zoom link!
You will learn a lot, particularly if you can debrief with your
colleague.
You will learn what it feels like to be a student in a live class
session. This will help you see the need for interaction. It will
also help you get a sense of what seems effective and what
does not from the perspective of being a student. This will help
you discover approaches you had not even considered.

Experiment and learn from your experimentation

Try new approaches or ideas in your online teaching.
Ask a colleague to observe you teach and give you feedback.
Collect student feedback and evidence about student learning
to help you assess how your ideas went in practice.
Reflect on what went well and what could be improved.

55
 Chapter Summary
Think about what pedagogic principles underlie your teaching
practices and how best to apply or enact these principles in your
live online classes.
The key pedagogic principles underlying the practices and advice
advanced in this book are:
(1) Be student-centered.
(2) Plan for active learning.
(3) Begin with the end in mind.
(4) Use online teaching to its comparative advantages.
(5) Teachers are made, not born.

56
PART II - Ways your students engage

There are five key channels through which students can communicate
using Zoom (or other similar applications) to engage in a live online
session: they can speak, vote, write, work in groups, and share work.
These channels are not mutually exclusive. For example, students can
share work or speak while working in groups. And more importantly,
these ways of engagement can often be combined within a segment of
the class. For example, after you ask students to vote, you could
immediately assign them to work in groups to discuss their vote. Before
thinking about how to combine and integrate these channels, I think it’s
helpful to think explicitly about how students can engage in each
channel, as that can be a useful guide for planning your classes. The
five chapters in this section address each of these channels.

Chapter Students can… Key Zoom tool(s)

3 Speak Raise hand

Unmute

4 Vote Polls

Participants

5 Write Chat

57
6
Work in groups Breakout rooms

7 Share work Share screen

58
59
Chapter 3 – Speak
If your class has over a dozen students, you will likely want them to
have their microphone on mute at all times except when they are
addressing the class. Otherwise, everyone will get distracted as soon
as anyone has some noise in their environment (keyboard clicking, dog
barking, phone ringing, etc.). For a student to participate in a live online
class, the typical sequence is:
Students raise their hand using Zoom’s “Raise Hand” feature (see
picture below).
You select a student who raises their hand and call on them.
They unmute themselves.
They state their comment/question.
They mute themselves.

Figure 3.1 – Student uses two-step process to raise hand in Zoom

60
This process (like other online teaching processes) takes a little longer
than it would in a physical classroom, and it takes some time for
students and instructors to get used to it. Moreover, even without the
use of the “Raise Hand” and “Mute/Unmute” features, the mere fact that
the conversation is taking place over the internet makes dialogue feel
less natural because the internet sends audio and video via chopped-
up bits through different channels to the recipient, and then
reassembles them. This tends to disturb the “No gap, no overlap”
conversational rule that most cultures observe[9].
My colleague Dutch Leonard pointed out that another difference
between dialogue in a physical classroom versus a virtual one is that in
a physical classroom you can more easily use verbal and non-verbal
cues to signal to a student that you want them to bring their comment or
question to a close. This means that engaging in dialogue online tends
to be more challenging and potentially more time-consuming.
All of this implies that conversations often take longer in a virtual
classroom, which has led several of my colleagues to observe that you
should cut how much material you plan to engage with in an online
session. Some suggest that you aim to get through 80% of the material
online that you would get through during the same amount of time in a
physical classroom. On the other hand, there are some things (like
quickly eliciting student views through the chat function, sending
students into breakout groups with different classmates, or bringing the
class back to order after working in those breakout groups) that can be
done more efficiently online. The bottom line seems to be that you
should not assume that you will be able to engage with the same
amount of material online as when you teach in person, and that your
pedagogic approach and style will likely determine how much less you
will be able to engage with virtually.
To decide which parts of your class plan to cut, focus on your learning
objectives for the session and think hard about two questions: (1) Is this
essential to achieving the learning objectives?, and (2) Will this benefit
greatly from us being together in the live session? Sometimes, the
material you plan to address in class might be available in another
format – like a newspaper, journal article, or YouTube video – that you
can post or distribute before or after class. Chapter 10 provides some

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guidance on how to decide what material should be addressed in the
live sessions and what should instead be oriented to learning outside of
live classes.

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3.1 How do I get my students to participate?
You might be in an environment where students don’t tend to participate
in class. Or maybe you have some students raising their hand a lot
while others rarely do. If you want to have a more inclusive classroom
and a richer discussion, here are some things to try:
Ask good questions. See section below.
Do not answer your own questions. Wait for students to participate.
Silence is one of the most powerful and underused tools at your
disposal.
After you ask a question, pause for at least 10 seconds before you
call on someone. This allows every student in the class more time to
develop their own thoughts, and usually results in more hands going
up, which gives you the opportunity to bring in a wider range of
views. This technique is sometimes referred to as “wait time” and
has been shown to have many benefits for student engagement and
learning.[10]
After you pose a question to the class, say explicitly: “I would like to
see more hands up before I call on someone,” or “Let’s make sure
we have five hands up before I call on anyone.”
After you ask a question, say explicitly: “I would love to hear from
someone who hasn’t participated.”
Cold call (that is, without telling them in advance, call on someone
who did not raise their hand). See “In Practice” below.
Warm call (that is, with some advance warning, call on someone
who did not raise their hand). See “In Practice” below.
Call on a student who made an interesting comment on the chat.
Keep track of who has participated and who has not, and be
deliberate about whom you decide to call on. You might consider
using a tool like Teachly, which is aimed at helping faculty teach
more effectively and inclusively (full disclosure: I am one of the
founders).

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3.2 How do I ask good questions?
Asking good questions is critical to generating good discussions in
class and ultimately learning. A full treatment on what constitutes a
good question and how to manage class discussions is beyond the
scope of this book, but here are some guidelines based on the Center
for Teaching and Learning at Washington University in St. Louis:
Make sure your questions are aligned with your learning goals for
that class.
Aim for direct and specific questions.
Ask questions throughout class and ask only one question at a time.
Consider asking open-ended questions.
When a student answers a question, be intentional about how you
respond.
Show interest in their answer with verbal and non-verbal cues.
Consider asking a follow-up question to clarify, probe, or expand.
Invite other students to react (agreeing, disagreeing, or
expanding).
Be rigorous with the answer but gentle with the student.
Please see the companion site for a few resources on asking good
questions and managing discussions in different types of classes.

In Practice 3.1 – The art of cold calling

Mike Toffel teaches Operations at the Harvard Business School,
where cold calling is widely used. He notes that cold calls can help
ensure that students are prepared for class because they know
there’s a real chance they will get called on even if they don’t raise
their hand. But he cautions that there are tradeoffs to cold calling.
While you can use it to nudge those students who haven’t
participated in a while or whom you know have experiences that can
add important insight, calling on students who aren’t raising their

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hand risks lowering the quality of conversation – and eroding the
motivation of those who are raising their hand. That said, Mike uses
cold calls throughout the class period, sometimes even cold calling
students who participated just a few minutes earlier as a way to keep
everyone paying attention and ready to respond as well as to
cultivate careful listening skills and a ready-to-contribute mindset.

In Practice 3.2 – The art of warm calling

Many instructors want to have a vigorous discussion in class but
dislike cold calling. One effective way of calling on students who
haven’t participated much is to devote a little time the day before
class to thinking about possible connections between the students’
backgrounds and the class topic. Below are a couple of illustrative
examples.
My Harvard Kennedy School colleague Julie Wilson is a sociologist
who has a knack for customizing her teaching plans to the students
in her class. When she was recently preparing to teach a case, “Our
Piece of the Pie,” which takes place in Hartford, Connecticut, she did
a quick search of her students’ backgrounds in the student roster
and found out that one student was from Hartford. She wrote to the
student and said she was going to start class by asking her to briefly
describe the city so that participants could better understand the
context in which the case unfolds. The next day, the student came to
class prepared and in a couple of minutes painted a picture of the
city that helped ground the ensuing discussion. See box below for
the e-mail Julie sent the student.
In my own classes, I often send an online module or survey/quiz for
students to complete before class and then leverage their answers to
stimulate a discussion during class. A typical sequence in the pre-
class survey is a multiple-choice question followed by another
question asking students to justify the choice they selected.

65
Sometimes I simply pose a question that I plan to ask in class but
that I want students to start thinking about beforehand. In class, I
might pose the same question, show a student’s answer as a quote
(sometimes with the student’s name), and invite that student to
initiate a conversation or debate. See example below.

Sample e-mail to prepare a student for warm calling

From: "Wilson, Julie Boatright"

Date: Monday, May 18, 2020 at 6:49 AM
To: [Redacted]
Subject: Welcome to the Using Evidence program

Welcome to the Using Evidence program. I just wanted to let you

know that I may reach out to you in our discussion of Our Piece of
the Pie this morning to say a few words about Hartford.
Those of us who live in New England know it as both the
headquarters for many large insurance companies – a site of quite
spectacular buildings as you drive through on the interstate – but
also a place of considerable poverty and hardship.
While we won’t spend much time discussing the background
information because we need as much time as possible for laying
out a framework for the week, we almost never get to take
advantage of someone who actually knows Hartford to help us set
the stage!
I hope this works for you. I’ll check in before the class.
Julie

Figure 3.2: Bringing into live session a student’s response to a pre-class

quiz or survey

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67
 Tech Tips
In Zoom, students who use the “Raise Hand” feature appear at the
top of the participants list (immediately below the hosts and co-
hosts) in the order in which they raised their hand.
Hands remain raised unless someone “lowers” them. Students can
lower their hand simply by clicking on same hand-shaped icon a
second time. Hosts and co-hosts can also lower the hand of any
participant. It can be distracting and inefficient to call on a student
who has their virtual hand up unintentionally, so try to set up
processes and norms to avoid this. For example, you can ask a
member of your teaching team to lower the hands of students who
have just made a comment.
Sometimes a student starts to speak, and you and the rest of the
class cannot hear well. This typically happens for reasons related to
internet bandwidth. At this point, you need to decide how much time
to let pass before you intervene. I typically wait for about 10 seconds
and if it hasn’t resolved by then, I ask the students to write the
comment on the chat, move on, and then come back to the chat to
address the comment a few minutes later.
The phrase “you are on mute” is probably the most widely uttered
phrase in Zoom. For students new (and even not so new) to Zoom, it
takes a while to get used to the routine that they have to unmute
themselves before saying something to the class. If you call on a
student and they don’t respond within a few seconds, you might
want to intervene and say “you might be on mute” so as not to waste
precious class time on this. If you want to find out whether a
particular student is on mute or not, you can look at the microphone-
shaped icon next to their name on the participants list (right in
between the hand-raising icon and the video feed icon).
While I understand the need for students to be on mute during class,
the default “everyone on mute” seems very unnatural and
constitutes one of the hardest things to adapt to when moving from a
physical classroom to a virtual one. Humor does not travel as well.

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 More generally, you and your students cannot “hear the classroom”
and miss some of the things that sometimes make a class in a
physical classroom such a human experience, as described in
chapter 1. You miss the laughter, the quick reaction on one side of
the room to a comment from a student on the other side, the
occasional chuckle, etc. I don’t have a solution to this conundrum
but hope that we can evolve into a different default soon with the
help of technology or some creative ideas.

Sample checklist for calling on students

Before class
❏ If you are planning to teach online a class you have taught in
person previously, plan your time carefully. Consider cutting
some of the material (or at least having a plan for what you
would skip if pressed for time).
❏ Plan what questions you want to ask in class to achieve your
learning goals.
❏ Have a plan regarding which students you want to call on
during class.
❏ Consider reaching out to specific students ahead of time, so
you can warm call them during class.
During class
❏ Always have Zoom’s participants list open and monitor it so you
can see if/which students are raising their hand.
❏ Resist the temptation to call on the first hand raised. Be
deliberate about whom you call on.
❏ Put the list of students you want to call on in class somewhere
visible.
After class

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❏ Reflect on the kinds of conversations you were able to stimulate
in class and the diversity of students and viewpoints reflected in
these conversations.
❏ Write lessons learned for your next class!

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 Chapter Summary
Conversations tend to take longer in a virtual classroom than in a
physical one. Take this into account when you plan your class.
Set norms for students to raise their hand during class.
There are many techniques to ask good questions and help
stimulate students to participate in class. Use them!

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72
Chapter 4 – Vote
If you have a class with more than a dozen students, one very effective
way of aggregating your participants’ views and helping you understand
where the class is with respect to a particular topic or question is to poll
them. Polling has many benefits,[11] including:
Nudging students to actively engage with the material
Encouraging participation from all students
Providing you with a more objective view of students’ perspectives
on a topic
Helping both you and your students check for understanding during
class
Helping you adapt your teaching plan to where your students are in
the class
For a wonderful and thorough description of the use of polling in
teaching, I highly recommend Derek Bruff’s book Teaching with
Classroom Response Systems (2009). While the book was written with
a physical classroom in mind, its key principles and wonderful examples
make it an excellent guide for the use of polling in online teaching. For a
shorter guide on the use of polling devices, take a look at a post he
wrote for the Center for Teaching he directs at Vanderbilt University.
Links to these resources are available on the companion site. The table
below gives you a sense of the kinds of questions you can ask when
polling your students.

Table 4.1 – Types of questions in polling

Type of question Example

Recall What are the basic units of life called?

A. Bacteria
B. DNA
C. Cells
D. Genes

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Conceptual You roll a die twice. What is the probability
understanding of getting at least one “6”?
A. 1/6
B. 2/6
C. 1/36
D. 11/36
E. None of the above
F. I don’t know

Application Evaluators are studying the impact of a

microfinance program using a randomized
controlled trial. Suppose there was a
drought in the region where the study was
being conducted.
How does this drought affect the credibility
of the study?
A. Would not affect credibility
B. Would somewhat affect credibility
C. Would substantially affect credibility
D. I don’t know

Student perspectives If you were in the shoes of the protagonist

of the case, would you merge with the other
company?
A. Yes
B. No

Student preferences Which of the following topics would you like

to discuss in our midterm review today?
A. Utility functions

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 B. Public Goods
C. Externalities
D. Taxes
E. Subsidies

Confidence level How confident are you in your answer to

the previous question?
A. Very confident
B. Confident
C. Somewhat confident
D. Not confident

Feedback/monitoring How difficult was the assignment you just

questions turned in?
A. Very easy
B. Easy
C. Appropriate
D. Difficult
E. Very difficult
Sources: Typology adapted from Bruff (see post). Correct answers for first two
questions are C and D.

In Practice 4.1 – Use of polls

In 2008, I participated in a teaching workshop on the use of polling
devices and peer instruction led by Harvard physics professor Eric
Mazur. This workshop and several subsequent conversations with
Eric have profoundly influenced the way I teach. Then, in the fall of
2010, I had an aha moment. While teaching a session on
probability, I used a polling device to pose what I believed to be a
warm-up question, expecting at least 80% of my students to arrive

75
 at the right answer. But when the poll results came in, I was
stunned and stood in silence in front of the class for over a minute.
Only 17% of participants had answered the question correctly. This
was a humbling experience for me and made me realize how
clueless I can be about where my students are. Since that day, I
have relied on polls frequently in teaching to assess student
understanding, take the temperature in the room, gauge levels of
interest on different topics or activities, ask sensitive questions, and
many other purposes.

The rest of this chapter is organized as follows. First, I discuss whether

polls should be anonymous, a key decision to make when designing
polls. For both anonymous and non-anonymous polls, I discuss how to
implement them in Zoom, their key relative advantages, what to do after
polling, and some examples of real instructors using them. I then
explore how to use polls in small classes. Finally, I wrap up with some
tech tips, a checklist for using polls, and a chapter summary.

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4.1 Should polls be anonymous?
A key decision to make is whether you want the students’ votes to be
anonymous. An anonymous poll allows you to see how the students
voted in aggregate (e.g., 23% of students voted for option A, 54% voted
for option B, etc.) without identifying which student voted for which
option. A non-anonymous poll allows you to see both the aggregate
results and how each student voted individually. The method for non-
anonymous polls suggested in the table below also allows students to
see other students’ votes.
Table 4.2 – Key features of anonymous vs. non-anonymous polls

Type of Suggested Zoom tool Key features

polling

Anonymous Polling (in Zoom’s main Can see aggregate

bar) results but not individual
votes.
Can decide when to
share poll results with the
students.
Should create poll in
Zoom before class.

Non- Buttons at bottom of Can see both aggregate

anonymous participants list (Yes, No, results and individual
Go slower, Go faster, votes.
etc.)
Students can also see
how other students vote.
Can create poll before
class but also on the fly.

Figure 4.1 – Reporting of results in anonymous vs. non-anonymous

polls

77
Anonymous polls

78
 Non-anonymous polls

You can use a mix of anonymous and non-anonymous polls in your

teaching. Below is a description of the advantages and disadvantages
of each to help you decide when to use each kind of poll.

Anonymous polls
In Zoom, you can use the “Polling” feature for anonymous polls. Below
is a table explaining the different tasks associated with this feature, and
information on when to do them and who can do them. Note that the
poll results are visible to you when you end the poll, and they only
become visible to the students if you decide to share the results. This
means you can check the aggregate poll results in private and decide if
and when to share the results with your students.

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Table 4.3 – Tasks in Zoom’s “Polling” feature for anonymous polls

Task When to do it Who can do it

Create poll Before class Person who creates the

Zoom session

Launch poll During class Host or co-host

End poll During class Host or co-host

Share poll During class Host or co-host

Re-launch poll During class Host or co-host

For detailed tutorials on how to perform each of these tasks, visit the
companion site.
To launch an anonymous poll during your live class, you click on the
“Polling” icon on Zoom’s main toolbar, which will then give you the
option of launching any of the poll questions you created for that
session. Select the poll question you want to launch and then click
“Launch Poll.” See picture below. If the “Polling” icon does not appear
on your Zoom bar, you need to add it (please see “Tech Tips” section
below for instructions).

Figure 4.2 – Launching anonymous poll from Zoom’s main toolbar

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An anonymous poll has the advantage that students are more likely to
express their real views about the question you are asking them. This is
particularly important with questions that are sensitive or where
students might feel nervous about expressing unpopular views. But it is
also important for other questions where students who are unsure of
their answer might deliberately or inadvertently side with the emerging
majority (or with specific students who are known to be strong on the
subject), which might lead you to inaccurately assess your students’
level of understanding[12]. Finally, by making a poll anonymous,
students don’t know how others voted until you share the results. My
general advice is that if you want to have a vigorous debate, you should
not share the poll results until after the debate is over, so students are
not unduly influenced by how others voted. The possible exception to
this advice is if the vote is very split (i.e., top 2-3 choices gather a
similar percentage of votes), in which case showing the results might
spur people who were unsure of their answer to participate.
What should I do after I launch a poll in class?
After you launch an anonymous poll and see the results privately, you
can take a number of actions. Below is a table summarizing some of
your options. Some of these come from Mazur (1997) and Bruff (2009),
while others are adaptations to my own teaching practices. You can of

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course mix some of these options, come up with variants, or use
entirely different ones; this list is just meant to stimulate your thinking. If
you are interested in seeing some of these actions in practice, check
the companion site.

Table 4.4 – Some possible courses of action after you launch a poll and
see the results

If you are new to polling in your teaching, one small step to get you
started is to prepare a poll for your next class, launch it, see the results,
and invite the class to discuss/defend their answer. If you are having
difficulty getting students to participate, you might nudge some of them
by saying something like, "40% of you voted no. Can one of you share
with the class why you think that?"
One disadvantage of using the polling feature of Zoom is that to create
a poll while in class you have to go to your Zoom account on the web,
type the question, type the possible answers, return to Zoom, and
launch the poll. This can take time. For this reason, it is better to create
the poll before class. This has to be done by the person who created

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the Zoom meeting. One way to address this disadvantage of
anonymous polls is to include in your list of polls for every class a
generic question that simply has as possible answers A, B, C, D, etc.
(see image below). This way, if you come up with a question during
class that you want to poll your students on, you can simply launch the
generic poll.

Figure 4.3 – Generic poll

Non-anonymous polls
Using a non-anonymous poll has the advantage that by knowing how
each student voted, you can follow up the vote by asking specific
students why they made the choice they made. This could help
generate a rich debate and make it easier for you to call on students
who haven’t participated much. It also has the advantage that it tends to
be a little quicker and you can nudge the students who haven’t voted to
vote (e.g., “Ricky, I noticed you haven’t voted. Could you please do
so?”).

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The most common way to implement a non-anonymous poll in Zoom is
to ask a question and have students vote by pressing one of the
buttons at the bottom of their participant list. Once they do so, their vote
will be reflected in the participant list so everyone can see how
everyone else voted.
The typical use case is for yes/no questions. But if you want to use a
non-anonymous poll with more than two possible answers, you could
ask the students to use other buttons at the bottom of the participants
list. For example, if you think the answer is A press “yes”, B press “no”,
C press “go slower,” and D press “go faster”. See picture below.

Figure 4.4 – Non-anonymous poll with more than two possible answers

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You can create non-anonymous polls in advance or on the fly.
Regardless of when you create them, it is helpful to be very explicit with
students about how to vote. For yes/no questions, it is fairly obvious for
students to know what to do. But even then, keep in mind that some
students might not have heard the question well, so consider having a

85
visual cue (e.g., a slide) reflecting what the question was. Furthermore,
for questions where the mapping between the possible answers and
Zoom’s buttons is not obvious, being explicit is crucial. In my own
teaching practice, I tend to show participants a slide that indicates the
mapping between the possible answers and Zoom’s buttons. See
example slide below.

Figure 4.5 – Sample slide for non-anonymous polls

In Practice 4.2 – Using non-anonymous polls

Rebecca Nesson, Associate Dean of the Harvard College
Curriculum, teaches computer science and math courses at
Harvard and uses non-anonymous polls in interesting and flexible
ways. She frequently asks a question during class followed by “If
you think the answer is X, press Yes; if you think the answer is
something else, press No.” After students have voted, she
deliberately picks a student from the list and calls on him or her to

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justify the choice (e.g., “Jamie, I noticed you voted yes. Could you
please explain your reasoning to the class?”). She thinks this works
better for her than traditional cold calling (where you just call on a
student to answer a question immediately after you ask the
question) because she knows that the student has already thought
about the question and will likely have something to say.
Rem Koning teaches strategy courses at the Harvard Business
School and uses non-anonymous polls to generate vigorous
debate in his case discussions. In many business school cases, the
protagonist has to make a decision (e.g., to buy or not to buy, to
merge or not to merge, etc.). In a recent online class, he asked the
students whether the company featured in the case had to do
“more of the same” (press “Yes”) or “do different” (press “No”). He
then wrote on a flipchart behind him, where he titled two columns
“More of the same” and “Do different” and proceeded to call on
specific students to submit arguments to support each of the
choices (e.g., “Veronica, you voted for doing different. Can you
explain why?”) and then wrote the students’ comments in each of
the two columns. I found Rem’s adaptation to the online
environment of what traditionally happens in a business school
classroom to be creative and resourceful. See picture below.

Figure 4.6 – Harvard Business School professor Rem Koning adapting

traditional polling methods

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88
4.2 Using polls in small classes
If you teach a relatively small class (fewer than twenty students), you
can poll students in ways other than the ones described above. For
example, you might pose a multiple-choice question, and ask students
to show one finger in their hand if they think the answer is 1, two fingers
if it’s 2, and so on. Or you might have students show you cards of
different colors (red for the first answer, blue for the second one, etc.).
You can then quickly explore the video feeds of your students in Gallery
View to give you a sense of the aggregate vote and to know how
specific students voted. The advantage of doing it this way over using
Zoom’s native polling tool is that you can probably do it a little more
quickly.

In Practice 4.3 – Using polls in small classes

Shoshanna Kostant is a math teacher at Brookline High School in
Massachusetts. She splits her class into two groups to be able to
conduct smaller sessions with each of them, and combines polling
with other teaching approaches in a very creative manner.
When she wants to do a quick non-anonymous poll, she asks her
students to signal their response using their hands (e.g., if you
think this series converges, show your hand in form of a “C”; if you
think it diverges, show your hand in form of a “D”). This allows her
to see how her students voted very easily and quickly by just
looking at the video feeds of her students in Gallery View.
When she wants to do an anonymous poll, she asks her students
to chat their answer just to her, privately. This has the advantage
that she does not need to give her students a list of possible
answers that she would have to think of beforehand, and allows her
to identify possible misconceptions that she might not have even
been aware of. She can simply say, “Solve this problem and send
me your answer through the private chat” and then examine her

89
students’ answers and call on any of them to explain their
response.

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 Tech Tips
If the “Polling” feature does not appear on your Zoom’s main toolbar,
you need to add it. Please note that this feature is currently not
available on Zoom’s basic (free) plan. To add the “Polling” feature to
your Zoom’s main toolbar, follow these steps:
Login to your Zoom account on your browser. The web address
will depend on your institution’s setting.
On the left navigation bar, click on Settings. See image below.

Click on sub-menu “In Meeting (Basic)” and scroll down until you
find the item related to polls. Make sure it is turned on.

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To launch polls using Zoom’s built-in poll feature, it is best to create
the polls in Zoom before your class session. Once in class, you can
launch any of the polls that are pre-loaded for that class.
Only the person who sets up the Zoom meeting can create polls for
that meeting/class. So if someone else is setting up your Zoom class
sessions or you are invited to give a guest class, you should
coordinate with the person setting up the Zoom meeting(s) so they
create your poll(s) in Zoom in advance of your class. Once the class
begins, both hosts and cohosts can launch polls, share results, etc.
When you share the poll results, your students see a window where
the results appear in front of their Zoom screen. Once you stop
sharing the poll, this window will disappear.
Zoom’s native poll capabilities are fairly basic. You can only create
two kinds of questions: multiple choice (respondent can select only
one answer) or multiple answers (respondent can select one or
more answers). There are polling applications (such as
polleverywhere, mentimeter, etc.) that offer more capabilities (such
as questions where respondents can type words and a word cloud
gets formed). You could use these polling applications alongside
Zoom, and ask your students to visit an external site to answer the
poll, perhaps by sending them the link in the chat when you want
them to do so. The disadvantage of using another application is that
students are already managing multiple windows in a Zoom call

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 (gallery view, participant list, chat, any program they use to take
notes, etc.), so using a poll application outside of Zoom adds one
more window to manage. If students are managing everything from
a laptop computer and/or they are not very technologically savvy,
this disadvantage can be particularly salient. In sum, Zoom’s native
poll capabilities are more convenient but less powerful. Although I
was a big user of a more sophisticated polling solution in the
physical classroom, I have tended to rely on Zoom for online polling.
My hope is that in the near future Zoom’s polling capabilities will get
better, and/or the more sophisticated polling applications will build
integrations with Zoom that would allow students to vote without
leaving the Zoom interface.
You can also use Zoom’s polling feature to conduct a non-
anonymous poll. In fact, this is Zoom’s default. But what Zoom calls
a non-anonymous poll is one in which you can download a report
after class that would show you how each student voted along with
their names (assuming that the students registered for the Zoom
meeting). This report is not available during class, so it might be
helpful to analyze what happened after class but not to make
decisions in class such as whom to call on. For this reason, I
recommend that if you want to conduct a non-anonymous poll, you
ask students to vote by using the buttons at the bottom of their
participant list (as described earlier in this chapter).
If there are not too many students in your class, you can use non-
anonymous polls to assign participants into breakout rooms. For
example, you could say, if you want to do activity A press “yes”, B
press “no”, C press “go slower,” and D press “go faster”. For details,
please see chapter 6.

Sample checklist for using polls

❏ Decide what polls you plan to use in class
❏ For anonymous polls, create the poll(s) in Zoom before class

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❏ For non-anonymous polls, have clear instructions or a clear
visual for how students will vote
❏ Have a clear plan for what to do during class once the students
have voted

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 Chapter Summary
Polls can be a very helpful tool to engage students, assess where
they are, and teach in a more flexible manner.
For each poll you plan to use, consider whether you want it to be
anonymous or not. There are tradeoffs in this choice and my
recommended approach to implement these in Zoom differs
(Zoom’s native polling tool for anonymous polls, and Zoom’s
buttons at the bottom of participant list for non-anonymous polls).
Be deliberate about what you plan to do once you learn the
results of the poll. Key options include leading a class-wide
discussion, asking specific students to justify their vote, and
assigning students to work on the question further in breakout
rooms. Consider the possibility of repolling after any of these
activities to see if the views of the class changed.

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Chapter 5 – Write
While voting is very useful to quickly aggregate student views, you
sometimes want to know about what is on your students’ minds in a
less structured way than using a multiple-choice poll. Zoom’s chat
feature enables students to write what they are thinking as the class
progresses and/or in response to a prompt from you. If you have ever
dreamed of teaching in a classroom where you could see in thought
bubbles what is going on in your students’ minds, you might want to
consider the use of chat in your online live classes.

Figure 5.1 – Thought bubbles

Image Source: Classroom Doodle Diva.

That said, the use of chat in a live online class is controversial. Some
instructors encourage their students to use it freely, many place some
restrictions (like whether everyone or just the instructor can see what
students are writing), and others simply ban it. Students also seem split,
with some finding it a useful way to participate, and others finding it too
distracting. The table below points to some of the main advantages and
disadvantages of using chat in a live class session. The last row
assumes that you are using Zoom’s most liberal (and currently default)
setting, which allows students to see what other students are writing.

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Table 5.1 – Key advantages and disadvantages of using chat during
class

Key advantages Key disadvantages

+ Allows you to quickly see – Can be distracting for you

what’s on your students’
– Can be hard for you to monitor
minds more efficiently than in while you are trying to manage
a physical classroom many other things during class
+ Helps you uncover issues that
you need to address / clarify
during class
+ Can help resolve technical
issues quickly
+ Provides an additional venue to
contribute to class for students
who might be hesitant to
speak in class
+ Allows more students to
actively engage and
participate in class, just like
with voting

If students can see what other students are writing:

+ Helps students learn from each – Can be distracting for students

other without intervention from
you
+ Students can help answer
other students’ questions
+ Can bring a richer set of
perspectives into the class
+ Creates community by allowing
students to interact with and

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 learn from each other

The table above suggests that there are more advantages than
disadvantages to using chat, but this can be deceiving, because the
disadvantages are big ones. I address them below, but before doing so,
let’s examine ways you can use chat in your live online class.

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5.1 Main uses of chat
Use chat to have students respond to your prompt
Asking your students to write in the chat can be a very efficient way to
quickly find out what they think about a specific topic or issue. In a
traditional classroom, you might ask a question and then get a few
students to answer verbally. Because this process is sequential (i.e.,
you don’t want all students to speak at the same time), it would likely
take more time and involve fewer students than using the chat tool
(where multiple students can write at the same time).
Using chat allows you to quickly look for interesting patterns in the
students’ responses, pull out a particularly interesting comment to
discuss verbally, and ask a student that you want to nudge into
participating in class to expand on their chat comment. In a traditional
physical classroom, this would all be much more difficult and time-
consuming.
Below are some illustrative examples of the kinds of questions for which
the chat function would work well. There are of course many more. The
key is not to try to find a question that fits the chat function, but rather to
substantively think of questions where you would like to know what’s on
your students’ minds and ask yourself whether the chat is the right
vehicle for it. In the process of doing so, some questions that you might
not have thought about asking in a physical classroom might emerge.
You may want to keep two factors in mind when deciding whether a
particular question is a good candidate for chat and, if so, how to
communicate the question to your students: (1) how long you expect
the typical answer to be (a few words or one to two sentences is ideal in
terms of your ability to collect and process the comments quickly); and
(2) how many students you expect to contribute (the greater the
number, the more structure you need in the question and the shorter
the student responses should be).

Table 5.2 – Possible prompts for students to respond using chat

Example of prompt Goal

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When you hear the term X, what Assess students’ initial
are the first words that come to understanding of a concept/idea,
mind? and identify potential
misconceptions.

What examples come to mind to Quick, low-barrier-to-participate

illustrate Y? question aimed at helping
students come up with a broad
range of examples that you can
leverage in the ensuing
discussion.

What questions do you have Help you uncover things that

about the material so far? need clarification. Can also help
you be more selective about
which questions you answer in
class.

How would you apply this Help students apply what they
concept/idea to your own life? have learned. Typically, you
would need to give students a
little bit more time for this kind of
question.

What are the Quickly come up with a list that

advantages/disadvantages of you can use to jumpstart a
X? What would be the reasons to conversation
do X?

What are your key conclusions Help your students do retrieval (a

(i.e., takeaways) from today’s process that leads to learning)
class? and allows you to understand
what your students took away
from the class (and compare it
with what you planned for them
to take away).

What did you do last weekend? Foster a sense of community

before class.

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Consistent with the general theme about the importance of being
explicit when communicating with students in live online classes, it
sometimes can be helpful to write the prompt in a visual (e.g., slide,
whiteboard, etc.) that students can refer to while you ask them to write
in the chat. The prompt can also indicate how long you expect their
answers to be. See example below.

Figure 5.2 – Slide with question asking students to write in the chat

In Practice 5.1 – Use of chat in response to your

prompt
Teddy Svoronos, a Lecturer at the Harvard Kennedy School and
the person most skilled at using technology to teach effectively that
I have ever seen, frequently uses chat to find out what is on his
students’ minds. In a recent class, he asked his students to write in
the chat the methodological and practical criteria relevant to select
a particular statistical method. Within a few seconds, he had more
than a dozen comments to choose from. He selected some of

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them, mentioned them verbally to the class, and wrote them on the
slide he was showing the students (see picture below). At the end
of the class, he asked the students to write their key takeaways
from the session, which gave him a better understanding of what
the students had learned as well as a starting point for his next
class.

Figure 5.3 – Annotating a slide based on comments from the chat

(Teddy Svoronos)

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Use of chat to communicate administrative or logistical matters during
class
Sometimes chat can be the most efficient and discreet way to
communicate things that are relevant to the logistics of running the
class. As the instructor, you can use it to communicate messages such
as:
Class will begin in 2 minutes.
When we begin class, group #3 will be asked to present their key
takeaways from last class. Please make sure that you have
designated a spokesperson for your group and that they are ready.
Here is the link to a site that I would like you to look at / work on
(e.g., Google Slides for upcoming breakout room).

Figure 5.4 – Rebecca Nesson sends a quick chat to get students ready
to start her class

As for students, they might communicate messages such as:

We cannot see your slides.
We cannot hear you well.
Can you repeat the instructions again?
How much time do we have for this activity?
Notice that some students’ questions can be answered by their peers,
allowing you to continue without having to pause the class to answer
them.

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Use of chat in private mode
A few settings in Zoom go beyond the public use of chat described so
far, where each comment is visible to all students and the instructor. By
default, a student can also write privately to one individual, including to
you or one of their peers. You can modify Zoom’s default settings so
that some of these kinds of messages are allowed and others are not.
See “Tech Tips” section below on how to do this.
If you decide to use chat under a certain set of norms (see below), my
suggestion is to specify the use of these settings when developing
these norms. For example, if you have a person who can help students
address technical support issues, you might want to encourage
students to chat privately to that person to avoid distracting other
students in the class with technical issues that are only relevant to
certain individuals.

Use of chat in free-flowing form

Sometimes students use chat to simply express what is on their mind
while the class is taking place. Some of the comments are meant to
express viewpoints that agree, contradict, or complement points being
made verbally or via chat. Some chat comments are then followed by
other chat comments that agree, debate, or complement them. When
this happens, it can feel like there are two parallel conversations taking
place in the virtual classroom: one by voice and a second one by chat.
Sometimes students post links in the chat that relate (or not) to one of
the two conversations. In fact, there often are more than two
conversations taking place because sometimes several students write
in chat simultaneously, so several conversation threads occur within the
chat. These scenarios have made some educators and students
oppose the use of chat in live online classes.

Figure 5.5 – Use of chat in free-flowing form leading to several

conversations in your classroom

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5.2 The case against chat
The main case against the use of chat in online classes is that it is too
distracting for both the instructor and the students. For the instructor,
monitoring the chat while you are teaching can be challenging. In a
typical online class, you are paying attention to many things beyond
executing your class plan: the video feed of students so you can
connect and read non-verbal cues, the list of participants so you can
keep track of who is raising their hand, the slides/visuals you are
presenting, the clock to keep track of time, and so on. Adding the
monitoring of the chat window to this list can seem like a daunting task,
especially if you are new to teaching live sessions online and/or if you
are not very comfortable with the technology.
One way of addressing this problem is to designate someone else to
monitor the chat. The ideal person is a teaching partner or teaching
assistant who is familiar with the class content and your class plan, so
they can exercise judgment as to what to bring to your attention. If this
is not possible but you still would like someone to monitor the chat, you
could assign someone (perhaps a student) to play this role and give
them instructions on the kinds of issues they should bring to your
attention and when. Finally, you could designate times in which you
plan to check the chat, and tell the students that you will only be
checking it at those times.

In Practice 5.2 – Having someone monitor the chat

Julie Wilson, a Senior Lecturer at the Harvard Kennedy School,
was teaching recently in a program for mid-career professionals.
She gave me a list of students she wanted to call on during class
and a sense of what she wanted to achieve in that session. At a
few points during the class, I interjected with comments such as,
“Julie: In the chat, several students are expressing confusion about
the term theory of change in this context,” or “Julie: Ahmad argued
that the theory of change is incomplete.” I tried to make sure that

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 the interjections were enriching the conversation and not disrupting
her flow, so I interjected most often in response to her pausing and
asking, “Dan: Anything in the chat that you would recommend that
we address?” This process allowed Julie to leverage the chat
without having to monitor it herself.

The second – and, in my mind, bigger – problem with chat is that it can
be distracting for students. There is ample research suggesting that
most people are not good at multitasking,[13] even though many people
believe they are,[14] further compounding the problem. My own
experience observing the use of chat is that the conversations in chat
can frequently veer off topic. And even if they are on topic, it is
cognitively taxing to try to pay attention to two separate conversations.
Finally, any links posted on the chat are an invitation to yet another
potential source of distraction, as students are tempted to click on those
links immediately to view that material.

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5.3 The verdict
The decision of whether or not to use chat, and if so how to use it, is a
personal one. What I can recommend is that you be deliberate in
making this decision and clearly communicate your choice and the
reasons behind it to your students. I think your options are as follows:
Ban the use of chat completely.
Permit the use of chat under a certain set of norms (when to use it,
private vs. public, etc.), and decide how to enforce these norms
(e.g., by urging students to embrace them and/or by imposing
restrictions by changing Zoom’s settings).
Permit the use of chat freely.

If you are inclined to ban the use of chat completely, keep in mind that
students might decide to have their own way of chatting outside of
Zoom, in which case they will still be chatting, but you just won’t know
what they are chatting about! I have seen students do this using
WhatsApp groups, Slack channels, etc.
My own view at the moment, which might change over time, is that chat
can be very beneficial if you can develop a set of norms that work for
you. Below is a sample set of norms you might consider adapting. I also
suspect that there will be technological advancements in the next few
years that might allow us to address some of the challenges of using
chat raised in this chapter.

Table 5.3 – Sample norms for using chat

Stringent set of norms Relaxed set of norms

Use it privately for technical Use it privately for technical
support. support.
Use it publicly only when I ask Use it publicly for questions or
you to do so. comments related to the class.

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Finally, whatever set of norms you decide to use, there are bound to be
some students who will still find it too distracting or dislike using it, but
are worried that they might miss something important in the chat. One
possible strategy to address their concern is to give these students the
option of closing their chat window, tell them that you will verbally
announce to the whole class any comments in the chat that are time
sensitive and relevant to the whole class, and indicate that you will
make the chat transcript available after class (e.g., by posting it in your
learning management system). You can copy the content of the chat at
the end of class or access it on your Zoom account (see companion site
for instructions on how to do this).

Sample checklist for using chat

❏ Establish and communicate norms. Consider changing Zoom’s
chat settings to help you enforce these norms (see “Tech Tips”
section below).
❏ Take action if the norms are violated.
❏ Decide who will monitor the chat. If it’s someone other than
you, coordinate how and when you want this person to bring
chat comments to your attention.
❏ For every question you plan to ask in class, assess whether
chat can be a productive vehicle for gathering your students’
views.

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 Tech Tips
To change Zoom’s chat settings once the session has started,
simply go to the bottom of the chat window, click on the square with
the three periods, and select the option that you prefer. See picture
below for how to change settings and table below for Zoom’s current
settings. Note that you can also change Zoom’s chat default settings
for all your Zoom meetings by logging into your Zoom account on a
web browser, and going into the Settings tab.

Figure 5.5 – Changing the chat settings in Zoom

Table 5.4 – Zoom’s current settings

How Participants can chat Means

stringent the with
setting is

Very No one You are banning the use of

stringent chat. You can still use the
chat feature to send
messages to your students,
but your students cannot
send or reply to messages.

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Stringent Host only Your students can send
private messages to you
(and to each of your co-
hosts) but the messages will
not be visible to anyone else
(in particular other students,
unless you assign them as
co-hosts).

Liberal Everyone Your students can write

(publicly) messages in the chat that
will be visible to you and
everyone else in the
session, but they cannot
send private messages to
each other.

Very liberal Everyone Your students can send

(publicly and messages that are visible to
privately) everyone else and also
private messages to other
students.

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 Chapter Summary
Chat is a very quick and efficient way to find out what is on your
students’ minds.
While using chat has several advantages, it can be distracting for
both you and your students.
If you plan to use chat, establish some norms and communicate
them to your students.

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Chapter 6 – Work in Groups
The positive effects of working in groups has been well documented in
the teaching and learning literature.[15] In an online live class with more
than a dozen students, dividing the class into small groups can be a
great way to get participants to engage, do some work, reflect, and
learn from their peers. By splitting the class into small groups and giving
students a meaningful task to complete or a meaningful question to
answer, you give more of your students an opportunity to directly
engage with the material, more time to process and make meaning of
what has happened in class, and more chances to ask questions they
might not feel comfortable asking in class. Working in groups also gives
students an opportunity to learn from others who might be better able
than you to understand the difficulties faced by someone learning the
material for the first time. When you have a whole class discussion, the
students who are not speaking might tune out more easily than when
they are discussing in small groups.
Having students work in groups also has some drawbacks. You might
feel like you are losing control over the class, and unless you clearly lay
out what you would like students to do (see details below), students
might not use the time as productively as you would like.
In Zoom, you send students to what are called “Breakout Rooms,”
where they can work for a period of time. Breakout rooms is a Zoom
feature that allows you to split your Zoom meeting into separate
sessions for each group. When the students are placed into breakout
rooms, their Zoom interface is identical to the regular Zoom interface
except that they can see only the students in their group. The
participants list and chat become private to the students in that room.
During this time, you can visit these rooms to listen in on the
conversations, and you can bring them all back into the main room
whenever you like.
To create and send students to breakout rooms, you need to click on
the “Breakout Rooms” item in Zoom’s main toolbar. See “Tech Tips”
section below for instructions on how to add this item to your toolbar if it
is not already there.

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Figure 6.1 – Sending students into breakout rooms using Zoom’s main
toolbar

Many students view breakout rooms in a very positive light. In a recent

student survey of Harvard Kennedy School students, over one third of
respondents mentioned breakout rooms when asked what had been
effective for their learning. One student commented that breakout
rooms “create a tangible social pressure to participate.” Another one
indicated that “breakout sessions are really nice for getting to have
more intimate conversations with peers, similar to how we would do in
person.” And in our online executive education programs at the Harvard
Kennedy School, many participants mention breakout rooms as an
important component of the program both for learning and for getting to
know other participants.
As with other technological tools in online learning, the most important
guideline in the use of breakout rooms is to be purposeful with what you
want to achieve. Having a clear task that the groups are assigned to
work on, a clear deliverable, and a specified timeframe helps
tremendously. Several students reported that they were often in
breakout rooms without a clear sense of what they were supposed to
do and wasted a lot of time trying to figure that out. Others reported that
they were much more likely to use breakout room time to catch up with
each other socially when the task wasn’t clear or if they didn’t feel
accountable for completing it. See sample instruction slide below.

Figure 6.2 – Sample slide to show students before they head to

breakout rooms

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117
6.1 Main uses of breakout rooms
Breakout rooms can be used for many purposes. This section focuses
on three key ones: (1) to answer a question, (2) to produce a
deliverable, and (3) to build community.

Use breakout rooms to answer a question

If you are planning to ask a question that is central to the class you are
teaching and where you think students would benefit from discussing
and reflecting, breakout rooms might be a great tool for you. A typical
pedagogic structure for doing this is within “Think-Pair-Share,” a
collaborative learning strategy widely used in K-12 classrooms.[16] The
name comes from the sequence of the following activities:
Think: You ask the students to think on their own about a particular
question/issue.
Pair: You ask each student to pair with a partner to discuss the
question/issue.
Share: You ask students to share a key insight from their paired
discussion with the whole class.
This technique can be modified in various ways when teaching online.
One of the most powerful ways is to conduct a poll after the “think” part.
If the results of the poll indicate that the class is split, then you proceed
with the “pair” part (See row A of Table 4.4 in chapter 4 for more
details). This combination of polling with “Think-Pair-Share” is
frequently referred to in higher education as “peer instruction,” an
approach popularized by Eric Mazur to teach physics and now widely
used in many other disciplines.
In an online live class, the breakout rooms are used for the “pair” part of
the sequence. You do not need to take the word “pair” literally, as
groups can be larger than just two students. Slightly larger groups can
be useful to minimize the chances of forming groups where everyone in
the group answered the poll in the same way. See “How large should
groups be” section below.

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 In Practice 6.1 – Using breakout rooms to answer a
question
Rebecca Nesson, Associate Dean of the Harvard College
Curriculum, teaches computer science and math courses at
Harvard and uses breakout rooms to ask students to answer a
series of challenging questions. At a recent class, she spent a few
minutes at the beginning of class explaining the material of the day,
and then assigned students to work on three questions. The
students had access to a PDF document with the questions and
discussed them in their groups. Because the subject was math,
and answering the questions involved writing formulas and
equations, students used a variety of tools (including Zoom’s
whiteboard and the latex equation add-on to Google Docs). While
the students worked in groups, Rebecca and her teaching
assistants briefly visited the breakout rooms to monitor the
discussion and to help facilitate the conversation by asking probing
questions. After the breakout rooms ended and the students had
returned to the main room, the class went over the answers to the
three questions, and new questions emerged. It was a very
productive discussion because students had already spent time in
the breakout rooms thinking hard about the questions and trying to
answer them.

Use breakout rooms to produce a deliverable

One potential use of breakout rooms is to ask students to produce a
deliverable, which typically means a shared document, slide, graph, or
sketch. Requiring each breakout group to produce something concrete
focuses their attention on the task at hand, particularly if students know
they might be called on to present their work. It also makes their
learning visible (to you, themselves, and other students), which has
many pedagogical benefits.[17]

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 In Practice 6.2 – Using breakout rooms to produce a
deliverable
Karen Brennan, who teaches several courses on education and
technology at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, uses
breakout rooms in very interesting ways. But before I tell you what
she does, let me set the context for you. Observing Karen teach is
like observing a concert where beautiful music is being played but
the conductor is rarely seen. The students seem to be doing all the
work in class. The casual observer might wonder how the class is
going so well given that Karen seems to be doing so little! But what
you don’t realize until you speak with her and her students is how
much work she and her teaching team have put in before class,
advising and guiding the students individually and in small groups so
that the class can go so well. It just seems like magic!
At a recent class, Karen started the session by asking a group of
students to conduct a presentation about the topic of the day and
explaining the activity that the whole class would be asked to do
during the breakout rooms. Karen and her teaching team had
assigned and briefed this group ahead of time. After this group
finished its presentation, Karen assigned all students to breakout
rooms based on their responses to a pre-class survey, matching
students with similar interests related to that day’s topic. In the
breakout rooms, the groups focused on a clear task and documented
their work on Google Slides (see below if you are interested in
learning how to do this). The students in the group that had
presented at the beginning of class were distributed across the
breakout rooms and acted as facilitators of these discussions. After
the breakout groups ended, each group was asked to present the
slides they had produced in the breakout room to the whole class—
in 2 minutes or less.

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Use breakout rooms to build community
Another potential use of breakout rooms is simply to build community.
This tends to happen anyway when you use breakout rooms for other
purposes, but sometimes you might want to use them primarily for
community building. See chapter 11 for an example.

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6.2 Implementing breakout rooms
A number of questions arise when contemplating the use of breakout
rooms during a live online class. Below are a few of the key questions
with suggested answers. This short video provides a compact overview
of many of the issues discussed below.

How do I assign students to groups?

There are two ways to assign students to groups: randomly or
deliberately. If you assign deliberately, you can do so before class or
during class.

Figure 6.3 – Ways of assigning students to breakout rooms

Assigning randomly is the simplest. It requires no planning. When you

are ready to assign the groups in class, you click on “breakout rooms”
in Zoom’s main bar and then select “automatically” when prompted,
indicate how many groups you want to have, and that’s it. Another
advantage of assigning randomly is that you might get students who
would normally not interact with each other to work together. And if you
use breakout rooms frequently during your course, assigning randomly
might help students get to know many other students in the class (in
contrast to the typical experience in a physical classroom, where
students tend to socialize with other students they know or students
who are sitting next to them).

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Figure 6.4 – Assigning randomly to breakout rooms during class

Assigning deliberately requires a bit more work. If you want to assign

deliberately to breakout rooms, there are two ways of doing so:
uploading a list of students with their respective groups (before or
during class) or assigning students manually (during class). As
explained in the “Tech Tips” section below, I recommend against
uploading the list and in favor of assigning manually. To assign students
to breakout rooms manually during class, see figure below. Assigning
manually can be time-consuming, especially if you have many students.
See “Tech Tips” section below for some possible ways to address this
challenge.

Figure 6.5 – Assigning manually to breakout rooms during class

There are several reasons why you might want to assign students
deliberately to breakout rooms. For example, you might want to have
groups that are working on a project for the course meet during one of

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the breakout room activities in class. Or you might want to assign
students to groups according to their interests or the activities they want
to pursue. To do this, you can conduct a non-anonymous poll (before or
during class) and then assign students according to their poll responses
(see example slide below for how this can be done during class).

Figure 6.6 – Assigning students to groups according to poll response

Independently of whether you assign students randomly or deliberately,

once the assignment is completed, you will get a list of which students
were assigned to which group, and you will be able to rename groups,
reassign individual students to other groups, and tweak some settings
(see figure below). Once you are ready, you click on “Open All Rooms”
and students are immediately sent to their respective breakout rooms.

Figure 6.7 – Screen that shows up after you assign students to groups

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How many students should I assign per group?
For most activities, four to six students per group is ideal. If you use
breakout rooms for answering a question (rather than for producing a
deliverable), groups of two to three students are often fine, especially if
the goal is to quickly discuss the question. In general, groups larger
than six students are not ideal if part of your goal is to have every
student in the group actively contribute. Also keep in mind that the
larger the group, the more time you probably want to allow for breakout
rooms as it’s often harder to coordinate larger groups. Finally, you can
have a maximum number of breakout rooms (somewhere between
twenty and fifty, depending on the number of participants), so if you
have a very large class, take this into account in deciding group size for
breakout rooms.

How long should the breakout room activities be?

One of the main concerns that students report about the use of
breakout rooms is that they are not given enough time to complete the

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assigned task. So my advice is to err on the side of giving too much
time rather than too little, although I recognize that as instructors we
rarely have the luxury of time. The main factors that drive how long
breakout rooms should be is the nature of the task students are asked
to complete, and the number of students in the group. If the breakout
groups are small and their purpose is to answer a question, the
breakout session might be as short as 5 minutes. If it is to produce a
deliverable, the 10-20 minutes range is more appropriate. I have seen
some instructors dedicate as long as 30 minutes to breakout rooms,
which can work if the students in the group are working towards making
progress on an important task for the class or course.
Another factor to take into account in deciding time for breakout rooms
is whether students in the groups are likely to know each other. If they
are, they can probably start to work quickly. But if they have never met,
consider allowing for a little time to introduce themselves and perhaps
discuss an ice-breaking question, as described in chapter 11 on
community building.
Finally, regardless of how much time you assign to the breakout room
activity, there are three things to keep in mind. First, you can set the
time you want the breakout rooms to last before sending students to the
breakout rooms by tweaking the settings (see “Tech Tips” section
below). Second, you can adjust the time designated for breakout rooms
during class if you sense that students are done before time is up or if
you think they need more time. Third, it is probably a good idea to give
students a 3-minute or 5-minute warning before the end time (through
the use of broadcast messaging; see “Tech Tips” section below), so
they know they have to bring the discussion to a close.

What should I do while students are in breakout rooms?

There are several possibilities, including visiting one or more groups to
check in (by clicking on “Join” next to the group name), checking the
work they are producing if you asked them to document it in a place you
can check (e.g., a Google Slide; see “In Practice” examples below),
planning what you will do in class after the breakout room is over, or
simply taking a break!

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What should I do after the breakout rooms end?
In general, it is a good idea to devote some time after the breakout
rooms to build on what the students did during them. A typical activity is
to invite some groups (or individual students) to answer the question
that was posed or present the work that they produced. When you
conduct these activities, make sure that they are adding value beyond
what students did in the breakout rooms. You probably don’t want to
simply ask all groups to report out their answer to the same question,
as this may not be a good use of time. One possible approach is to
build on their answer to address a bigger question – or perhaps the
next question – in your class plan. For example, if they did some
calculation during the breakout room, you can have one student quickly
go over the calculation and then ask what implications that number has
for a decision, or what were the key assumptions underlying the
calculations.

What tools should students use to produce a deliverable during

breakout rooms?
The answer to this question depends on a number of factors, especially
what task(s) you want them to perform. There are a number of
collaborative tools on the web to do different kinds of tasks, but one
strong contender is the Google suite (particularly Google Slides and
Google Docs). One way to use Google Slides during breakout rooms is
to have a Google Slide document for all students in the class, and
assign each group to one slide (or one set of slides) in the document.
To do this, you can create a template slide(s) for one group and
reproduce it for every group in your class.
Using Google Slides in this manner has the following key advantages:
(1) Most students are familiar with the tool, so they don’t have to spend
part of their breakout room time figuring out how to use it; and (2) You
can observe what students are writing in real time. Being able to
monitor the groups’ progress in real time allows you to visit groups that
seem to be making little progress (or send a teaching assistant to do

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so), and to start planning whom to call on once the students come back
from the breakout rooms to the main session. When you call on a
group, you can display their slide (by sharing your screen with the
students; see chapter 8) to provide this visual support when they
present to the whole class. You can then call another group with a
different, contrasting, or complementing view, and generate an
interesting debate or discussion. If you are interested in the use of
Google Slides for breakout rooms, see the section “In Practice” below
for some examples, and the “Tech Tips” section further below for a step-
by-step guide on how to implement this approach.

In Practice 6.3 – Using Google Slides in breakout

rooms
Julie Wilson, a sociologist who teaches at the Harvard Kennedy
School, uses breakout rooms to help prepare groups to contribute to
case discussions. In a recent class where she was teaching about a
social program in Jamaica, she wanted the students to understand
the potential points of failure in the implementation of the program.
She assigned different breakout rooms to represent each of the
stakeholders involved in implementing the program (central
government, local office, schools, etc.) and had each group fill in a
table that identified flows of information, people, and money that
involved the specific stakeholder they were assigned to. See sample
slides below and the companion site for access to the full
presentation.
What is most impressive about Julie’s use of Google Slides is what
she is able to do with what the students are writing during the
breakout sessions. She monitors the slides as they are being written
and identifies which group(s) she wants to participate in the post-
breakout room discussion, based on what they are writing on the
slide and on whether the group contains any students who haven’t
participated much in the course. When students come back from the

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breakout rooms to the main room, she meticulously proceeds to call
on the groups that she selected during her examination of the
Google Slides, and nudges the low-participation students to
contribute to the conversation. In this way, she is able to conduct a
discussion that is both effective and inclusive.

Figure 6.8 – Sample slides used by Julie Wilson for breakout rooms

Note: Each breakout room has its own slide (in the same Google Slide deck); only two
are shown here.
See companion site for details.

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 Tech Tips
What do I do if I don’t see “Breakout Rooms” in my Zoom main toolbar?
If the “Breakout Rooms” feature does not appear on your Zoom bar, you
need to add it. To do so, follow these steps:
Login to your Zoom account using your browser. The web address
(URL) will depend on your institutions’ setting.
On the left navigation bar, click on Settings. See image below.
Click on sub-menu “In Meeting (Advanced)” and scroll down until
you find the item related to breakout rooms. Make sure it is turned
on.

How to assign deliberately to breakout rooms?

As indicated above, there are two ways of assigning deliberately to
breakout rooms. First, you can upload a list of students with their
respective groups before or during class. In practice, this method does
not work so well for several technical reasons. If students register with
an email address different than the one you have in the list you
uploaded, they won’t be sent to the breakout room and they will be left

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in the main room. Furthermore, sometimes students log in with more
than one device to the same session (e.g., if their laptop camera does
not work, they might log on with their laptop to engage in the session
and view the material, and with their smartphone to provide their video
feed), and this causes problems when pre-assigning them to breakout
rooms.
The second way of assigning students deliberately to groups is to do so
manually during class. If you have a small class, this is easy to do. But
if you have a large class, this can be time-consuming. Two possible
solutions you might consider:
It may be helpful if you can designate someone (e.g., a colleague or
a teaching assistant) to do it for you. The way this would work is that
once the session starts, that person can create the breakout rooms
with the students who are in class and according to the list that you
gave them, and once you are ready to assign the breakout rooms,
you ask this person to send the students to their breakout rooms.
This is more effective, because your colleague can do this while you
are conducting class, so the breakout rooms are ready to go when
you decide it is time for this activity.
Ask your students to rename themselves according to their group
number (e.g., “1 – Maria Klinger,” “2 – Ian Sullivan,” etc.). Since
Zoom arranges the participants list in alphabetical order, students
from group 1 will appear at the top, followed by students from group
2, and so on, which makes assigning to breakout rooms much
quicker since the students are already in the right order. This tip is
courtesy of Horace Ling. For instructions on how to rename on
Zoom, please see “Tech Tips” in chapter 10.
I hope that one day Zoom will make it possible to have students self-
select into the groups they want and/or allow the instructor to send
students to different breakout rooms according to how they answered a
poll question.

Who should assign students to breakout rooms?

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Only the host can assign to breakout rooms. This means that if you
want another person (e.g., a teaching assistant, colleague, etc.) to
assign and send students to breakout rooms, this person needs to be
the host of the meeting and assign you as a co-host. If this is not your
default setup, these roles can be reassigned at the beginning of class.
The host is also the person who can broadcast messages to all rooms,
and who can send people (you, a teaching assistant, etc.) to individual
breakout rooms. You can visit several breakout rooms, but only one at a
time.

How do I tweak the settings in breakout rooms?

Once you assign students to breakout rooms, Zoom will show you a
screen that indicates how the students were distributed into the
breakout rooms. If you click on Options, you can tweak a number of
settings. One that I recommend you check is the one that indicates
“Move all participants into breakout rooms automatically,” as this means
that whenever you send students into breakout rooms, they don’t need
to do anything to get there. Otherwise, students need to actively
approve, which often delays the process. The other settings are mostly
a matter of personal preference, but I think leaving the countdown timer
at 60 seconds is probably a good idea as it implies that students will
receive a warning that 60 seconds later they will be automatically
returned to the main room.

Figure 6.9 – Tweaking the settings in breakout rooms

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How do I broadcast a message to students while they are in breakout
rooms?
When students are in breakout rooms, your breakout room dialog box
(click on breakout rooms in the Zoom main bar if you don’t see this
dialog box) will give you the option to broadcast a message. See figure
below.

Figure 6.10 – Broadcasting a message to breakout rooms

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How do I end breakout rooms?
When students are in breakout rooms, your breakout room dialog box
(click on breakout rooms in the Zoom main bar if you don’t see this
dialog box) will give you the option to “Close All Rooms.” See picture
above. Once you click on it, all students will be brought back to the
main room after 60 seconds (or some other specified time if you
tweaked the settings; see “Tweaking the settings in breakout rooms”
above)

How do I produce and use Google Slides for breakout rooms?

See sample checklist below.

Sample checklist for producing and using Google

Slides for breakout rooms
Before class:
❏ Create Google Slide document.
❏ Use initial slides to display instructions and/or reference
material (see sample slide with instructions above).
❏ Create a template slide.
❏ Tables usually work well to guide students on how much
you expect them to write.
❏ Have breakout group number (or name) very visible (e.g., at
the top).
❏ Try to fill in the template as if you were a student (to make
sure it works well).
❏ Once you are happy with the template, reproduce the
template many times so you have a slide for each group,
and change the group number (or name) on each slide.

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❏ Set permissions in Google so that your students can edit the
slides. If you forget to do this, your students will be able to view
the slides when they click on the link, but won’t be able to edit
their group slide(s)!
❏ [Optional] Get a short link (though bit.ly, tinyurl, or a similar
service) so you can more easily share link with the students.
❏ Technical tip: As of the time of writing, Google Docs and Slides
do not work very well when more than a certain number of
people are editing the document at the same time. I was able to
do this well with eleven groups of five students, but it broke
down with twenty groups of five. In this latter case, using two
separate Google Slide decks (one for groups 1-10, and another
for groups 11-20) will do the trick (tip courtesy of Teddy
Svoronos).

During class (before sending students to breakout rooms):

❏ Go over the instruction slide.
❏ Give them the link to the Google Slide document.
❏ Show them the slide(s) you want them to fill in and explain the
task as clearly as possible.
❏ Ask if there are any questions.
❏ Send (or have host send) students to breakout rooms.
❏ Follow general instructions in “Sample checklist for using
breakout rooms” below.

Chapter Summary

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There are a lot of benefits to having students work in small
groups during part of your online live classes.
For this to work well, being explicit about the task you want
students to accomplish (e.g., answer a question, produce a
deliverable, etc.) and the time they have available is crucial.
Consider having students document the work they do in breakout
rooms (through Google Slides, Google Docs, or other
collaborative documents) to make learning visible to you,
themselves, and their classmates.
Following the breakout room with a debrief or discussion is highly
recommended.

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137
Chapter 7 – Share Work
Another way students can engage in a live online class is by sharing
their work with you and their peers. Sharing their work with the class
can have many benefits for your students, including increasing their
level of engagement, fostering a greater sense of accountability, making
their work more visible, developing a greater sense of ownership over
what happens in class, and building a greater sense of a learning
community.
Students sharing their work also has some potential drawbacks. It takes
time away from other activities in your live class, it might make you feel
like you are losing some control over what is happening in your class,
and the experience might end up not being as good as you want for the
student(s) presenting (especially if they have not prepared adequately).
So like everything in teaching (and life), you will want to weigh the
potential advantages against the potential disadvantages when
deciding whether to offer students opportunities to share their work with
the rest of the class. My sense, though, is that most of us employ this
teaching approach too rarely rather than too often, so I will err on the
side of nudging you to consider doing it more often.
The rest of this chapter describes how students can share their work
and a handful of situations in which you might consider them doing so.

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7.1 How students can share their work
Students can share their work on Zoom in several ways, including:
By clicking on “Share Screen” in their Zoom’s main toolbar and
sharing the application or content they want to show. If you are
unfamiliar with the use of “Share Screen” to share content, please
refer to chapter 8.
By having you click on “Share Screen” in your Zoom’s main toolbar
and share the content that your student wants to share. The
students would send you the content in advance (e.g., by emailing
you their PowerPoint presentation) or produce it in a shared space
(e.g., Google Doc, Google Slide, Dropbox file, etc.).
By showing something (sheet of paper, object, artwork) to the class
through their Zoom video feed. In this scenario, it would be best for
you and your students to use the “Speaker View” (instead of the
“Gallery View”) in Zoom.
By performing (e.g., singing, acting, playing an instrument, etc.) “in
front of the class” through their Zoom video feed. In this scenario,
“Speaker View” would also be recommended.
By allowing you or other students to access their computer through
Zoom’s Remote Control feature.

Which of these ways is optimal for your students to share their work will
depend on what they want to share and the specific context.

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7.2 Situations for students to share their work
There are many situations in which students can share their work in a
live online session. This chapter focuses on the following:
Share work they did before class
Share work they did individually during class
Share work they did in groups during class (breakout rooms)
Share work in special events
Share work that requires close examination

Share work they did before class

When you assign students to work outside of class on material that you
think could be useful to examine in your live class, consider asking
them to present this work in class. For example, if you have asked
students to summarize their key takeaways from the previous class or
how they would apply or extend the lessons from last class, you could
begin the class by asking one or two students (or groups) to present
their work in the first 3-5 minutes of class. Another possibility is for you
to ask a student to elaborate upon a particularly interesting comment
they made prior to class (e.g., on the discussion board of your learning
management system), which you could reproduce in one of your slides.
The work to be shared does not necessarily have to come in the form of
presentation slides. For example, your students might show a physical
object (e.g., a rocket ship) they built, go through a spreadsheet in which
they recorded data from an experiment they conducted, or play some
music they created. Whatever it is that you asked them to do outside of
class, think about whether there are ways they can share it (or an
aspect of it) during the live class.
One advantage of asking your students to share work they did before
class is that knowing they might be asked to present publicly in front of
their peers might stimulate them to exert greater effort and creativity
than the traditional assignment submission where you are the only one
who sees their work.

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One question that arises if you ask students to present work they did
before class is whether you should warn ahead of time the specific
student(s) you selected to present. On the one hand, if you don’t
announce which students will be in charge of presenting, it might
encourage all your students to prepare and exert a greater effort in the
work they do outside of class. On the other hand, warning ahead of
time the students who will present will likely lead to better preparation
and a greater chance of a successful presentation.

Share work they did individually during class

At various points in your live class, you could stop the class, ask the
students to do some work individually, and then when you all come
back together as a class you could ask a student to present their work.
For example, in a math class, students could present how they solved a
problem. In a language class, students could read out loud a paragraph
they wrote in response to your prompt. More generally, whatever you
ask students to produce during the time of individual work, think about
ways they could share this with the rest of the class other than
describing it verbally. See “In Practice” session below for an example.

In Practice 7.1 – Using interactive verbal roll to create

community
Kathy Pham is a computer scientist whose work has spanned
Google, IBM, and the federal government at the United States Digital
Service at the White House, where she was a founding product and
engineering member. She teaches a course on Product
Management and Society at the Harvard Kennedy School. At a
recent online live class, she paused the class and asked her
students to spend a few minutes individually developing a prototype
of a food delivery app. She gave the students a few minutes to do
this with pen and paper, and then called on a few students to present
what they had come up with. The students presented their work by

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showing their sheet of paper and pointing to the various app
“screens” that they had developed. It was a very simple way of
sharing and led to a very interesting discussion about principles of
product design. See picture below.

Figure 7.1 – A student shows the rest of the class a prototype of the
app she designed

Note: Student in the picture gave permission to publish this image.

Share work they did in breakout rooms

As indicated in the previous chapter, breakout rooms work best when
students have a clear task at hand, and they feel that doing this task

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well makes a difference. One way to accomplish this is to have some
students present the work they did during the breakout rooms. If they
produced a deliverable (e.g., Google Slide), they could present it during
class, and you could probe on some of the aspects of the work that you
think are helpful to advance your learning goals for that live class
session. See chapter 6 for more details on the use of breakout rooms.

Share work in a special event

Some special events traditionally done in person are now being done in
live online sessions. For example, in the context of a class or academic
program, you might have a celebratory event (e.g., commencement,
graduation, etc.) happening online. One way in which the event could
become more meaningful to participants is if they can share something
about their overall experience (e.g., what it meant to them, their key
lessons learned, etc.). See “In Practice” below for an example.

In Practice 7.2 – Allowing students to share in a special

event
Anna Shanley and Maddie Meister work in executive education at
the Harvard Kennedy School. In the closing session for one of the
online programs they recently directed, they asked participants to
produce one slide per group indicating one way in which their
thinking had changed as a result of the program and one thing they
were grateful for. They had shared this slide before the closing
session using Google Slides, which made the logistics much easier.
During the live online ceremony, each group took one minute to
present their slide before receiving their (virtual) certificate of
completion. By participating in this way, I think the ceremony was
more personal and meaningful for the participants than the typical in-
person experience. See sample slide below.

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Figure 7.2 – Sample slide for certificate ceremony of executive
education program at the Harvard Kennedy School

Note: Group member names have been changed to protect confidentiality of

participants.

Share work that requires close examination

Sometimes students produce work that requires closer examination
than what is possible to do by simply seeing a slide or object being
presented. In these cases, you might benefit from the ability to see and
change what is in the computer of one of your students. For example, if
a student wrote a computer program, they might benefit from seeing
how you make changes to improve or debug their code. Zoom’s
“Remote Control” feature allows one participant to take over control of
another participant’s computer. They both have to consent, and they
can stop sharing at any time. See “In Practice” session below for an
example. The companion site has instructions for how to use the
“Remote Control” feature in Zoom.

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 In Practice 7.3 – Using Remote-Screen to have
students share their work
At a Liberal Arts Remote Teaching webinar in March 2020, Ella
Foster-Molina (Swarthmore College) and Jingchen (Monika) Hu
(Vassar College) described how they have used remote sharing in
their teaching. Hu uses it to help students debug their computer code
in her data science course. One of her students gives her access to
their computer and she can explore the student’s code, fix a portion
of the code by typing new code, and run the code again. See picture
below. Foster-Molina also uses remote learning and thinks there are
a number of circumstances where it simulates in-person interactions
very well, but warns that “it should only be done if all of the parties
involved are completely comfortable with a variety of privacy,
autonomy, and safety concerns with looking at somebody else’s
screen and being able to actually control it.” The companion site has
a link to the webinar where they presented this work.

Figure 7.3 – Jingchen (Monika) Hu (Vassar College) uses Remote

Control to help debug computer code produced by her students

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 Chapter Summary
There are many benefits to having your students share their work
in front of you and their peers.
These benefits will of course need to be weighed against the
benefits of doing other things in the live class. Time is limited.
Your students can share work in a variety of situations, including:
Share work they did before class
Share work they did individually during class
Share work they did in groups during class (in breakout rooms)
Share work in special events
Share work that requires close examination
Whenever you ask students to produce work, think about the
potential benefits of having some of them present this work in a
live class session and the ways in which this can be done most
effectively.

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147
 PART III – WAYS YOU ENGAGE

This part describes how you, as the instructor, can engage in a live
session beyond the ways implied in part II, which focused on how
students themselves could engage (by speaking, voting, writing,
working in groups, and sharing work). Chapter 8 assumes you have
content (such as slides, written material, videos, or websites) that you
want to present to your students. It explains various ways you can
present this “pre-constructed” material. Chapter 9 assumes that you
would like to “construct” during the live class session part (or all) of the
material you present, in the form of annotating pre-existing materials
(e.g., by writing or typing on a slide) or writing or drawing from scratch
(e.g., by writing on a physical or electronic whiteboard). Since chapter 9
builds on chapter 8, I suggest reading chapter 8 first.

Chapter You can (ask Key Zoom tool(s)

students to):

8 Present Hardware: Computer

Software: Presentation software
(e.g., PowerPoint, Keynote, Google
Slides, etc.), Web browser (e.g.,
Chrome), Video Player
Zoom Tools: Share screen, Zoom
backgrounds

9 Annotate Hardware: Computer, tablet,

document camera, physical
blackboard, flipchart

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Software: Presentation software
(e.g., PowerPoint, Keynote, Google
Slides, etc.)
Zoom Tools: Share screen,
Whiteboard

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150
Chapter 8 – Present
During a live online session, you may want to present to your students
material that you prepared prior to class, such as slides, written
material, videos, and websites. This chapter explains how to present
this kind of “pre-constructed” material on Zoom, with a particular
emphasis on slides.
You present material in Zoom by sharing your screen using Zoom’s
main toolbar. Once you do so, you can share content from a number of
sources, including:
A specific application (e.g., PowerPoint, Google Chrome, etc.)
Zoom’s Whiteboard feature
Video from a secondary camera (e.g., document camera,
smartphone, etc.)
iPhone/iPad screen
Audio from your speaker

Zoom shows you the sources that it can share in a dialog box. Notice
that for an application to show in Zoom’s dialog box, it has to be open
on your computer. So if you plan to present from an application (e.g.,
PowerPoint), make sure that this application is open before you click on
“Share Screen” in Zoom’s main toolbar.

Figure 8.1 – Presenting material through the “Share Screen” feature in

Zoom’s main toolbar

Figure 8.2 – Using Zoom’s “Share Screen” dialog box to share an

application on your computer

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This chapter focuses on how to share your presentation slides, as this
is the main type of pre-constructed material used by most instructors.
The chapter ends with instructions on how to present two other types of
materials: videos and internet browser pages.
Before we delve into how to present slides (or similar material), a word
of warning which reinforces some of the pedagogic principles
underlying this book: presenting slides for a long time without engaging
directly with the students is unlikely to effectively stimulate their
learning. This is true in a physical classroom and even more so in a
virtual classroom, where you have little control over what students are
doing while you engage in your presentation. Remember the mantra
from Doyle[18]: “The one who does the work does the learning.” When
you present your slides, you are the one doing the work, so think about
your presentation in the service of stimulating other activities in class
that help your students learn and engage. Think about constantly
engaging your students in doing some of the work. If this has not
happened in your class for more than 5-10 minutes, it might be time to
pause and get them to engage.
Finally, when presenting slides, remember to follow principles for
preparing, designing, and delivering good presentations. These

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principles are beyond the scope of this book, but the companion site
has a few useful references.

.1 Presenting your slides

How do I present my slides?
If you simply want to show a presentation to your students, the easiest
way to do this is to “Share Screen” in Zoom’s main toolbar and then
double click on the icon corresponding to your presentation software
(e.g., PowerPoint, Keynote, etc.). Once you do so, Zoom will signal that
you are sharing this application by placing a border on your
presentation software. For all of this to work, make sure that your
presentation software is open before you click on “Share Screen” (so
that it appears as one of your options in Zoom’s Share Screen dialog
box). For reasons explained in the “Tech Tips” section below, I suggest
you share your slides using the icon corresponding to your presentation
software (e.g., PowerPoint) and not the icon corresponding to your
desktop; this item might be called “Desktop” or “Screen” depending on
the version of Zoom you have.

Figure 8.3 – Sharing a PowerPoint presentation with your students

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 Select PowerPoint icon in Share Screen.

Your PowerPoint “Window” will then be shared with your students.

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After you share your screen, others in your Zoom session will see
whatever is happening on that screen (e.g., presentation goes into slide
show mode, you advance a slide, you write on a slide, etc.) until you
click on “Stop Share”.

Should I share my slides all the time?

When you share your slides, your students’ screens change quite a bit
to accommodate the slides. The table below shows how their screen
typically changes; the particularities will depend on your students’
preferences and device setup, but two things emerge: (1) Your slides
occupy a lot of the students’ screens, and (2) their attention is likely to
deviate from you to the slides. In other words, the moment you share
your slides, they are likely to take over a large share of your students’
screen and attention. While this is also the case when you teach in a
physical classroom, the change is more dramatic in a virtual classroom
where your image is relegated to a small square on a screen dominated
by your slides.

Figure 8.4 – How your students’ screens change when you share your
slide
Your students’ screen before you share

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 Your students’ screen after you share

Given these facts, some faculty colleagues I have spoken with

recommend a judicious use of slides. One of them advised using slides
“only when absolutely necessary.” Others have developed interesting
ways to present material without having slides take over their students’
screens. See “In Practice” below for some innovative solutions.
Finally, also note that when you share your presentation, it will take over
a large part of your own screen. For this reason, some instructors like to
use two monitors: one to look at their students’ video feeds and other
items (e.g., the participants list, the chat window, etc.), and the second
one to look at the slides being presented. A second monitor occupies
additional space on your desk and costs money, but if you plan to
present slides or other material through Zoom and can get access to a
second monitor, I highly recommend doing so. Preserving the ability to
look at your students while you present enables you to see how they
are responding to your presentation, including how attentive they are,
and a second monitor makes it much easier to do this. The “Tech Tips”
section at the end of this chapter has more details on the use of two
monitors.

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 In Practice 8.1 – Presenting slides without sacrificing
screen real estate: High tech edition
Mitch Weiss teaches entrepreneurship courses at the Harvard
Business School and has a creative way of presenting slides without
crowding his students’ screens. For his case discussions, he uses
two sets of PowerPoint slides. The first set is used in a traditional
style where the slides occupy half of his students’ screens. He uses
Zoom’s Share Screen feature to show them these slides, and
annotates by typing on the slide (see next chapter). The second set
of slides are ones that don’t have as much information and are
typically there to help set the context and have a conversation. When
he is presenting these latter slides, he wants students to focus on
him and each other more than the slides. So instead of sharing the
screen, he sets the slide as a Zoom background (see “Tech Tips”
section below for how to do this) and the resulting effect is similar to
when a TV news anchor is broadcasting from a studio. He also uses
this technique when he asks students to answer non-anonymous
polls. See pictures below.

Figure 8.5 – Presenting slides as Zoom background

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 Mitch Weiss presents contextual slides as Zoom background

Mitch Weiss presents slide with poll instructions as Zoom background

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 In Practice 8.2 – Presenting slides without sacrificing
screen real estate: Low tech edition
Renee Loth, a distinguished journalist and opinion columnist for the
Boston Globe, teaches communication courses at the Harvard
Kennedy School. At a recent workshop, she was teaching a session
titled “The ABC’s of Op-Ed Writing” to a group of students. As she
was launching her session, she brought into her video feed a simple
prop that spelled out the ABC’s of the op-ed form. She then started
explaining each of the three key ingredients. Since it was the only
“slide” she presented in the workshop, the students had an easy way
of associating her with the prop, and she was able to command their
attention throughout the segment where she discussed each of the
three key ingredients, creating a memorable learning experience.
See picture below.

Figure 8.6 – Renee Loth uses prop to present material to her students

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Should I send my slides to the students before class?
You might consider sending the slides (or making them available) to
your students before class so they can have access to them during
class. In this way, your students can print the slides or put them on a
tablet to take notes during class, or simply display them on a second
monitor if they have one available. Giving students access to the slides
before class also means that they can refer to a slide that you have
previously shown if they want some clarification or need to remember
something, or to a slide you have not yet presented if they want to look
ahead to what’s coming. Because of this, if you decide to send the
slides to your students before class, you probably want to eliminate
from the version you send them any slide that is meant to provide an
element of surprise or an answer to a question that you want students
to engage with.
One concern with students having the slides during your session is that
they might get distracted. I can see this point, but there are many other
things they can get distracted with in an online learning environment. I
think a well-designed set of slides (with space for note-taking) has more
potential to help students focus than to distract them. For this reason, I
favor making slides available to students before class, although I
recognize that this is a personal preference.

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8.2 Sharing video
Sometimes you might want students to view a video to amplify a class
lesson. Just as in a physical classroom, when deciding whether to play
a video or not, consider your pedagogic goals. Is this a video that
students could watch before or after class instead of during class? If
you are considering showing it during class, what makes this video an
activity that benefits from everyone watching together at the same
time? For example, perhaps you want students to share their immediate
reaction, or the video is best understood only after you have taught
some lessons in class and it sets up the class to learn a different
lesson. If you can’t think of a key reason to display the video in class,
you can often save valuable class time by having students view it
before or after class. See chapter 10 for more details on how to decide
what parts of your content can be reserved for outside of class.
To share a video on Zoom, you follow a similar process to sharing a
slide. You first select “Share Screen” from Zoom’s main toolbar. Then
you select the source you want to share from. This could, for example,
be a video player (e.g., Quicktime) playing a file you have on your
computer or a video from the internet (e.g., YouTube) that you want to
play from your internet browser. A key difference when sharing a video
that includes audio content (as opposed to sharing slides) is that you
also need to click on some settings to optimize video and sound sharing
(see picture below), and then click share. I recommend opening the
application from which you plan to play the video and having it ready to
go (i.e., at the exact point you want the video to start playing) before
class. This enables you to start playing the video quickly during class. It
is also a good idea to ask students whether they can see and hear well.

Figure 8.7 – Sharing a video that will play from an internet browser

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If you are worried about the quality of the video or sound degrading
when transmitted over the Zoom meeting, an alternative is to type into
the chat a link to a video file that students can play on their computer,
and then resume class discussion after the elapsed video time has
passed and students have watched it.

.3 Sharing resources from an internet browser

Sometimes you may simply want to share resources available on your
internet browser (a website, a video, an audio clip, etc.). This is
especially useful if you want to visually show how to do something on
the web or if you want to present work that students have done using
collaborative software (e.g., Google Slides, Google Docs, etc.) as
described in chapter 6 (“Work in groups”). One advantage of presenting
from a browser is that you can switch what you are presenting easily by
simply navigating from one browser tab to another. To share from an
internet browser using Zoom, you can use the same process to share a
video described in the section above.

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 Tech Tips
Sharing your desktop
When you press “Share Screen” you will have the option to share
your computer desktop. It is the first item you see in Zoom’s Share
Screen dialog box (it might be called “Desktop” or “Screen”
depending on the version of Zoom you have). Doing so means that
Zoom will share whatever is on your computer desktop while you
are sharing. This has the advantage that if you are planning to
present from two or more applications (e.g., PowerPoint and your
internet browser), you can quickly change what students are seeing
by simply switching the application that is active on your screen.
Otherwise, you need to stop sharing one application (e.g.,
PowerPoint) and start sharing the other one (e.g., your internet
browser). You can also display the applications side by side (though
beware that your students might have a small monitor, which will
make it hard for them to read these well).
The key disadvantage of sharing your computer desktop is that you
might forget that you are sharing, and inadvertently share things that
you are not intending to share. For example, I have heard
colleagues tell stories of inadvertently sharing a personal email that
they were quickly checking, a list of students that they wanted to call
on, etc. For this reason, my recommendation is not to share your
computer desktop unless you have very strong reasons to do so,
and you trust that you can remember not to open on your desktop
any files that are not meant for students to see. Instead, as
described above, share the application you want students to see
(e.g., Powerpoint, Keynote, etc.). My other recommendation is that if
at any point during your Zoom class you are unsure of what is being
shared, stop sharing and then share again.

Using two monitors

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 To optimally use two monitors in Zoom, you need to “enable dual
monitors” in the Zoom settings. The companion site has a link that
explains how to do this for both Windows and Mac computers.
Enabling dual monitors allows for gallery view, speaker view, shared
screen, chat, and participants list to show in different windows. This
feels like a much better experience than having a second monitor
for more room without dual monitors enabled.
If you are using two monitors and share PowerPoint from one of
your desktops, the default is for PowerPoint to take over your two
monitors (one in presenter mode, which has your slides and notes,
and the other one in slide show mode, which displays the slides that
students see). This implies no space to see your students. I think
there are two ways to deal with this problem:
First, you can present PowerPoint from a tablet (e.g., iPad,
Microsoft Surface, etc.), by connecting the tablet to your computer
and sharing its output via Zoom’s “Share Screen” feature.
Second, you can go to PowerPoint’s “Slide Show” Menu, click on
“Set up Show,” change settings to “Browse by an individual
(window)” and to advancing slides manually. See figure below and
companion site for details. If you are using Keynote, I am not
aware of a solution analogous to this second one. If you use
Google Slides, this problem does not exist.

Figure 8.8 – Changing settings in PowerPoint so that it does not take

over the two monitors when you present

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 Note that if you have two monitors, they will appear as Desktop 1
and Desktop 2 (or Screen 1 and Screen 2, depending on your
version of Zoom) in your share dialog box. You could share either of
them (though as I indicated above, I don’t recommend sharing
computer desktops).
When you use two monitors, it can take a little while to get used to
how the windows are distributed across the two monitors when you
share and stop sharing your screen. Practice and try to customize
your setup so that you are comfortable. This will minimize the need
to move lots of windows while you are teaching.

Presenting using an external device

If you plan to present using an additional device (e.g., iPad,
Microsoft Surface, etc.), I suggest connecting that device to your
computer by cable and then using Zoom’s “Share Screen” feature,
rather than using any of the other alternative methods (see below).
Alternative 1: Some people connect that additional device by
logging into Zoom as a separate user on that device, and
therefore have two users connected into Zoom (one from the main

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 computer and one from the additional device). This means you
have two devices using bandwidth on your internet network, which
could lead to lower overall quality.
Alternative 2: Some people try to connect the iPad through
AirPlay. I have found that this connection is not very stable when
you have many students, and therefore recommend connecting
the iPad through a physical cable to your main computer (and
then sharing its screen by using Zoom’s “Share Screen” feature
and clicking on “iPhone/iPad via cable”).

Using slides as Zoom background

Before explaining how to show a slide behind you in Zoom like Mitch
Weiss does, a few words of warning:
Depending on the processing power of your computer, using a
Zoom background might slow down your computer, and create
other challenges for you.
For most people, having a virtual background creates some
strange effects in the way your image is displayed on the video
feed. In particular, your movement is sometimes not well captured
when you have a virtual background. You can test this to see
whether or not this is a problem for you.
While you can address some of these challenges with lighting,
equipment (e.g., computer, green screen, etc.), and other things,
be aware that for most people some of these issues are likely to
persist.
This is not a reason not to use virtual backgrounds, but a warning
to be aware of some of the limitations and a word of advice to use
virtual backgrounds deliberately.
Given the above, my advice is to experiment with one slide before
investing too much time with this approach.
In order to show a slide behind you in Zoom like Mitch Weiss does,
the following steps are involved (see companion site for more
details):
Create the slide(s) in your preferred software (e.g., PowerPoint,
Keynote, etc.). When you do so, most of the slide should be left

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 blank (remember that your face will be in front of most of the slide
when you present it). Because this process involves some trial
and error, follow the next two steps below for a single slide, and
you can come back to create additional slides once you have the
right template that works in your setting.
Save the slide as an image (e.g., PNG). How to do this depends
on the software you are using. For example, in PowerPoint for
Windows, select File > Save As and then select PNG from the
“Save As Type” dropdown menu. In PowerPoint for Mac, select
File > Export.
Join a Zoom Meeting, and add one or more slides to your list of
virtual backgrounds by clicking on the arrow next to “Stop Video”
on the main Zoom bar, selecting “Choose Virtual Background…”,
and the plus sign (+), and then find the PNG file on your
computer. See image below. If you don’t see the option of
“Choose Virtual Background,” it might mean that you need to
enable it. See companion site for instructions on how to do this.
Once you are in class and want to select a slide as a virtual
background, follow the previous step but instead of hitting the plus
sign (+), click on the image corresponding to the slide that you
want to display as your virtual background. If you plan to use
several slides as your virtual background, you might want to leave
the dialog box open so that you don’t have to open it every time
you need to switch your background slide.

Figure 8.9 – Adding a virtual background in Zoom

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 Chapter Summary
You can use Zoom to present slides, videos, pages on your
internet browser, and pretty much anything on your computer.
Remember that presenting slides for a long time without having
students actively engage in their learning is unlikely to be
effective. Plan for interaction every few minutes of class.
Be aware that the moment you share your slides, they are likely
to take over a large share of your students’ screen and attention.
So do so judiciously, and consider not sharing your slides in
segments of the class where you don’t need them.
When presenting, try to keep your eyes on your students rather
than on your slides. If you have access to a second monitor, this
goal becomes easier to achieve.

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Chapter 9 – Annotate
If you use a blackboard, whiteboard, smartboard, document camera, or
similar device when you teach in a physical classroom, you are
probably used to the idea of annotating. I use the term “annotating” in a
broad sense to include:
Writing or drawing on a blank page/canvas/board
Writing notes (by hand or typed) on an existing document (e.g.,
slide, text, diagram, etc.)
Drawing a diagram, graph, or visual on an existing document
Underlining, highlighting, or circling words on an existing document
Annotating to explain your ideas or record student comments can make
your live online classes much more dynamic, engaging, and effective. In
this chapter, I describe different ways to integrate the practice of
annotating into your teaching – and then some ways of annotating with
Zoom. As you look them over, I suggest you keep these guidelines in
mind:
Before choosing any of these tools, test-drive a few of them.
Each has its own upsides and downsides, and it’s important to
choose a tool that works for you. For example, if you simply want a
blank canvas to write on, using a physical flipchart or Zoom’s native
whiteboard tool might be enough, whereas if you want to write on
your slides, using a tablet or document camera will be preferable.
Before using any of these tools with your students, try them
out first on a friend, colleague, or family member. Have
someone (ideally more than one person using different types of
devices) play the role of the student. Set up a Zoom meeting with
them, and have them see and do exactly what your students would
see and do. Try out all the tools you might use with your students.
For example, if you plan to use a flipchart, have your friend in the
Zoom meeting check that they can see the whole surface of the
flipchart and can read your handwriting! The feedback you get will
be priceless, and even small adjustments will make a big difference
in your ability to use the tool successfully.

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172
9.1 Different ways to integrate annotation into your teaching
You can use annotation to explain your ideas and/or to capture your
students’ ideas.

Annotating to explain ideas

A common goal of annotating is simply to explain or highlight ideas that
you are presenting to the students. If you write on a board when you
teach in a physical classroom, you are used to the idea of writing as a
part of the process of explaining your ideas. Similarly, if you use a
document camera or a smartboard, you are used to the idea of having a
document or visual on which you can then write, draw, underline, and
highlight.

Annotating to capture and make student comments visible

If you step into a typical case discussion in a classroom at the Harvard
Business School (HBS), you will see the professor constantly
interrogating the students on various aspects of the case, and writing
the various student responses on one of the nine boards available in
most HBS classrooms. The instructor breaks the discussion into
different segments (called “pastures”) and typically devotes a board (or
two) to each pasture. In preparing for class, HBS faculty members are
known to be meticulous in deciding what questions they will ask the
students, what they will write on each board, how they will transition
from one board to another, and how the boards should broadly look like
at the end of class. The latter is called a “board plan” and it forms part
of their teaching plans. It is very impressive.
While the majority of us don’t plan how we will annotate student
comments in class with this level of detail, there is something very
powerful about being able to write down the essence of what students
are saying – whether on a blackboard, a Google Slide, or on a tablet.
Doing so conveys the notion that learning in your class is a collective
enterprise and that students are expected to learn from you but also
from each other. Students feel heard, are encouraged to contribute to
class, and get more actively engaged in their education. They do not

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see themselves as passive receivers of knowledge, but rather as active
creators of their own learning experience. Finally, when you write down
the essence of what students are saying, you make their learning
visible, and can refer back to some of what you wrote at various points
in class to underscore or highlight key ideas.
As with every other aspect of teaching, being deliberate about what you
want to accomplish is key. Whatever method you use for recording
student comments, it might be helpful to prepare templates that set the
structure for your note-taking. This is particularly important in the
context of an online live class, where you will tend to be more
constrained in terms of physical space. And you don’t have to adopt a
full HBS teaching style to benefit from this approach. You could decide
that for a given segment of class, you will ask students a question (or
set of questions) and write their answers in a place that is visible to the
whole class.

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9.2 Key question: Annotate by hand or by typing?
There are many hardware and software options to annotate during a
Zoom class. A key decision that drives which annotating setup works
best for you is whether you want to annotate by hand or by typing.
While this is a matter of personal preference, the following guidelines
might help you decide. Annotating by hand gives you more flexibility in
terms of how you use the space, feels more natural to some instructors
(and to some students), and you can more quickly produce a wider
range of output (words, diagrams, underlining, highlighting, etc.).
Annotating by typing typically leads to more legible and better-looking
output, and does not require an additional device or piece of equipment.
Finally, annotating by hand is not a great idea if your handwriting is hard
to read, and annotating by typing is probably not a good idea if you type
slowly like me. The table below summarizes the options I recommend
you consider for each of the two ways of annotating.

Table 9.1 – Options to consider for annotating by hand vs. typing

Way of Key tools to annotate Cost Learning

annotating curve

By hand Physical blackboard, $ Low

whiteboard, or flipchart

Document camera to capture $$ Medium

handwriting on paper

Smartphone to act as a - Medium

document camera

Tablet (e.g., iPad, Microsoft $$$ High

Surface, etc.)

Typing Zoom’s native whiteboard - Medium

feature

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 Presentation software (e.g., - Low
PowerPoint, Google Slides)

Adapted with permission from document “Options for Virtual Board Work” produced by
Ian Tosh and Kristin Sullivan for the Harvard Kennedy School. Cost column assumes
that you don’t already own the hardware (or have access to it), except for smartphone
option.

Annotating by hand
There are many options for annotating by hand, including:
(1) Writing on a physical blackboard, whiteboard, or flipchart located
behind you
(2) Writing on a sheet of paper on your desk and capturing output
using a document camera, your smartphone, or a similar device
(3) Writing on a tablet

(1) Writing on a physical blackboard, whiteboard, or flipchart located

behind you
If you are accustomed to using a blackboard or whiteboard to teach,
you can continue doing so if you can adjust to what will likely be a more
spatially constrained environment (like your home or office). I confess
that I was skeptical about this approach being effective until I saw some
instructors using it successfully. And if you can teach an online live
session from a physical classroom, you might be able to use technology
to provide your students with an experience that resembles being in a
classroom. See “In Practice” examples below.

In Practice 9.1 – Annotating with a flipchart from home

Rem Koning teaches strategy courses at the Harvard Business
School and uses a flipchart to annotate what his students say in

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response to his questions. His choice of using a flipchart is very
deliberate. “The minute you share a slide in Zoom with the students,
all their attention goes to the slide,” he says. So he uses slides only
occasionally. Most of the time what you see is him in front of a
flipchart, alternating between asking questions and writing students’
responses on the flipchart. Since the flipchart offers much less space
than what he has available in a physical classroom, he is much more
deliberate and constrained in what he annotates. He writes with a
black marker but occasionally uses color markers to highlight key
ideas. Once he finishes a segment of the discussion, he moves to
the next segment and flips onto a blank page on the flipchart. In one
session, Rem wanted to highlight the importance of the founder to a
firm’s success, so at that point in the discussion he taped a picture of
the founder on the flipchart, which I believe made the point very
memorable for his students. Rem is used to teaching in a classroom
with nine boards, so if he can adjust to the space constraints of a
flipchart, we all can! See pictures below.

Figure 9.1 – Rem Koning using a flipchart in a strategy class at Harvard

Business School
Annotating in two columns of a flipchart

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 Taping a picture on top of a flipchart

In Practice 9.2 – Using a blackboard in a classroom

Steven J. Miller teaches mathematics at Williams College. He has
taught courses where Williams College students are physically
present with him in the classroom, while students from other liberal
arts colleges (e.g., Swarthmore, Vassar, etc.) join in remotely. This is
a common practice among small liberal arts colleges that want to
expand the number of courses available to their students. In these
classes, he uses technology that allows the camera to track him in
the classroom while he writes on the board (if you are interested, see
the companion site for an article describing the technology he uses).
So far, he has mostly used asynchronous recordings of his classes
to address two issues (students in colleges with different calendars,
and students that want to take two courses on the same time block).
He also considers recording as a valuable asset for students who

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have to miss class or for others who want to watch a portion of class
again.
While you might anticipate being restricted to a small
blackboard/whiteboard while teaching online from your home,
Steven’s example suggests that it might be feasible to use a full-
sized blackboard in a live online class if you can get access to a
classroom. At a webinar of liberal arts colleges, he commented on
the use of a blackboard as one of the ways an instructor can
annotate, noting, “I look at Zoom as a way to help facilitate
conversations. Depending on what you are doing, different things will
probably work better for you. Just be open to exploring.” See picture
below.

Figure 9.2 – Steven J. Miller teaches from a physical classroom and

posts recording of class for students who cannot attend the live class

Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NgHIiZUYI6g&feature=youtu.be

(2) Writing on a sheet of paper on your desk and capturing output using
a document camera, your smartphone, or similar device
If you love the feeling of writing with a pen on a piece of paper, you
might consider doing so to capture your students’ comments and

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sharing these comments with them using a document camera,
smartphone, or similar device. One advantage of this setup is that you
can use a blank page but also a printed page or slide, or even a page
from a newspaper or magazine. You can then use a pen to write,
highlight, annotate, underline, etc. This makes it a very flexible system.
Two things to keep in mind as you consider this option are:
(1) It requires having space on your desk to write and to put the
equipment.
(2) Anything you put under the camera will show up (i.e., you cannot
be self-conscious about your hands!).

In Practice 9.3 – Annotating by using a document

camera or similar device
Shoshanna Kostant, a teacher at Brookline High School in
Massachusetts, uses a document camera to teach math. She
sometimes has a solved-out math problem pre-written on a sheet of
paper, and hides some of the content of that page by placing a blank
sheet of paper on top of part of the original sheet. As she explains
how to solve the problem, she progressively slides down her cover
sheet revealing more of the content of the original sheet. This allows
her to scaffold the learning for her students in a very simple way.
Moreover, when she gets to a part of the problem that she wants her
students to try solving, she pauses the class, gives her students
some time to think, and then asks them to privately chat their
answer. She then calls on a student and progressively continues
sliding the cover down to make visible the solution to that part of the
problem. See picture below. On other occasions, instead of having
the math problem already solved, she just has the question pre-
written and then writes the answer as a student reveals it verbally.

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Figure 9.3 – Shoshanna Kostant scaffolding the learning of her students
by sliding down cover page on top of a solved math problem

Figure 9.4 – Shoshanna Kostant’s setup with a document camera

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You can also use your smartphone as a document camera. For this to
work, you need to place your phone in a way that it films the sheet of
paper where you are writing. And you need to install an app on your
phone that allows Zoom to recognize that your phone is acting as an
additional camera in your computer. See “Tech Tips” section below for
details. The advantage of using the document camera is that it is a
device designed specifically for this use. The disadvantage is that it
occupies space on your desk and is more expensive than using your
existing smartphone (assuming you have one).

(3) Writing on a tablet

The most flexible option for annotating by hand is to write on a tablet. If
you already use a tablet with an electronic pen (e.g., Apple pencil for an
iPad, stylus for Microsoft Surface, etc.), this is probably an attractive

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option for you. The reason this method is so flexible is that you can
essentially share anything on your tablet with the students. This means
you can use whatever software you are comfortable with to write your
students’ comments. For example, both PowerPoint and Keynote allow
you to handwrite on your slides while they are presented on a tablet,
which provides you the benefits of modern presentation software along
with the flexibility of being able to handwrite on your slides. You can
also use software that is more specifically designed for note-taking,
such as Microsoft OneNote, Notability, GoodNotes, and others. Finally,
you can also use a tablet to write using Zoom’s native whiteboard
feature.

In Practice 9.4 – Using a tablet to annotate

Teddy Svoronos uses an iPad to teach quantitative methods at the
Harvard Kennedy School. He imports a PDF of his class handout to
an app called GoodNotes, which he uses to project the PDF and
annotate it during class. As he asks questions to students and they
reply, he annotates his handout with their answers. He also uses the
pen to underline important parts of a table, highlight sections of the
output he wants his students to pay special attention to, etc. The
students are seeing their input reflected in how the handout is
annotated, and he is grounding what might otherwise be an abstract
conversation by reflecting what is being said on the handout.

Figure 9.5 – Teddy Svoronos displays a PDF and annotates it based on

input from his students.

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Annotating by typing
As indicated before, the two key tools for annotating by typing are:
(1) Zoom’s native whiteboard feature
(2) A document on your computer in your preferred software (e.g.,
PowerPoint, Google Docs, Google Slides, Microsoft OneNote,
Microsoft Word, etc.)

(1) Zoom’s native whiteboard feature

A simple way of annotating what students are saying is to type into a
document. You can do this by using Zoom’s native whiteboard feature.
This feature is fairly basic at the moment, but it has the advantage that
it is integrated into Zoom. So everything happens within Zoom. To use
the whiteboard, you simply click on “Share Screen” and select the
“Whiteboard” icon.

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Figure 9.6 – Activating Zoom’s whiteboard feature through “Share
Screen”

Once you are in the whiteboard, you press “Text” and locate the text
box wherever you want on the canvas and start typing. You can also
draw and use some of the other options available. If you plan to draw or
handwrite using Zoom’s whiteboard feature, I recommend connecting a
tablet to do this (see “Tech Tips” section below).

Figure 9.7 – Using Zoom’s native whiteboard to type text

Finally, one advantage of the whiteboard is that your students can also
contribute to the output at the same time, though if more than a few
students are contributing it can get unwieldy. If you prefer, you can
change a setting in Zoom to disable the ability of students to annotate.

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(2) Typing on a document in your computer
A more robust option for typing notes during class is to prepare a blank
document (e.g., PowerPoint, Keynote, Google Slides, Google Docs,
etc.) and show it to students (via “Share Screen”) during class while you
type and fill it in. If you do this, it might be helpful to prepare templates
that set the structure for your notetaking and allows you to more easily
type exactly where you want on the page. See “In Practice” below for
an example of how to do this with PowerPoint.

In Practice 9.5 – Annotating by typing on PowerPoint

Mitch Weiss teaches entrepreneurship courses at the Harvard
Business School (HBS) and uses PowerPoint to annotate what his
students say in response to his questions. He has a few slides with
text boxes that allow him to quickly decide where he wants to type
the comment that the student is making. A key to making this work is
to design the note-taking slides in a very intentional way so that he
quickly knows where to type the notes. When he is presenting to his
students, his PowerPoint presentation is on “Normal” Mode (i.e., not
on “Slide Show” mode), so he can type on a slide, and with the
sidebar minimized so the slide is as large as possible and so
students cannot see later slides. See picture below.
Mitch uses “Share Screen” to share these slides with students at
times, but when he wants students to see more of each other (rather
than the slides), he continues taking notes in the slides but stops
sharing his screen. Throughout the class, he smoothly moves in and
out of “Screen Share” mode to allow students to alternate between
seeing him and each other (“Screen Share” is off) and seeing the
slides he is typing in (“Screen Share” is on).

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Figure 9.8 – Mitch Weiss inputs student comments by typing into
PowerPoint slides

The advantage of using a collaborative solution like Google Slides or

Google Docs to record student input is that the students themselves
can type the comments directly into the shared document, which makes
note-taking a more collaborative enterprise. See chapter 6 – “Work in
Groups” for more details on how to use Google Slides in the context of
an online live class and chapter 11 – “Building Community” for some
ideas on how to use Google Docs to create community.

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 Tech Tips
If you plan to annotate using a (physical) flipchart or blackboard in
the room where you are teaching, test out your setup with people
joining by Zoom who can help guide you to make adjustments, such
as how far behind you the flipchart or blackboard should be, which
portions are legible, etc.
If you plan to annotate using a document camera, there are many
options in the marketplace. Two key features are resolution and size
(it needs to fit on your desk). The companion site has some links of
options for you.
In May 2020, Zoom enabled virtual camera support, which allows
you to use a smartphone as a document camera. You need to install
software, and there are several options in the marketplace. The
companion site has some links with options for you. To share, click
on “Share Screen” in Zoom’s main toolbar, click on “Advanced” and
then click on “Content from 2nd Camera”. See image below.

Figure 9.9 – Sharing content from second camera

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If you plan to annotate using an additional device (e.g., iPad,
Microsoft Surface, etc.), I suggest connecting that device to your
computer by cable and then using Zoom’s “Share Screen” feature,
rather than using any of the other alternative methods (see “Tech
Tips” section in chapter 8 for details).
If you want to simply use an electronic whiteboard to handwrite
student comments, one way to do it is to use Zoom’s native
whiteboard tool. In theory, you could use the mouse to handwrite but
I frankly don’t recommend doing it this way as the output rarely
looks good and it takes longer to write with a mouse than to write
with a pen. If you want to do a fair bit of handwriting and use Zoom’s
whiteboard for this, I recommend that you consider connecting a
tablet (e.g., Wacom, iPad, Microsoft Surface, etc.) with an electronic
pen.

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 Chapter Summary
Annotating to explain your ideas and/or record student comments
can make your classes much more dynamic, engaging, and
effective.
In deciding which tool to use, it is helpful to decide whether you
want to annotate by hand or by typing.
Pre-test the tools to decide what works for you, and test it with
friends or colleagues to make adjustments before you use them
in the classroom.

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PART IV – Putting it all together

The goal of this final part is to help put some of the things you learned
in the previous three parts in a broader context, and to pull things
together. Chapter 10 recognizes that online live classes are just a part
of the larger ecosystem of online learning, and provides some guidance
on how to decide what material should be presented in the live sessions
and what should instead be oriented to learning outside of live classes.
It then focuses on how to synergize the two types of learning
experiences. Chapter 11 is about the crucial goal of building community
in your online course. It is organized around practices that you can
employ to build community before, during, and outside class. Finally,
chapter 12 provides some advice to help you bring together some of
what you learned, and offers some ideas for organizing your next steps.

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Chapter 10 – Blending Sync and Async
Live online classes, the focus of this book, are just one part of the larger
ecosystem of online learning. Just like in an in-person course, your
students’ engagement with the course does not happen only during the
live classes. Students are typically asked to work on a number of things
outside class, including readings, homework, online modules, quizzes,
projects, reflections, memos, etc. So you are already used to thinking
about the balance between work in class and outside of class.
Yet as many of us are transitioning to teach our courses online, we are
being encouraged to think more carefully about what material we
should try to teach in our live sessions (synchronously) and what
material we should ask students to engage with on their own time
(asynchronously). This is especially salient now because, as described
in chapter 3, many instructors are reporting that they can engage with
less material in a live online session than in an equally long live in-
person session, which implies that many of us will have to make some
hard decisions about what material to keep in our live sessions and
what material to ask our students to engage with on their own time or
simply cut out. Moreover, some of us are, or will be, in environments
where class schedules provide for less live class time than we used to
have when teaching students in person.
This chapter starts with a discussion about how to make the decisions
of what material should be presented synchronously and what should
instead be oriented to asynchronous learning. I then focus on the
question of how to leverage students’ asynchronous learning to help
you conduct better synchronous class sessions.

Key Definitions
Synchronous: You and your students come together in a live
session (Zoom).
Asynchronous: Students engage with material on their own time
(before and/or after your live session).

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Key Decisions
(1) How should I split my content into synchronous and
asynchronous materials?
(2) How should I leverage the asynchronous learning to help me
conduct better synchronous sessions?

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10.1 How should I split my content into synchronous and
asynchronous materials?
The answer to this question will depend on what you think is the
comparative advantage of a live class session over activities your
students can do asynchronously. In other words, what are learning
activities where being together makes a difference? This will vary based
on your learning goals, the material you teach, and your style of
teaching, but below is a table summarizing what I think are reasonably
general principles.

Table 10.1 – General Principles of Synchronous and Asynchronous

Learning

Synchronous learning Asynchronous learning

Better Exchange of You want students to

when perspectives among your have or to develop a
students is important. common foundation
Your students’ learning before your class
from each other is (especially of basic
important. ideas/concepts).
Dialogue is important. Knowing your students’
Your intervention to perspectives or
facilitate or mediate is background on the
important. subject would affect how
you conduct your live
You want to build
class.
community.
The material is such that
each student going at
their own pace is
beneficial for their
learning.
Students having a good
amount of time to ponder

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 and reflect is beneficial.
A debate A reading (e.g., book,
Typical
A Socratic discussion article, case study, etc.)
examples
Using polls and asking A video
the students to work in A short mini-lecture
groups to discuss the Online module where
question in the polls students with little
A discussion of sensitive background on the
or emotionally charged material can go at a
issues slower pace than
An activity that helps students with a strong
build community by background
being together A computer
programming
assignment

The laundry test

At the school where I teach, classes on Zoom generally get recorded so
that students can watch them if they cannot attend the live session. I
recently asked a student how she decided whether to engage in the live
class or watch the recording later. Her answer was revealing. She said,
“When I am trying to decide, I ask myself ‘Is this a class I could attend
while folding my laundry?’ If the answer is yes, I watch the recording. If
the answer is no, I attend the live session.” While I think that, in general,
we should design both synchronous and asynchronous experiences
that students find so engaging that they cannot fold the laundry at the
same time, I think the spirit of this question might help inform your
decision of what to reserve for asynchronous learning. If the students
can conceivably fold their laundry while engaging in the experience, my
advice is to either eliminate it or reserve it for asynchronous learning.

A word of warning

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I recently heard an instructor say that he had a lecture that was very
boring last year in the classroom and that he was just going to record it
so that students could watch it online and he could save some valuable
live class time. My thoughts on this, which I shared with him in a much
more tactful manner, are: If you think something will be boring in a live
session, what makes you think it won’t be boring in a recorded
session?! More generally, if something will be ineffective on a live
session, it will also probably be ineffective in an asynchronous session!

Designing asynchronous material

How to design effective asynchronous material is beyond the scope of
this book, but you might find these guidelines helpful:
Use the same active learning principles you would use when
designing a synchronous experience. Don’t speak to your
students for a long time without providing them opportunities to
process, internalize, apply, reflect, and make sense of the material.
This can sometimes be accomplished by breaking a long recording
into several small ones and including questions in between where
students can actively engage. Make sure these questions are
meaningful and not just busy work.
Incorporate into the design of your asynchronous materials
opportunities for you to collect information on your students
that could inform the design of your live classes. For example,
you could ask a few questions on a survey or quiz that would help
you understand which parts of the material your students mastered
and which parts they did not. Or you could simply ask students to
apply the material to their own lives or to ask open-ended questions
about the material. For ideas on what kind of information to collect
and how to use it, see the next section.

The companion site has links to some useful resources on how to

create asynchronous material, including a “flipping kit” and some
concrete examples of asynchronous materials.

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10.2 How should I leverage asynchronous learning to help me
conduct better synchronous sessions?
As indicated above, it is helpful to design asynchronous material in a
way that you can collect information about your students that you could
then use to conduct better synchronous sessions. The picture below
summarizes the three key steps of this “blended learning” approach,
where you are blending the synchronous and asynchronous
components of your course.

Figure 10.1 – The blended learning process

One pattern I have noticed is that some instructors either skip or don’t
leverage step 2 to its fullest benefit. Below is a table that provides you
with some ideas of the type of information you could gather (in step 1)
and review (in step 2), and how you might leverage this information in
your live classes (step 3). One thing to note is that you often have an
asynchronous assignment after the live session (step 3) that could help
students solidify their learning and help you adjust the design of the
next class, in which case the image below could look like a cycle rather
than a sequence.

Table 10.2 – Information you could collect in asynchronous engagement

and how you could use it

Information about your How you could use this

students you could information

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collect

What percentage of them Just because you asked them to do

engaged in the it does not mean they did it. This
asynchronous work information could prompt you to
remind your students of the work
you expect them to do.

What parts of the material This could help you determine how
they have or have not you should allocate your time during
mastered class (by spending less time on the
material they have already
mastered).

What mental models and Engaging directly with their mental

misconceptions they are models and misconceptions will help
bringing to class you deepen their learning.

What choices they made Knowing how they answered these

on questions where there is questions might help you decide
no right answer how to allocate time in your live
session and/or preview which
students you want to call on during
the live session.

What personal or By identifying which students have

professional experience relevant backgrounds, you could
they have that is relevant to bring their voices to the class at
the material in class appropriate moments.

How they are applying the You can use the examples they
material to their lives provided to meet students where
they are, and help connect the
material with things they are
interested in.

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Two illustrative examples of blended learning in action
These two examples of blended learning in action are meant to spark
your imagination, and hopefully help you come up with some ideas for
your own live classes.

Example 1 – Leveraging information on what students have mastered

and what they haven’t
You ask students to engage with some material before class and ask
them to respond to a survey or quiz with five multiple-choice questions,
each followed by a question asking the students to explain their choice.
Below is the data you get from the quiz, where the number at the
bottom in each bar represents the percent of students that got that
question right and the number at the top the percent that got it wrong.
From this, you conclude that students seem to have mastered the
material that questions 2, 3, and 4 were testing, but had more difficulty
mastering the material corresponding to questions 1 and 5. This would
lead you to spend less live class time on content related to questions 2-
4, and more class time on content related to questions 1 and 5. Notice
that without having collected these data from students in the
asynchronous portion of this material, it would have been difficult to
make this decision.

Figure 10.2 – Summary of how well the students did in each question in
the pre-class quiz

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Moreover, you decide to look more closely at question 1. You analyze
the justifications provided by those students who answered question 1
incorrectly, and identify some misconceptions that those students have.
You also identify some misconceptions after reading the explanations
that students who answered these questions correctly gave. Armed with
this information, you not only know which parts of the asynchronous
materials students are having difficulty with, but also why they are
having difficulty. You can now design a class plan that addresses the
reasons for these difficulties directly by, for example, giving them a
problem in class where the same misconceptions are likely to occur and
then helping students see in class (through discussion or other means)
why these ways of approaching the problem are not valid. Again, notice
that without having collected these data from students in the
asynchronous portion of this material, it would have been difficult to
take this course of action.

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Figure 10.3 – Analysis of justifications that students gave to their
answers in one of the multiple-choice questions

Note: Output on the right was blurred to protect confidentiality of the students.

Example 2 – Leveraging student responses to questions that have no

right answer
You ask your students to read an article or a case study, which
concludes by asking them to express a preference or take a position,
something along the lines of, “Given the evidence presented in this
article, which of these three positions do you think is the most
reasonable?”, where you provide three choices in a multiple-choice
question. Or in the case of a case study, the question might be, “If you
were in the shoes of the protagonist of the case, what would you
decide?” and give students three choices in a multiple-choice question.
On either occasion, you would follow the multiple-choice question with a

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 question asking the student to justify the choice they made in a short
paragraph.

Table 10.3 – Leveraging student responses to questions with no right

answer

Student quiz Sample data / evidence you might

collect

) Which option would

you choose?
Option A
Option B
Option C

) Justify your answer to Maria: I would choose option A

question 1. because…
Pat: I would choose option B because…
William: I would use option C because…
… [other student responses here]

You look at the data corresponding to the first question and see that
over half of the students favor option B, and also notice that option A
was favored by very few students. You start planning for your live
session and think about strategies you might employ by making sure
that option A gets a fair representation in the class discussion. You start

204
pouring over the answers to the second question and notice that Ruth,
who favored option A, made a very compelling argument for this choice.
You decide you will want to call on Ruth when the live session happens.
Furthermore, you see that Varun, who voted for option C, has an
argument that contrasts with Ruth’s argument in an interesting way, and
decide that after calling on Ruth you might want to call on Varun to have
an interesting debate. Armed with this information, you now go into your
live class with a much better sense of where your students are and a
good plan to leverage their work in the asynchronous session to
conduct a more engaging and vibrant live class session.
When you start the live class session, one challenge you face is how to
remember which student favored which option. A low-tech approach is
to simply sort student names based on their responses to the multiple-
choice question, and print that sheet to draw names from as the
discussion unfolds. This is fairly easy to do but will require that you look
at the printed sheet of paper while you are teaching your live session.
A higher-tech approach is for you to ask every student to rename
themselves in Zoom (see “Tech Tips” section below for instructions on
how to do so) according to the option they voted for (e.g., “A – Ruth
Levine”, “C – Varun Garg”, etc.). Now when you look at the participant
list, you not only see the names of your students but also how they
answered the key multiple-choice question before class. During class,
you call on Ruth and Varun as you planned, and a vigorous debate
ensues. Then you want to bring someone who favored option B, and
look at your participants list in Zoom for a student who voted for option
B and notice that three students have their hand up but only Beatriz
voted for option B. You call on Beatriz. And so on. Magic happened.
The students don’t even know how, but you have just orchestrated an
engaging discussion in a way that they have rarely seen. And all of this
happened because you took some time to think about what information
you wanted to know about your student engagement with the
asynchronous material, collected this information, and used this
information to inform your class plan.
In employing the blended learning approach represented in the
illustrative examples, the following questions may emerge:

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How do I make sure that students complete what I ask them to do in the
asynchronous part?
The answer to this question will depend on your institutional context,
but consider making the completion of these “pre-class exercises” part
of the course grade. I recommend that you consider grading for
completion (or perhaps effort) but not whether they got the right
answers.

This sounds great, but I don’t have time to do this for every class! What
do I do?
You don’t have to do this for every class. Like with everything else in
teaching, my advice is to start small. Experiment doing this for a couple
of classes in your next course. Or to save time, only pose multiple-
choice (or numeric) questions without seeking explanatory text. See
how it goes. You will learn a lot. You can then tweak and do more the
following time. Or you might decide that it doesn’t work for you, and not
do it again.

When should students do the asynchronous work?

The exact coordination of timing between the synchronous and
asynchronous work will depend on many factors, but in general you
want the asynchronous work that is meant to inform your class plan to
be due sometime before class. If your live class is at 9 am, you could
make it due the day before to give yourself some time to go over the
information and adjust your class plan. Even if it’s due shortly before
your class session, you might have enough data by the previous day to
at least start making some decisions, and can then make some final
tweaks just prior to class.

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 Tech Tips
For students to change their name in Zoom, ask them to do the
following (see below):
Go to participant list.
Hover over your name.
Click on More.
Click Rename.
Type your new name.
Hit enter.

Figure 10.3 – Instructions for renaming in Zoom by adding the option

the student voted for before their name

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208
 Chapter Summary
Live online classes are just one part of the larger ecosystem of
online learning.
Key decision #1 – How should I split my content into
synchronous and asynchronous materials?
Remember the laundry test: If the students can conceivably
fold their laundry while engaging in the experience, consider
eliminating it or reserving it for asynchronous learning.
Key decision #2 – How should I leverage the asynchronous
learning in order to conduct better synchronous sessions?
Collect data on your students’ engagement with the
asynchronous material that you can then use to design a better
live class.

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Chapter 11 – Building Community
A lot has been written about the importance of building community in
online learning.[19] Classroom interactions (between your students and
you, and among your students) happen almost automatically in the
physical classroom, but in the virtual classroom, you have to be much
more deliberate about creating these interactions, which are essential
to building a strong learning community. The ultimate goal of a strong
learning community is to instill a sense of belonging and camaraderie
that keeps your students engaged and motivates them to learn and
persevere. This chapter focuses on how to build community in online
live classes. The table below breaks down community-building into
three key goals and provides illustrative examples for ways of reaching
each goal. The companion site has some suggested readings and
resources for how to build community in online learning more broadly.

Table 11.1 – Community-Building Goals

Community-Building Examples
Goal

Foster opportunities for Open your virtual classroom a few

students to engage minutes before class and leave it open
with you for a few minutes after class.
Expand your office hours.
Explore new forms of office hours (with
a group, for example).
Conduct more 1:1 correspondence with
students.
Learn your students’ names and basic
backgrounds.
Collect feedback that informs you how
each student is faring as an individual in
the course.

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Foster opportunities for Use ad-hoc small group breakouts.
students to engage Design small or low stakes group work.
with each other
Design larger or higher stakes group
projects.
Provide opportunities for structured peer
review/feedback.
Use icebreakers at the beginning aimed
Engage students on
at helping students learn more about
co-building the
each other, especially with regard to
learning community
experience relevant to the course.
Encourage your students to co-create
class participation norms.
Ask students to curate new content and
examples for the course.
This table is based on input from my colleague Maria Flanagan, a learning designer
who is very thoughtful about community-building and other key aspects of online
learning.

The rest of this chapter is organized around practices that you can
employ to build community before, during, and outside class.

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11.1 Practices to build community before class begins
It is a good idea to invite students to join your live online class a few
minutes before class begins. This allows students to see you and each
other, engage in some activities that strengthen their sense of
belonging and community (see ideas below), test their technology
(video, microphone, etc.), and ensure they are ready to learn when the
official class time starts.
How long before class starts should you ask students to join? This
obviously will vary with your institutional context, personal preferences,
and time constraints. But here are two things you might want to keep in
mind: First, as indicated above, you have to be much more deliberate
about creating interactions online compared to face-to-face teaching,
and being available to your students just before (and just after) class is
one easy way to do it. Second, one reason you might not be able to be
available to your students for much time before class when you teach in
a physical classroom is because someone else is occupying the
classroom before you. But in a virtual classroom, this is not a constraint!
You and your students of course would still need to be available before
class starts, but if you are, this seems like a great way to engage with
them, build community, and maximize the chances of a productive
class.

What do I do before class begins?

You can do a number of things to build community before class begins,
including asking ice-breaking questions, playing music, and getting
participants to express themselves in various ways. Below are
examples for each of these activities. Whatever you decide to do, I
suggest that your goals be simply to be present, connect with your
students, and create opportunities for them to connect with each other.

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 In Practice 11.1 – Using ice breaking questions before
class begins
Carrie Conaway is a senior lecturer at the Harvard Graduate School
of Education, and was the chief strategy and research officer for the
Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education
(DESE). She opens her live session a few minutes before class is
scheduled to begin, warmly welcomes the students as they join, and
asks them an ice-breaking question (e.g., which Game of Thrones
character would you like to be and why?) and encourages them to
respond by voice or chat.

In Practice 11.2 – Using music before class begins

Teddy Svoronos, a lecturer at the Harvard Kennedy School by day
and a jazz musician by night, loves music. He shares his love for
music with his students by playing songs from a Spotify playlist that
he created for his class. He invites students to contribute to this
playlist, which makes this one of the things that his students create
as a community in his class. He also encourages students to write
something in the chat before class begins. See his first slide below,
which he displays to students before class. To learn how to share
music with your students during a live session, see “Tech Tips”
section below.

Figure 11.1 – Sample slide inviting students to chat before class begins

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11.2 Practices to build community during class
Some of the practices used to create community during a class in a
physical classroom can be used in a virtual classroom as well. For
example, getting to know your students and connecting with what they
bring to the class can help them learn more deeply and create
community. Providing opportunities for students to interact with each
other in breakout rooms (see chapter 6) is another effective way of
advancing both learning and community-building. Having a ritual at the
end of class (such as everyone unmuting themselves and saying
something, or everyone writing something on the chat) can also help
create community. And after class officially ends, consider staying for
extra time to engage students in informal conversation and/or use
informal breakout rooms to provide your students with easy
opportunities to socialize with each other. The “In Practice” sections
below offer some other ideas for building community online during your
class.

In Practice 11.3 – Asking students to rename

themselves and using breakout rooms
Anna Shanley, Maddie Meister, and James Brockman work in
Executive Education at the Harvard Kennedy School, where
participants come from all over the world. In the online programs
they are involved in, they ask participants before classes start to
rename themselves in Zoom (see “Tech Tips” section in chapter 10
for instructions on how to do this) using the following convention:
“First Name & Last Name; Location; Organization; Job Title” (e.g.,
“Anna Shanley; Cambridge MA; HKS Program Director”). This allows
participants and instructors to see information about each other on
the screen, which helps people get to know one another more
quickly than they would otherwise. This practice also enables the
instructor to use this information before or during their teaching (e.g.,

216
“Mary, I heard there is a heat wave in Arizona; how are you doing?”
or “Sarah, given your background in finance, what would you do if
you were presented with this financial proposal?”). For instructions
on how to rename on Zoom, please see “Tech Tips” in chapter 10.
They also use breakout rooms very effectively in their programs.
Some of the breakout rooms are random (which allow participants to
network with each other) and others are deliberate (which allows
participants to get to know themselves better and produce work that
they can share with the class). When they use random breakout
rooms, they typically instruct participants to introduce themselves
once they are in the breakout room and answer an ice-breaking
question. See example slide below. To give you a sense of what they
have been able to accomplish, one participant at the end of one of
their programs said, “I have attended one course on campus, and I
actually found that I bonded with more of my classmates in this
setting than in a face-to-face setting; the breakout room discussions
were very valuable, as I was able to connect with people with whom I
would not otherwise have known I had to so much in common.”

Figure 11.2 – Sample slide giving students instructions before sending

them to breakout rooms

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 In Practice 11.4 – Using check-in questions about a
common experience at the beginning of class
Zoe Marks, a Lecturer at the Harvard Kennedy School, begins every
session with a poem on the screen (not read aloud), and with a
check-in question. In her words: “Some days I asked what they
wanted to see come out of the pandemic crisis for the better, some
days I asked what they were sad or angry about, some days what
made them hopeful, and sometimes anyone they wanted to keep in
their/our thoughts. It provided an icebreaker that touched on our
common experience, while hopefully making room for people's
specific circumstances and need to either be seen or be quiet but in
community with others experiencing similar good and bad
challenges.”

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 In Practice 11.5 – Using interactive verbal roll to create
community
Kathy Pham teaches a course on Product Management and Society
at the Harvard Kennedy School, and uses a variety of tools to create
community in her class. At the beginning of every class, she asks
students to write their name, pronouns, location, and an answer to
one question for that class in a Google Doc. The question can be
about the material for that class (see example below) or a more
social question (e.g., favorite band name, favorite childhood food,
etc.). If it is about the material for that class, she might call on some
of the students who provided answers during class. She sometimes
begins class doing a verbal roll call where she says their names, and
they respond with what they wrote in the Google Doc. She said
about this practice, “I did this because I wanted everyone to feel
seen and it felt nice to hear people’s names and hear them respond.”
Beatriz Vasconcellos, one of the students in Kathy’s class,
commented that this sort of interactive verbal roll call “helped make
students engage in class right from the beginning and build
community.” See example below of her roll call for one of her
classes.

Figure 11.3 – Kathy Pham uses a Google Doc to create an interactive

roll call

Wednesday, April 15th, 2020

Add yourself to the Google Doc:

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 (I will call on some of you to discuss the product partnership
below)

Name | pronouns | current location | Name an interesting

product partnership (two products, teams, companies, etc., that
joined together to make a product better)

Evan Collins | they/them | Somerville, MA | Starbucks + Spotify

Scarlet Roman | she/her/hers | Allston, MA | Most stores + Apple
Pay
Kimora Christensen | they/them | Los Angeles, CA | CVS and Target
Karla Hamilton | she/her | Cambridge, MA | Pokemon + Niantic
…
Hannah Chang | she/her | Taipei, Taiwan | EVA Airlines + Hello Kitty
Nicodemo Blanco | he/him | Florida | Apple + Google COVID
Katelyn Hanson | she/her | Lakewood, CO | Cover Girl + Lucasfilm
Claudia Cochran | Cambridge, MA | Samsung and Google
Chloe Frost | she/ her | Cambridge, MA | Spotify and Hulu
Pascual Carrasco | Cambridge, MA | Lyft + Capital One

Note: Student names have been changed to protect confidentiality.

In Practice 11.6 – Building community during class one

small gesture at a time

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Allison Shapira, who teaches communications courses at the
Harvard Kennedy School, does a lot of small things to build
community in her classroom. Here is how she frames her efforts: “In
my research preparing to teach virtually at Harvard, I found that one
of the biggest reasons students drop out of online courses is due to
a feeling of loneliness and isolation, so I begin every class by asking
students to say hello in the chat and say how the weather is (or the
mood is) in their country or city. Then, I might cold call someone to
take themselves off mute to answer. I also learn how to say hello to
students in their own languages which always brings a smile to their
face. To keep students engaged, I'll stand up while teaching and
keep the camera lens at eye level so that I can both create and
transmit energy through the camera lens to my students. When
things go wrong, I laugh at the situation and show students you can
laugh when things go wrong. I use "Gallery View" so I can see
students' reactions; if I notice one of my students' children wandering
in the frame of view, I might stop and say, "Steve, is that your baby
daughter? She is beautiful!" It makes the student feel seen and the
other students feel that I'm paying attention to them.”

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11.3 Practices to build community outside of class
A lot of community-building happens outside class without your
intervention. Students might create WhatsApp or Slack groups to
interact with each other. They might organize parties, dinners, outings,
and other events (virtually or in person). And your school/institution
might organize events for your students, such as orientation sessions,
guest speakers, workshops, and so on. These community-building
efforts don’t negate the need for you to think about building community
outside class, but knowing about them might inform where you focus
your energies. For example, devoting part of a class session to having
your students introduce themselves to each other does not make sense
if they have already done so at an event organized by your institution.
Below is one example of the types of activities that can be done outside
class to build community.

In Practice 11.7 – Building community outside class

Dana Born, Horace Ling, Keisha Mayers, Susan Tuers, and Cindy
Wong recently led a 4-week long online executive education
program at the Harvard Kennedy School. The program is intense,
and they creatively used a number of activities to help build
community. “One of the biggest challenges of the online space for
education is the difficulty in creating a community and network.
When we talk to prospective participants, the most common concern
is that they won’t be able to connect with the faculty and their
classmates to the level that they would during an in-person
program,” Horace reported.
They were successful at building community by implementing
multiple activities, each of which attracted different participants,
including:
Online 5K Run – Participants went for a run, pausing from time to
time to share the views of where they were. Many who didn’t run
also enjoyed and watched the exercise. Participants were in

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 Washington DC, Seattle Washington, Ottawa Canada, Lexington
Massachusetts, and Provincetown Massachusetts.
Online Talent Show – Participants volunteered to sing, do yoga,
tell jokes, or share other talents.
Mentoring Online – Each participant was assigned one co-mentor
to meet with.
Live Cooking Show/Networking with Alumni – Participants
cooked along with the Harvard Director of Culinary Operations.
Afterwards, they ate lunch with each other and with the alumni
that were invited to join.
Affinity Groups (Organized by Participants) – Various topics that
participants wanted to talk about that others were interested in as
well.
Lunch Chats with Faculty – Faculty met with participants for an
informal hour during lunch.
The list above might not be directly applicable to you, but hopefully it
helps spark some ideas for activities that you can use to build
community in your course.

This chapter ends with an “In Practice” section describing the approach
and many practices to build community adopted by my colleague
Marshall Ganz and his teaching team. While it might be difficult for
many of us to achieve the exceptional sense of learning community that
Marshall has achieved in his online classes, I think we can all learn
from his practices and adopt a few for ourselves.

In Practice 11.8 – Building community online: an

example of mastery

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Marshall Ganz teaches courses in leadership, organizing, and public
narrative at the Harvard Kennedy School. He has successfully taught
thousands of students online, and to me represents the ultimate
example of what can be accomplished online when the instructor is
as intentional and deliberate as Marshall is. One of the practices he
is most distinguished at is building community. He argues, “You can
do online whatever you can do in a room as long as you establish
the relationships.” To give you a sense of how successful he is at
building community, on the last day of his online learning programs
(which typically meet twice a week for several weeks), students do
brief presentations about their learning in the groups they have been
working with throughout the program. There is laughter, joy, tears,
and emotional connection like I have rarely seen in a classroom.
Remember these are online courses, and most of these students
have never met face to face!
Marshall often tells the story of a student from Norway who took one
of his online courses on public narrative. Sometime later, she visited
the Kennedy School and asked Marshall for permission to sit in one
of his in-person classes on the same topic. At the end of class,
Marshall asked her what she thought about the class. She
responded, “I think online was more intimate.” Marshall was
surprised by this answer and probed. She said, “Well, I am sitting in
a classroom looking at the backs of everyone’s heads. But online I
see everyone’s faces, and I can see tears, and I can see laughter,
and I realize what I am a part of.” In reflecting about this encounter,
Marshall says, “Our faces communicate so much of our emotional
language. It really struck me; it’s not something I would have thought
of before. But it’s the truth.”
Describing all that Marshall does to achieve this sense of community
in his courses is beyond the scope of this book, but these are some
of the practices I noted as crucial:
Establishes strong community norms. See example slide below.
Acknowledges from the beginning that “Nothing will be perfect;
we are all here to learn. We are partners in learning,” and follows

224
 through on this by asking students for quick feedback after every
class session.
Students work in fixed groups for some activities and random
groups for others. Fixed groups help build community; random
ones help build networks.
Groups are asked to set their own norms, they come up with a
group name and a group chant. This helps group members be
accountable to each other.
Each member of the teaching team is responsible for the learning
of their own section of about twenty students. They meet with
each student one on one, facilitate discussion, coach students,
and evaluate their work. They work with the same section for the
entire course, guide learning, sustain motivation, and enable peer
accountability.
Conducts purposeful and highly structured facilitation where all
students are encouraged to participate in a wide range of forms.
Ends class by asking everyone to unmute themselves and
applaud.
Marshall is extremely generous with sharing the lessons of what he
has done. The companion site has links to several of his resources,
including a video presentation he gave on his online teaching
practices.

Figure 11.4 – Marshall Ganz’s slide summarizing use of community

norms

225
 Tech tips
To play music for your students in Zoom, you have two options: the
first one involves simply playing music without sharing anything
else, and the second one involves sharing music while you are
sharing something else (e.g., a slide).
Option 1: Just share the music.
Click on “Share Screen” in Zoom’s main toolbar.
Click on “Advanced”.
Click on “Music or Computer Sound Only”.
Click on “Share”.

Figure 11.5 – Sharing music for your students in Zoom (and nothing
else)

226
 Option 2: Share music and something else (e.g., a slide).
Click on “Share Screen” in Zoom’s main toolbar.
Click on the other thing you want to share (e.g., Powerpoint,
Keynote, etc.).
Check “Share Computer Sound” at the bottom.
Click on “Share”.

Figure 11.6 – Sharing music along with something else with your
students in Zoom

227
228
 Chapter Summary
Building community is crucial for a successful online learning
experience.
You have to be much more deliberate about building community
online than in person.
Building community involves:
Fostering opportunities for students to engage with you
Fostering opportunities for students to engage with each other
Engaging students on co-building the learning community

Think about what you can do to build community:

Before class
During class
Outside class

The most important aspect of building community is to foster

human connection. The particular activities you employ are less
important than your desire to do this genuinely.

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230
Chapter 12 – Next Steps
This final chapter provides some advice to help you bring together
some of what you learned, and offers you some ideas for organizing
your next steps. Below are some of the key lessons I hope you took
from the book. Before you review them, I suggest that you take 5
minutes right now to write down the key ideas that you took from the
book. If you kept notes while reading, this might be a chance to add any
ideas you have recently had. Doing this will help you learn them more
deeply than you would if you immediately read the list below, and it will
increase the likelihood that you implement your ideas.

Part I: Key ideas – Summary

Transitioning from a physical classroom to a virtual one
represents a loss. Acknowledging this loss is important.
Teaching online, just like teaching in physical classrooms, is all
about the learning of your students. The technology, including
Zoom, is just the vehicle to reach your goals.
Think about what pedagogic principles underlie your teaching
practices, and how best to apply these principles in designing
and teaching your live online classes.
The key pedagogic principles underlying the practices and
advice advanced in this book are:
(1) Be student-centered.
(2) Plan for active learning.
(3) Begin with the end in mind.
(4) Use online teaching to its comparative advantages.
(5) Teachers are made, not born.

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 Part II: Ways your students can engage – Summary
There are more ways of engaging your students in an online
classroom than in a physical one. Leverage this fact to help
you reach your goals.
Key ways your students can engage (with key Zoom tool in
parenthesis):
Speak (Raise hands)
Vote (Polling)
Write (Chat)
Work in groups (Breakout Rooms)
Share their work (Share Screen)
Conversations tend to take longer in a virtual classroom than
in a physical classroom. Take this into account when you plan
your class.
Polls can be a very helpful tool to engage students, assess
where they are, and teach in a more flexible manner.
Chat is a very quick and efficient way to find out what is on
your students’ minds, but if you decide to use it, you will
benefit from establishing and communicating norms around its
use.
There are a lot of benefits to having students work in small
groups during part of your online live classes. For this to work
well, being explicit about the task you want students to
accomplish (e.g., answer a question, produce a deliverable,
etc.) and the time they have available is crucial.
Whenever you ask students to produce work, think about the
potential benefits of having some of them present this work in
a live class session and the ways in which this can be done
most effectively.

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 Part III: Ways you can engage – Summary
You can use Zoom to present slides, videos, websites via your
internet browser, and pretty much anything on your computer.
Remember that presenting slides for a long time without
having students engage in their learning is unlikely to be
effective. Plan for interaction every few minutes of class.
Be aware that the moment you share your slides, they are
likely to take over a large share of your students’ screen and
attention. Do so judiciously and stop sharing your slides in
segments of the class where you don’t need them.
When presenting, try to keep your eyes on your students
rather than on your slides. If you have access to a second
monitor, this goal becomes easier to achieve.
Annotating to explain your ideas and/or record student
comments can make your classes much more dynamic,
engaging, and effective.
In deciding which tool to use, it is helpful to decide whether
you want to annotate by hand or by typing.
Pre-test the tools to decide what works for you, and test it with
friends or colleagues to make adjustments before you use
them in the classroom.

Part IV: Bringing it together – Summary

Live online classes are just one part of the larger ecosystem of
online learning.

233
Think about your students’ work falling into two categories:
Synchronous: You and your students come together in a live
session (Zoom).
Asynchronous: Students engage with material on their own
time (before and/or after your live session).
Two key decisions in the larger online learning ecosystem:
Key decision #1 – How should you split your content into
synchronous and asynchronous materials?
Key decision #2 – How should you leverage the
asynchronous learning to help you conduct better
synchronous sessions?
Building community is important in general, and even more
important in online teaching.
Building community online requires a more deliberate effort
than in person.
Think about what you can do to build community before,
during, and outside class

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12.1 Next steps
The next steps in your journey depend partly on where you are:
1. Before starting your online course
2. During your online course
3. After your online course

Below are some thoughts for each of these stages.

1 - Before starting your online course

My three key recommendations for getting ready for an upcoming
online course are:

Get some practice.

Practice alone with Zoom.
Do one or more dry runs of your first class with a group of friends
or colleagues and get feedback. This will help you identify a
number of opportunities for improvement. See sample list below.
Tweak your practices and setup.

Table 12.1 – Sample list of issues you might discover in your dry run
and possible ways of addressing them

Feedback Way of addressing it

received

We cannot see Play with the lighting in your room (e.g., add a
your face well. lamp).
Consider getting a better camera or using your
phone for video.

You are not Tweak your desk setup to make it easier to look

235
making eye at the camera.
contact with us. Change the way you arrange your Zoom
windows to make it easier to look into the
camera.
Change the placement of your camera (if
portable).

You did not Make sure the participants list is always visible
notice that I had to you; this is easier if you have a second
my hand up for monitor.
a few minutes. Train yourself to keep an eye on the
participants list.

Instructions for Investigate what was unclear.

our breakout Create a slide with instructions that addresses
room were what was unclear.
unclear.

You looked Consider developing a routine where you log in

frazzled at the to your online classes before of everyone else,
beginning test your equipment, try out the things you plan
to do, so that when your students arrive you are
ready to engage with them.
If you can, try to get someone to help you with
some aspect of the technology (e.g., monitor
the chat)

Our breakout Tweak the Zoom settings so that people get a

room ended one-minute warning before the breakout rooms
very suddenly. end.

Your energy Consider changing your setup to increase the

level was low. chances of projecting your energy. In general,
standing is preferable to sitting.

We couldn’t see Consider moving the board to be closer to the

what you were camera.

236
writing on your Consider getting better chalk/markers.
blackboard. Consider using some other technology for
annotating (Zoom’s native whiteboard, a tablet,
etc.).

Establish norms for your students.

Develop norms for how students will engage in your online class.
See table and sample slides below. Slides are also available on
the companion site.
If you plan to use chat, make sure you establish some norms
around its use.
Think about what you will do if/when norms are broken the first
time.

Table 12.2 – Zoom-related norms

Aspect My norms*

How to speak in Use “Raise hand to indicate you want to

class speak.
Use “Lower hand” after you have spoken or
if you no longer want to speak.
Unmute yourself before speaking, and then
mute yourself.

Use of chat Use privately to a designated person for

technical support.
Use publicly only for comments/questions
directly related to the discussion in class at
that moment.
I will pause at various points in class to
check it.

Use of audio Please use “Mute” as your default.

237
 Please “Unmute” yourself when you want to
speak.
If possible, use a headset to improve audio
quality.

Use of video Unless you have a good reason not to,

feed please keep your video on so you can be
seen by your peers and me.

Recording I will record sessions for you and me, but

sessions these are not to be shared with anyone else.
If you cannot come to a live session, watch
the recording and answer the discussion
questions.

Start time I will open the “live classroom” 10 minutes

before official start time.

End time We will end class on time.

I will stay in the Zoom meeting for about 15
extra minutes for anyone who wishes to
have an informal follow-up discussion or
simply wants to chat for a little bit. This is
entirely optional.
*These are not meant to represent what the right norms are for you, but rather to give
you a concrete sense of the kinds of things that you want to be explicit about when
establishing and communicating your Zoom-related norms.

Figure 12.1 – Sample slide for norms to begin your live session

238
Figure 12.2 – Sample slide for norms related to use of Zoom features

If possible, get help.

239
 There is a lot to keep track of when you are teaching with Zoom. If
you can have someone (ideally a teaching assistant, but it could
be a colleague or even a student) help you during your live
sessions, it can make the whole process more manageable.

A few possible roles for your helper:

- Assist students if they are having technical issues
- Run breakout rooms
- Monitor chat
- Alert you to issues you are not aware of (you are on mute, the
slides are not projecting, etc.)
- Launch polls

2 - During your online course

Have a colleague observe you teach and ask for feedback. See
sample feedback below to give you a sense of the kinds of things
you can learn both as an observer and as the person being
observed.
Observe a colleague teach. Learn from them and give them
feedback if they want it.
Collect feedback from your students as to how things are going. You
can do this with an anonymous poll or survey.
Collect evidence about what your students are learning.
Make adjustments based on the feedback and evidence you collect.
Assess whether your Zoom-related and other norms need tweaking.
Write some reflections after every class regarding what went well
and what could be improved. This will help you teach much better
next time!

240
Subject: Feedback

Dear Jane:
Thank you very much for the opportunity to let me observe you teach
and learn from you. As requested, below is some feedback that I
hope can be helpful to you. Thanks again and best regards,
Dan
======

Strengths
Highly organized class where time was used very productively.
Just as a small sample: Telling students on the chat “Class will
start in two minutes” is a great way of making sure everyone is
ready to start.
You warmly welcomed your students.
Great use of roadmaps. Constantly telling students where you
were going and marking the transitions very clearly. This seems
particularly important online.
You have a conversation with each student who participates. You
seek to understand, probe, investigate, which I think leads
students to prepare better for what they plan to say.
Use of yes/no quick polls, and being able to call on a student
according to their response to the poll.
I liked the idea of the icebreaker for the breakout rooms. I can
imagine this being very effective in courses where students don’t
know each other.
You know your students and it shows. Welcoming a student from
India, telling Jim to bring his higher ed experience, telling Ankur
“you are in NY.”
Great at connecting student comments.
You care about your students and it shows.

241
Observations/Suggestions/Questions
Hard to get students to participate in the large group discussion.
And you tried!
I noticed that after the polls you tended to call on someone who
had the right answer. This seems great in terms of efficiency and
probably helps people feel less intimidated with the cold call, but
provides you with fewer opportunities to learn where students are
confused and what the key misunderstandings are. I wonder if
you have thought about calling students who have the wrong
answer before calling on students with the right answer.
Why did most people not have their video on?
You asked several questions that forced the students to make a
decision between two choices. I wonder if you could transform
some of these into quick polls where people can answer Yes/No,
and you can interrogate students who chose each of the options.
I wonder if you could use visuals more. Table 1 exhibit for
example.

3 - After your online course

Reflect on what went well and what could be improved.
Develop a plan for next time.
Observe colleagues teach. You will learn a lot.
Think about adjustments to your Zoom-related norms that might be
warranted next time.
Think about adjustments to your technology and workspace that
would make a big difference in your ability to teach and that fit your
budget.

242
 Sample checklist for your next steps
❏ Practice. A lot!
❏ Establish and/or tweak norms. Communicate these norms
clearly to your students and enforce them.
❏ Observe a colleague teach.
❏ Have a colleague observe you teach and ask for their feedback
❏ Develop a “master checklist” that contains everything you want
to have in front of you when you teach a live session. Think of
this as a one-pager to have on your desk or wall while you are
teaching. See companion site for an example.
❏ Experiment and learn from your experimentation. Be explicit
with students that you are experimenting, noting that
experimentation is necessary to learn, and that sometimes
experiments will not work out.
❏ Be gentle with yourself. Nothing will be perfect.

243
12.2 In closing
I hope that reading this book enabled you to develop some ideas to
help you improve how you teach online live classes. This was certainly
my goal. If you come up with some ideas that you think would be of
interest to others, please share them with me on the companion site, as
I would love to help you share them with others (with full credit to you,
of course). As you put these ideas into practice, some of them are likely
to work well and some are likely to fail. This is always bound to happen
when we experiment with new technologies and teaching approaches. I
think this is OK as long as we can learn from our experimentation. And
let us remember that technology is just a vehicle to help us reach our
learning goals. As educators, our mission is to help our students learn,
grow, and develop. What a noble profession we are in. Thank you very
much for your time.

244
245
About the Author
Dan Levy has been a faculty member at Harvard University for over 15
years, where he has held various positions related to promoting
excellence in teaching and learning. He currently serves as the faculty
director of the Public Leadership Credential, the Harvard Kennedy
School's flagship online learning initiative. He co-founded Teachly, a
web application aimed at helping faculty members to teach more
effectively and more inclusively. He has won several teaching awards,
including the university-wide David Pickard Award for Teaching and
Mentoring. He is passionate about effective teaching and learning, and
enjoys sharing his experience and enthusiasm with others.

246
247
Notes To This Book
[1]
General references for teaching online
Bates, A. T. (2018). Teaching in a digital age: Guidelines for
designing teaching and learning.
Boettcher, J. V., & Conrad, R. M. (2016). The online teaching
survival guide: Simple and practical pedagogical tips. John Wiley &
Sons.
Caulfield, J. (2012). How to design and teach a hybrid course:
Achieving student-centered learning through blended classroom,
online and experiential activities. Stylus Publishing, LLC..
Darby, F., & Lang, J. M. (2019). Small teaching online: Applying
learning science in online classes. John Wiley & Sons.
Nilson, L. B., & Goodson, L. A. (2017). Online teaching at its best:
Merging instructional design with teaching and learning research.
John Wiley & Sons.
[2]
Bruff, D. (2019). Intentional Tech: Principles to Guide the Use of
Educational Technology in College Teaching. West Virginia University
Press.

[3]
“The coronavirus allows us to reimagine the college experience” By
Bharat Anand The Boston Globe, Updated June 8, 2020, 3:01 a.m.

[4]
References on active learning
Bransford, J. D., Brown, A. L., & Cocking, R. R. (2000). How people
learn (Vol. 11). Washington, DC: National academy press.
Deslauriers, L., McCarty, L. S., Miller, K., Callaghan, K., & Kestin, G.
(2019). Measuring actual learning versus feeling of learning in
response to being actively engaged in the classroom. Proceedings
of the National Academy of Sciences, 116(39), 19251-19257.

248
 Freeman, S., Eddy, S. L., McDonough, M., Smith, M. K., Okoroafor,
N., Jordt, H., & Wenderoth, M. P. (2014). Active learning increases
student performance in science, engineering, and mathematics.
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 111(23), 8410-
8415.
Michael, J. (2006). Where's the evidence that active learning works?
Advances in physiology education.
Prince, M. (2004). Does active learning work? A review of the
research. Journal of engineering education, 93(3), 223-231.

[5]
Doyle, Terry (2008). Helping students learn in a learner centered
environment: A guide to teaching in higher education. Sterling, VA:
Stylus.

[6]
A Nobel Laureate's Education Plea: Revolutionize Teaching.
Westervelt, Erich, April 14, 2016.
[7]
Wiggins, Grant, and McTighe, Jay. (1998). Understanding by Design.
ASCD.
[8]
“The coronavirus allows us to reimagine the college experience” By
Bharat Anand The Boston Globe, Updated June 8, 2020, 3:01 a.m.
[9]
“What’s that again? The intrinsic psychology of “Zoom fatigue”,” The
Economist, May 16, 2020.
[10]
Benefits of wait time
Cain, S. (2013). Quiet: The power of introverts in a world that can't
stop talking. Broadway Books.
Dolan, E; Collins, J. (2017). We must teach more effectively: here
are four ways to get started. Molecular Biology of the Cell, 26(12)
Reda, M. M. (2010). What's the Problem With Quiet Students?
Anyone? Anyone? The Chronicle of Higher Education.
https://www.chronicle.com/article/Whats-the-Problem-With-
Quiet/124258

249
 Rowe, M. (2003). Wait-Time and Rewards as Instructional Variables,
Their Influence on Language, Logic, and Fate Control: Part One –
Wait Time. Journal of Research in Science Teaching.
Ruhl, K. L., Hughes, C. A., & Schloss, P. J. (1987). Using the pause
procedure to enhance lecture recall. Teacher education and special
education, 10(1), 14-18.
Schwegman, J. (2013). Engaging introverts in class discussion–Part
2. Stanford Teaching Commons,
https://teachingcommons.stanford.edu/teaching-talk/engaging-
introverts-class-discussion-part-2
Tobin, K. (1980). The Effect of an Extended Teacher Wait-Time on
Science Achievement. Journal of Research in Science Teaching,
17(5)
[11]
Benefits of polling
Davis, B. G. (2009). Tools for teaching. John Wiley & Sons.
McKeachie, W., & Svinicki, M. (2013). McKeachie's teaching tips.
Cengage Learning.
Prince, M. (2004). Does Active Learning Work? A Review of the
Research. Journal of Engineering Education, 93(3), 223-231.
Crouch, C. H., Watkins, J., Fagen, A. P., & Mazur, E. (2007). Peer
instruction: Engaging students one-on-one, all at once. Research-
based reform of university physics, 1(1), 40-95.E.
Mazur, E. (1997). Peer instruction: A user’s manual. Prentice Hall
series in educational innovation.
[12]
Levy, Yardley and Zeckhauser, “Getting an Honest Answer: Clickers
in the Classroom” Journal of the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning,
Vol 17, No 4, October 2017.

[13]
References suggesting that most people are not good at multitasking
Ophir, E., Nass, C., & Wagner, A. D. (2009). Cognitive control in
media multitaskers. Proceedings of the National Academy of
Sciences, 106(37), 15583-15587.

250
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