This blog post is part of a series of reflections on the Coronavirus / Covid-19 crisis and the immediate transition from my face-to-face courses to online classes.

At the time of writing of this blog post, there are still uncertainties about the start of the new academic year in European business schools and universities.

• The least likely – but not impossible – scenario is a « business as usual » scenario: lecture halls full of students, face-to-face classes, and an open access to school facilities (offices, canteen, library, work rooms).
• At the other extreme of logistical conditions is a scenario of a courses as they were delivered during the Covid-19 containement, i.e. 100% online classes, alongside with all the other dimensions of the academic profession (online tutoring of dissertations, meetings by videoconference, and a lot of e-mail exchanges – much much more than under normal operating conditions).
• And then comes the 3rd way, or rather, all the intermediate ways, consisting of a weighted cocktail of online lecturing and face-to-face courses – with some students being connected online – as well as digitized pre-requisites, all of those operated in a synchronous or asynchronous manner.

At the time of writing, the dice have not been cast, and no doubt that many schools and universities are currently putting a lot of energy and fever, thinking about the organization of the next semester in September. Now, if we take the point of view of the consumer/customer, i.e. the student, what is education?

In other words, what’s in a diploma? What are the components of that piece of paper that Shakespeare (or Humphrey Bogart) might qualify as being of the stuff that dreams are made of?

So, what does a student or a manager look for in an education? In my opinion, 3 different things:

1. Knowledge: delivered by professors & researchers, but also available in textbooks, or co-constructed during group projects. In those processes, we learn, we understand, we develop reflexes (thought and action). It is thus one of the dimensions of the professor’s work to create a consistent pedagogical path, like a game of hopscotch that alternates activities, strong or weak moments and many different bricks, Lego like: examples, concepts, pitfalls, practical applications, discussions, anecdotes, references to current world news, presentations, feedback…

2. Brand & Positioning: Part of the value of the diploma is the business school’s or university’s brand. Some people swear by the rankings, even though rankings have the bad taste of not remaining stable over time, and a school’s good grade might be different, depending on the organization or the newspaper that operates the ranking; other people rely on the long-lasting reputation (La Sorbonne…). In this situation, business schools & universities have taken good care of this intangible asset over the years: there are the leader brands, the ones everyone knows; then there are the specialists, who have managed to create a niche: « the best entrepreneurship training West of Berlin », « the first salesforce school »…

3. Collective experience. An education is not just a set of textbooks stamped with a brand (with a price attached…). Students and managers come to live a collective experience, which takes place outside as well as inside the classrooms. This mix of networking, collective projects and mixing of European and extra-European cultures leads to « thicken the sauce ». Graduate cohorts follow one another without being the same: some sauces are more fluid, others are more spicy, and most of them have a unique taste. Nevertheless, it should be noted that many programmes today offer such an electivity of courses and modalities (alternation, gap year, stay abroad) that it is becoming increasingly difficult to talk about the « spirit » of a cohort of students who will graduate on the same day. In fact, within the global cohort, we can see the formation of several sub-groups where the participants know each other and recognize themselves in the same joint experience.

These three components (diploma = knowledge + brand + collective experience) are the pillars of an education in business, and even though the weighting is probably not uniform (1/3 knowledge, 1/3 brand, 1/3 lived experience), it is difficult to estimate the weight of each of the three components in the value of a given diploma.

But it’s all for the real world, i.e. the world of face-to-face classes and one-one-one tutoring in the professor’s office. What happens when you suddenly switch to 100% online training? Let’s look at the impact on these three components:

1. Impact on knowledge. Facilitating a 100% online class creates frustrations and drawbacks: group discussions are harder to start, participation is lower, and the professor has to invest in a lot of online software and new interaction techniques in order to regain the level of a face-to-face classroom experience. The value of the learning path will therefore be downgraded, compared to what could have been done in a face-to-face environment. Our assumption is that a 100% online course will only reach 80% of the quality of a face-to-face course (i.e. a loss of -20% compared to the face-to-face equivalent).

2. Impact on the brand. This component is little affected by the switch to 100% online courses. A brand consists in rankings, a network of successful alumni, and recognition from companies and other organizations. To take an analogy that may be debatable (I’m not a marketing expert), the value of the Wal Mart brand does not depend on the % of sales made in stores versus the % of sales made online. We can therefore assume that the Brand component will keep the same value when switching to 100% online classes.

3. Impact on the collective experience. Ouch, this is where it’s going to get worse. In the case of contained, or at least isolated students, the collective experience will shrink dramatically. You can’t rely on Whatsapp groups or discussion forums to instill the same spirit as when you are in a physical place. And what about extracurricular activities? Student associations, parties, sports challenges, students’ consulting activities are all opportunities to experience « The fiery crucible in which true heroes are forged », in the words of Master Sergeant Farell. We can thus assum that this collective experience value will be strongly degraded by a switch to online classes. Let’s take the hypothesis of a degradation of -70%, which means that when a course is suddenly switched to an online version, the collective experience from such a course will be 30% of its face-to-face equivalent.

In summary, we can write this down as a formula, first for a face-to-face education:

V(face-to-face education) = V(Knowledge) + V(Brand) + V(Experience)

And now for online education, using the same components:

V(on-line education) = 80% V(Knowledge) + V(Brand) + 30% V(Experience)

As a result, we get a comparison in terms of value:

V(face-to-face education) > V(online education)

The difference in value between the two modalities is due, as we have seen, for a small part to the lack of fluidity in the transfer of knowledge (loss of -20%), and to a larger extent, to the difficulty or impossibility to replicate a human experience with the same quality as in face-to-face education (loss of -70%).

Some last thoughts

• This model – like all models – simplifies reality. But – as with all models – it is through this simplification that we can begin to establish a basis for understanding and reflection. Your comments or suggestions are therefore welcome.
• The degradation mentioned here will only take place if there is an abrupt shift from face-to-face training to full-online training. There will be no degradation – at least we hope not – if online training had time to be designed from scratch by taking advantage of the great richness of online learning, including tools that allow you to do things online that you can’t do as well in a face-to-face setting. But in this case, it takes 6 months to a year (at least?) to design this new type of training.

Professors and lecturers have made an important distinction since the very beginning of containment: as noted in the previous blog posts, most of us did not actually do distant learning during the covid-19 crisis. Rather, we switched abruptly to online emergency teaching. This is not the same thing, particularly in terms of value delivered.

This blog post is part of a series of reflections on the Coronavirus / Covid-19 crisis and the immediate transition from my face-to-face courses to online classes.

Here is the continuation of my experiments on the abrupt switch of all my classes into an online version. I quickly realized that I had to make a mutation of my whole environment (i.e. get rid of my Doctor Jekyll syndrome and forcefully mutate into Mister Hyde). Here is a list of all the little tricks I have tried to put in place alongside this mutation, including false good ideas and safeguards.

Before class

As previously noted, the preparation of an online course requires much more time and attention to detail than the same session of face-to-face classes. To give you an idea, my first « decent » online course consisted in 17 distinct sequences for 3 hours of online session. This means I had a checklist with the 17 different parts of the course, and for some parts I even wrote the outline of my speech. It might sound silly, but when you know from the start that the course is recorded and that the video will be available for later viewing, you are much more concerned about the messages you are going to convey, both in form and substance.

One of my opening speeches at the beginning of the course was: « I’m trying new things ». This very simple sentence actually conveyed several messages:

• it gave me justification to have asked for some last minute assignments – even though this should not be done in such ciscumstances, because of the additional stress it can cause;
• this contributed to a shared responsibility of reinventing this course, or in other words, the fact that I had a right to make mistakes;
• it also helped share my stress on this new experience…

As you might recall, during the Dr. Jekyll period I experienced low participation from online students. So I prepared in advance some conditions for active participation:

• I created groups of 5 students arbitrarily. For this I made a mistake. I realize now that I should have followed to the letter the 2nd law of pedagogics online, i.e. sticking to the simplest. Instead, I tried to find funny names for the groups, to get a bonding effect. Not only did this take me quite a long time to find original names (« Sweet Salsa », « Diwali Party », « Bastille Day »…), but in the end, this triggered a disconcerted reaction from one student, who took it as my desire to regroup students according to cultural stereotypes. This required an apology and a rearrangement of the groups – and therefore a big waste of time and energy on the night before class. Since then, I am no longer looking for originality, only efficiency: the groups are called group 1, group 2, group 3…
• Once the groups had been formed, I told the students in advance that they would have to answer certain questions during the course: 2 or 3 groups had to work on a course question, for which I shot a small video with one slide explaining what I expected of them. For other groups, I asked to do a search on the Internet and told them that I would ask them for a synthesis during the course. Finally, for some other groups, I warned that I would ask them a question during the live course, and that I would expect them to be contributors. The purpose of all this planning was to avoid cold calling and subsequent awkward silences: they were warned in advance (warm call), so they could prepare themselves. Moreover, the fact of asking the same mission to 2 or 3 groups allowed me to solicit 10 to 15 students for a given task. Given that I currently have about 50% of the students actually present online, and that some of them suffer from « digital timidity », I expecting that out of 10-15 students, there would be at least 2 or 3 who would indeed be participating…
• On the morning of the class, I only had to print out the list of groups and names to check which students were actually connected. Then, instead of calling the groups by their number, I called out collectively all the connected students by their first name.

At the beginning of the class

• For each course where I meet the students for the first time, I start with a short description of the computer tool (Zoom or Blackboard Collaborate):
  • the controls they can activate;
  • access to Chat;
  • the discipline of turning off the microphone;
  • asking to talk by raising a virtual hand…

• Having done that, I ask each student to say hello in turn.
  • I call out a first name, asking them to activate their microphone and camera, wave to everyone and say hello.
  • In the first class where I did this, maybe because of the surprise effect, I had up to 1/3 of the students actually activating their camera; after the surprise effect, in the 2nd class with the same students, I had only 2 out of 27 students activating their camera… There was even a student who asked in the chat if his classmates could make the effort to switch on their camera to say hello – but that didn’t change anything. That said, when you see what a camera accidentally plugged in can do… (caution, explicit video! #teleconference)

• In the logic of my mutation into Mr. Hyde, this really raises the question of changes that need to be imposed in order to obtain an online course experience as satisfying as a face-to-face course – even though the elements of each experience would be different. It is a new language, with new tools and new reflexes. And the first reflex when faced with a language you don’t know well… is to stay silent. Having said that, one hypothesis is that the reflexes depend on age or context:
  • in the majority of companies that experience online meetings, the courtesy rule (most often imposed…) is that everyone should have their camera on.
  • This may be due to the work context, but from my initial feedback, I see that it is also a question of age: Executive MBAs (whose average age is around 40) all activate their camera during a course, whereas Master students (average age = 23) do not.

Screen sharing

As I experienced during my first week online, sharing of the screen and/or documents has to be as fluid as possible. Here are a few ideas and tricks that I have tried, with varying degrees of success:

• It’s a real plus to be able to use pencils to highlight some parts on a slide or to write / draw on the screen.
  • Some applications, such as Zoom, allow you to use a drawing toolbar above any shared screen – Blackboard Collaborate allows this too, but with far fewer tools. Also, in Blackboard Collaborate, this might cause delays (lag), so that when you say « this is here that the problem lies », students take 3 seconds to see the arrow you have drawn, like a movie where subtitles are not synchronized with the dialogs.
  • An alternative is to share a Powerpoint slideshow and activate the pencil in Powerpoint to draw directly on the slide (Ctrl-P for Pen, Ctrl-E for Erase, or, with a touch screen, just tap the screen to see a small pop-up menu that displays the pencil or eraser).
  • You can also use another software dedicated to note-taking and drawing: I’ve been using OneNote for years in amphitheaters where it was not possible to read the whiteboard from the last row, and this works like a charm online.
  • For all these tricks, it is even better to have a touch screen and a pen (or even a Wacom tablet, but not too small – for me, the A4 /Legal format is comfortable). With those tools, you will gain precision in your handwriting / drawing.

When it comes to document or screen sharing per se, most visio applications (Zoom, BB Collaborate) only allow you to share one document at a time. This means that when you want to change documents, you have to cancel the sharing of the first document, before you share another screen. However, the thumbnails of open documents are not always refreshed in Blackboard Collaborate, which means that several documents (especially PPT slideshows) are displayed with the same image: you have to pick a document at random, praying that it is the one you want, and by the law of the buttered toast, you often end up sharing the wrong document, so you have to start again and take another pick at random… So I opted for 2 alternative systems:

• Firstly, I use different formats for documents. One of my slide deck will be in PPT format, and will therefore be opened in PowerPoint; while another deck of slides will have been exported in PDF format, and will therefore be opened in a separate PDF reader; finally, if I need some static images, I have made screenshots of those in advance, and I open them either in an image viewer or in OneNote. Of course, this leads to having several applications open at the same time, with the memory problems that can arise. But at least, with this solution, each document is easily identifiable, and sharing is much smoother, since all applications are already open.
• Secondly, I open 2 or 3 different browsers: Google Chrome – which is not my favorite browser, but the one that Blackboard Collaborate works best with; Firefox for my online polling application (Wooclap), with the administrator’s rights; Opera, for the same Wooclap application, but this time to get what the students see on the screen. The alternative solution of having a single browser with multiple tabs open is less convenient:
  • within the same browser, you cannot be « logged in » and « anonymous » at the same time – unless you use a plugin, if there is such plugin;
  • navigation between tabs is not as easy as between applications – you have to learn one more keyboard shortcut – if there is such a keyboard shortcut.

• These 2 alternative systems allow to switch very quickly from one application to another (Alt-Tab on Windows, Command-Tab on Mac) and so, to make a discerning choice on which screen to share.

• Some of my colleagues use a 3rd solution: a 2nd computer or a tablet next to the main computer, to display the « student side » in parallel.

Tentative conclusion

This requires indeed a lot more concentration. Manipulations are numerous, you have to follow a complex pedagogical thread, and you must have an eye on everything. Here are two anecdotes from my last week:

• Since I use a lot of keyboard shortcuts, I sometimes trigger new unexpected events on the computer, like exotic Apps that are launched, obfuscating my screen.
• At one point, a student raised his hand, and I told him to unmute his microphone and speak… I waited… Then told him that we could not hear him… And waited again. After fumbling with my controls, I realized that I had accidentally muted my speakers, and everyone could hear him but me… So I put my speaker icon on display on my screen, and now I regularly check it.
• Chat can be a challenging tool also. Whenever students are chatting, there is visual sign on the screen, and even though I choose not to look at the Chat immediately (but only after having finished my explanation), the brain is a fickly thing and I am sure that I am not 100% concentrated anymore. Those are distractions in an environement that requires a lot of concentration…

Considering all those improvements and changes, my classes went reasonably well. Indeed , compared to the first « Dr. Jekyll style » courses, the changes I made to my online teaching style seem to have paid off:

• students participated significantly more, almost reaching the level of a face-to-face session.
• The Chat allowed some students who were more elusive to express themselves at length without having to participate orally. Some students also used the Chat to pass on humorous reactions about a concept or the arguments of a fellow student, all with excellent wit (cohesive humour, rather than aggressive mockery).
• I see this as a reward for my own efforts – duly publicized to the participants 😉 – but still with an efficiency ratio to discuss. Indeed, it takes me several hours more work than for a face-to-face course… just to get back to about the same level of participation.

Finally, this is still a work in progress, each week bringing its own little batch of improvements – and many new uncertainties.

“You start a question, and it’s like starting a stone. You sit quietly on the top of a hill; and away the stone goes, starting others…”

Robert Louis Stevenson, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde

This blog post is part of a series of reflections on the Corona virus crisis and the immediate transition from my face-to-face courses to online classes.

After general thoughts, let’s move on to a field report. Last week, I had the opportunity to test different online teaching setups. I will talk more specifically about 2 experiences, the first one and what I learned from it, and the last one, with all the modifications I tried to put in place to alleviate the initial disappointments.

This post will cover the first experience, or the Dr. Jekyll effect.

Some background: this course was a course shared with one of my colleagues. She was in charge of the first half (1h30), then I took over for the second half (1h30). My part consisted in debriefing a case that the students had previously handed in. This meant showing a few of their cases and commenting on them.

Before the class
A classical (face to face) needs preparation, of course. An online course takes even more preparation, in at least 3 distinct directions that can take a lot of time.

• First and foremost, there is the technological aspect. I had opted for a solution that was both simple (to follow the 2nd law of pedagogics) and ambitious, because it required juggling between several applications: Zoom with screen sharing, and Google documents. The first piece of advice I could give is to really do some training « like in real life » before the class. This allows to discover things that afterwards seem obvious, such as taking the precaution of opening all the necessary documents before the course, so that screen sharing can be done immediately, without having to wait for a given application to be launched, or a document being loaded.
• Communication with students. According to my first law of pedagogics, I had resolved to maintain regular communication with the students. As a matter of fact, there was no need to push in this direction: the implementation of the online course required many types of interactions with the students before the course even started:
  • To begin with, a few informative e-mails indicating the solutions I had chosen and the links to attend and communicate (the link to my Zoom room where the course would take place; the link to the question sheet shared from Google documents; answers to questions on logistics).
  • I also shot a small 2-minute video showing how to use Zoom from the student’s side, and giving some instructions for the class – for example, that all students mute their microphones to avoid noises in the background (reminder: almost all students are in confinement in apartments shared with other people, and possibly young children or animals…). It was also a test to see how easy it is to shoot a short video with Zoom => yes, it is easy, and it allows to relocate part of the content « outside of class ».
  • Finally, I proposed to do a « trial run » two days before the course, i.e. a session of 15 minutes to test the technological solutions. Here again, and even if only 4 students were present, this session was very beneficial in bringing out the problems that can arise in a real situation.
  • In retrospect, I see several beneficial effects from this abundance of communication. On a basic level, it sends the message that I am working for my students, and that they are not being left alone in this situation. On a less obvious level, it prepares the students for the online course experience, by giving them a few things in advance of what is going to happen (written communication of questions, sharing documents with online annotation…). And finally, maybe it can create a sense of committment, by convincing students to really attend the online course, instead of passively waiting for the recorded session for deferred viewing. In other words, it helps to make them a little less « passive listeners » and a little more « actors in their learning ».
• Coordination with colleagues. In the case of an online course, there is a lot of hidden time that does not necessarily appear as such. The coordination with my colleague for our 2 classes required several exchanges by email, phone calls and a Zoom training session. Once again, as obvious as it may appear, there’s a huge difference between intellectual knowledge (« you’ll see, Zoom is like Skype »), and the simulation of a course session (for example, thinking about launching the recording of the session 😉 ).

During class

This first experience was the opportunity to experience several discomforts.

• The key discomfort was to realize that during an online class, everything becomes extremely slow. Juggling between different activities adds each time a small amount of latency (« lag »), with the corresponding stress building up. What one does naturally in a physical classroom, without even thinking about it, requires much more concentration when doing an onlinecourse.
  • For example, while displaying slides, you can grab a felt tip pen at any time and begin write on the board. Online, this means that you have to activate the annotation bar (lag), then choose whether you are going to type a text or draw, because it is not the same tool (lag), then click on the chosen tool, then draw on the slide above your text (lag), then select the eraser to erase the drawing (lag), then select the mouse arrow to return to the slide scroll mode (lag). Of course, in such a complex sequence, there are a lot of mishaps and idle times… In several occasions, I found myself scribbling on a slide when I wanted in fact to scroll to the next slide. So [select eraser], [delete], [select arrow], [scroll slide]…
  • And yet, those are simple manipulations. Comparatively, it will take an even longer time to share a given document on the screen. In these cases, one of the lessons I have learned is to choose when (not to) apply the advice that radio hosts know: avoid silence on the air (« dead air ») at all costs. Indeed, when we fumble with controls or wait for a document to appear, we all tend to repeat the same words and excuses over and over again: « You’re going to have to wait a bit… », « Ah, it takes a while to load… », « Sorry, my computer is slow… ». In fact, it’s an attempt to fill the silence, without conveying any real information. So I suggest two alternative strategies:
    • Silence. Please avoid try to fill the silence. Take advantage of this situation to breathe. Tell yourself that everyone has earned this silent break, both the teacher who stops talking for a moment, and the students who can relax for a while. A short sentence such as « take a deep breath while you wait » can even explicitly signal that it’s a mini-break.
    • Moving into metacommunication. A strategy not to be used systematically, as it requires a minimum of preparation. This consists in commenting on the situation. For example, « as you can see, it takes time to load. Then again, you will often have the role to conduct meetings remotely. So my question is: which solutions would you use to avoid the discomfort of this waiting time and/or to continue to motivate your listeners? « It can also be « use this moment to take stock of what we have just said. If you had to summarize in a few key ideas what we’ve been talking about for the last 20 minutes, what would you write?« 
  • There’s also what I call the double lag.
    • First, there is the technological lag: between the moment I draw on the screen and the moment it is displayed on the student’s screen, there is a lag that depends on the quality of our respective Internet connections and the power of our respective processors. This means that when I ask a question, it can take no less than 3 seconds, and often more, before the students actually hear it.
    • And there is also the human lag. In a real-life classroom, when I ask a question, there is always a silence that follows. Indeed, the students have to process the question to understand it; then they mentally look for answers they might give; finally they decide whether they are going to participate to share their ideas, and if the answer is yes, then they start thinking about the form of their oral participation. All this takes time, which might depend on the students’ brain speed, but all in all, it is never negligible. That being said, even when this happens in a classroom, not all professors have the same reaction to silence. In my classes on pedagogy, I use the MBTI (Myers-Briggs) model to show that lecturers generally have a type of teaching that corresponds to their own personality type. For example, if we take the first axis of the MBTI model, type E professors will tend to expect a quick reaction from their students. Once they have asked a question, they have their perception of relative time, and they will begin to feel discomfort as soon as silence lasts more than a few seconds: they will thus tend to react quickly, either by asking the question again, or by rephrasing or cold calling a given student – who might still be in his/her thinking process.
    • Now, in an online class, there is the cumulative effect of this double lag. Things take more time: even a simple conversation back and forth (« Are you okay? », « Yes, I’m okay! « ) takes a longer time online than in real life. So when it comes to more complex issues, with the effect of the double lag, it is better to learn to slow down real-life reflexes, to breathe, to get used to silence… This can lead to an « old and wise man » effect which is not bad. The students can feel that the rhythm becomes more relaxed, more reflective, and less oriented towards a dialogue in the form of a verbal ping-pong…
  • The loneliness of the black screen. Online, most (and, in my experience, all) students turn off their cameras. So this leads to teaching black screens. You can’t tell whether the student is nodding his head, if she’s taking notes in a concentrated way, if he’s very busy with a parallel discussion through e-mail, or even whether she has left the room… This leads to moments of loneliness, when we call Jim who had typed a question and we all wait for Jim to unmute his microphone… or to come back into the room eventually. When this is combined with a low use of the Chat by students, it feels like talking to an empty room.
• All of this leads to a lot of stress and a lot of consumed energy. Compared to a face-to-face course (which is already a tiring experience, on a physical, emotional and mental level), an online course requires to send out a lot more energy, and to exercise a lot more control – while having, comparatively speaking, a lot less feedback. In this first course, for example:
  • less than half of the students were connected
  • the Google docs sheet intended to receive the questions remained empty throughout the class
  • Chat was not used often, and when used, it showed its limits: when I ask a question, students think (double lag) and they want to type their answer quickly… at the expense of clarity! So I had some answers that were really difficult to use as inputs:
    • on the one hand, you want to praise the student who took the trouble to write and interact (positive reinforcement);
    • on the other hand, the message may not be understandable, or it may mean several different things. In short, it is a downgraded communication that can lead to frustration on both sides.

In my case, the demand for energy and concentration was further increased by the fact that this course is given in English, which is not my mother tongue… And even though I think I have a good level in English (at least enough to have delivered classes in this language for years), the online transition adds a difficulty because of all the unplanned elements. Let’s take an analogy.

• Let’s imagine that we tell a French manager that he’s going to have to make a presentation in English. So he prepares for it, he writes out his speech elements, the visual aids, and most often he repeats the speech in front of his mirror, he might even be timing his speaking time until he feels ready and in control.
• Now let’s imagine that the same manager is told that he will have to conduct a « fire and evacuation » drill in English. He doesn’t necessarily know the technical terms, because he is no fireman; he doesn’t know what will happen, who will interupt and when, or the nature of the questions that will be asked; he doesn’t especially have expertise in « fire evacuations ». In this second case, the experience of communicating in English will be much more demanding, both in terms of energy and concentration that are required.

To sum up, I felt like the nice Dr. Jekyll, used to an already well-controlled and comfortable life, who said to himself, « Even if I don’t know this new part of town at all, I just have to behave as usual ». Well, it’s not enough. It’s not enough at all. Hence the fatigue and frustration that came from this first experience in the form of a baptism of fire.

In the next blog post, we will see my next classes, and my progressive mutation into Mister Hyde… (work in progress 😉 )

“Here then, as I lay down the pen and proceed to seal up my confession, I bring the life of that unhappy Henry Jekyll to an end.”

Robert Louis Stevenson, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde

This blog post is part of a series of reflections on the Corona virus crisis and the immediate transition from my face-to-face courses to online classes.

Here is the report of some experiments I have done in the past few days, with the corresponding links. To use again the idea of Magnetic North that I mentioned in an earlier post, I applied the equivalent of Isaac Asimov‘s 3 laws of robotics. For my readers who don’t know about these, those 3 laws are interlocked

1. The first law is the one with the highest priority;
2. the second law has a slightly lower priority, and is only applied as long as it doesn’t violate the first law;
3. the 3rd law has the weakest priority: it is only enforced if it does not violate the 1st or 2nd law.

I have therefore established my 3 pedagogical laws according to this scheme.

1. The first law is: « take care of my students »;
2. the second law is « accept that courses are in degraded mode »;
3. the 3rd law is « use collective intelligence ».

Here we go with descriptions and experiments.

• First law (priority over the others): take care of my students.
  • Communicate on a regular basis. Following the announcement of stage 3 in France, I sent several collective emails to my students. In accordance with what I said in the blog post on communication, the main idea was to inform my students that they had a contact person available if they needed help.
  • Conduct a survey. I realized very quickly that the technological solutions mentioned by my school (especially the digital team), or on the Internet (especially on Twitter, with the hashtag #CovidCampus) were solutions that assumed that the students had an advanced digital environment. However, between the closure of the school premises – where there is Wifi everywhere and we have dedicated and comfortable workspaces – and the return to their home countries, I needed to know what the working environment of my students was. So I sent them an online survey to learn more about their hardware + Internet setup, to check whether they had already had online courses, and to find out what their needs might be for the next sessions. Fortunately (thanks to the 3rd Law), I was able to use an online survey that an American Professor had designed and shared (link here). It was also interesting for statistical purposes: for students that I had already encountered in real life in class, just under 50% of the students responded to the survey, and only 20% answered questions that required slightly more detailed answers (for example, expressing their personal needs); on the other hand, for those courses in which I had not yet met the students in real life, the response rate dropped to less than 25%. Although the sample is not statistically significant, having had face-to-face courses might increase digital engagement when moving to an online course.
  • React quickly. In the needs expressed by my students, there were concerns about different aspects of the course: would there be an online presence/absence check? How to organize for group assignments? How to ask questions during an online course? Was it possible to avoid using the whiteboard in the classroom, as it was not legible on video (this was before the announcement of total confinement in France)? For all these general questions, I sent emails with adapted rules. For special requests, I used individual emails.
  • Show adaptability and imagination. Here’s an example that amused me in its different layers of complexity: several students worried about the poor quality of the work they would have to hand in by Monday. Indeed, due to travels home or other mishaps stemming from the coronavirus crisis, they could not communicate as smoothly as before with their work group, so they were anxious about the poor grade they might get. My first response was to say that this assignment would not be graded, because the most important thing was not to get a grade, but to learn… Then I thought of the opposite case: a group of students who had been working for weeks to deliver professional quality work. How would these students take the last minute announcement that their work would not be graded, and their efforts unpaid? So I opted for a slightly more complex proposal: all groups had to hand in their work by the deadline, regardless of the level of completeness, but each group had the possibility to request individually that their case not be graded (even though I promised to give them a detailed feedback). One can go very far in imagining all possible scenarios. Suppose a group had asked to be graded, and then got a bad mark: how should we deal with this siuation, compared to a group that chose not to be graded, and whose average grade would not suffer from the last assignment’s quality?
• The answer lies in the application of the 2nd law: avoid complicating things, deal with each situation as it comes up, instead of trying to foresee everything at the beginning (theory of incomplete contracts) .

• 2nd law to be applied (only if it does not violate the first one): accept that the course will be in degraded mode.
  • KISS (keep it simple and stupid). Telling myself that the online course will not be as interesting as a face-to-face course was ultimately quite liberating: it’s not about striving for perfection, but aiming for a minimum of efficiency. This can be done in a few very simple steps.
  • Rely on the tools I already know. Rather than investing time in reading, judging, and self-training on new tools, I prefer to capitalize on the solutions and environments I already know. And whenever possible, by aiming at technological frugality: not all students necessarily have access to a webcam or a broadband connection that allows video broadcasting. For example, recording a PowerPoint presentation with an audio commentary will end up in a degraded version of a lecture that has the advantage of being very light to transfer (even though it is probably dreadfully boring to follow…).
  • Reasoning in terms of piling up bricks. Following Maslow’s hierachy of needs, it is only once the basic needs are met (here, being able to display slides with an oral comment) that one can worry about adding more things. Here is my indicative pile of bricks to date, starting from the basic need and only moving up when the previous level is secured:
    1. scrolling through slides with an oral commentary
    2. give students the opportunity to ask questions live (for example, in writing in a shared Google drive document or – more complex – a chat utility or – more complex – an oral interruption)
    3. have an online whiteboard solution to be able to draw or type text
    4. …
    5. …
    6. Allow students to vote live on issues (e.g. with Wooclap or Klaxoon).
    7. Allow students to group together from time to time in small virtual workrooms before returning to the collective digital « amphitheatre ».
  • Back to basics. For me, the seminal question is pedagogical, not technological. It’s a question of very quickly identifying the key messages that you absolutely want to get across during a course session. Moving to an online course will require adapting resources to ensure that these key messages are actually conveyed. In other words, we follow the logic of Mies van der Rohe, less is more.

• The 3rd law (only to the extent that it does not contradict the first 2 laws): use collective intelligence.
  • I see 3 sources of collective intelligence: my colleagues; my students; the Internet.
  • My colleagues. The digital department of my school has quickly set up training in face-to-face or with distance learning, and this has helped enormously to spread knowledge about our digital tools. At the same time, we exchanged a lot of e-mails on the mailing list of all the professors. This allowed me to notice that there are a lot of profiles with a lot of different pedagogical needs within the school (school in the broadest sense, since we have several thousands of external lecturers…) Faced with this great diversity of questions, I realized very quickly that appealing to collective intelligence would most of the time contradict the 2nd law (go for simplicity).
  • My students. With the survey that I sent, I was able to collect some opinions from them, but not really advices on how to do an online class. Except for one student who suggested that I do the lectures with a touch tablet, I only received contributions focused on questions, not suggestions for solutions. I also opened a shared Google drive sheet, so that students could ask questions before class. To date, no questions have been asked. My conclusion is that here too, we cannot expect too much in terms of collective intelligence. In the long run, it will be worthwhile to come back to the respective roles of each one and their respective commitment. I summarize my views by deliberately exaggerating: in an extremely controlled course, where the professor announces strict rules of the game and a pre-set framework, it is not enought to have a Coronavirus crisis and an empowerment message (« do not hesitate to take charge and organize collective solutions among yourselves ») to change the behaviors established since the beginning of the semester. Our economy of attention very easily becomes an economy of passivity.
  • Internet. Praise be given to Twitter, which has made it possible to federate the individual efforts of hundreds of higher education professors around the world. Using the hashtags #CovidCampus, #CovidCampusFr, #PivotToOnline or #PivotOnline has saved me precious time by reading the advice posted by professors who were faced with the same questions as I was. It also made me realize that I really had to keep on track with the 2nd law: indeed, driven by their pedagogical enthusiasm, and most often, by years of investment in setting up online courses, most teachers were suggesting tools and solutions that would require several weeks – maybe months – of design and self-training before one could effectively deliver an online course session. Besides, not all universities have made the same technological choices: Moodle or Blackboard, Microsoft Teams or Collaborate, Google drive or Dropbox?
  • In short, the resources available online allowed me to learn very quickly about the possible options, but it was the filter of the 2nd Law that allowed me to avoid getting drowned in solutions that were too costly in terms of time and/or energy. Once again, the pedagogical quest has priority over technological tools. This is why, paradoxically, I chose to put collective intelligence as the 3rd priority…

That’s about where I am right now. What about you? Do you have any advice or comments?

This blog post is part of a series of reflections on the Corona virus crisis and the immediate transition from my face-to-face courses to online classes.

It has been announced yesterday night: France has just reached stage 3 of the Coronavirus pandemic. After the announcement by my school of the closure of the premises for all students (all courses are now switched online), we are now moving to a situation of national containment.

This means even more social distancing, and that justifies a post on the adaptation of communication. As with the previous post, I am interested in any reactions or suggestions.

In this situation of social confinement, communication is going to be very much through e-mail. So here are the few solutions and rules I have put in place in the last 48 hours. Most of these solutions are inspired by my « e-mail management » course.

• Manage the incoming flow. I have set up an automatic reply message to any email I receive. Here is this message, if you ever want to use/edit it for your own purpose:
  • Considering the Coronavirus crisis and the  closure of ESCP Business School campuses for students, I am working on switching all my courses online. This extra workload is huge.
  • As a consequence, please note that I will not answer all my emails, and if I do, this will be with longer delays than normal.
• Manage the backlog. It was necessary to take into account all the people who had sent me e-mails in the last days or weeks, and to whom I had not yet replied. So I wrote a message based on the concept of e-mail bankruptcy. Here is this message, if you ever want to use/edit it for your own purpose:
  • This is a generic message in response to an email you sent me in the last few days/weeks.
  • The situation is now going to be complicated for me, since due to the Coronavirus crisis, ESCP Business School is closed to students starting Monday morning. So I have to transform all my courses into an online equivalent – with all the additional investment that this represents, and all the losses in quality that can be expected. This means that in an already very busy schedule, I have to prioritise the fact that the course hours are guaranteed, but in a totally different format. In other words, I’ve gone into « crisis management » mode.
  • If your request was important and can’t wait (you are the sole judge), do not hesitate to send me a new email with your precise request. Otherwise, please contact me again when the situation is stabilized. NB: I do not wish to break off the communication. If you want to contact me, do not hesitate, but please note that I will not be able to answer all messages.

• Keep in touch with my students. In reference to what I have previously called my first magnetic north on my moral compass, I try to send one message per day to my students, in order to partly compensate for social distancing and to maintain a group spirit around our school values. As regards substance, these messages are mostly informative, to indicate the progression of my reflections and the decisions I have been led to make in the past hours. In terms of form, I always try to include 3 elements in my messages:
  • A positive state of mind, which I summed up with the slogan « Keep Calm and Carry On », whose story I have always found fascinating. As far as I am concerned, and given my personality type (MBTI/Enneagram), this state of mind includes humour and empathy, based on our common values.
  • Every time I announce a change in the rules of the course, it always goes in the same direction: alleviate the pressure. For example, extending the deadline for submitting a case; what was compulsory being now optional; reducing the expectations on a given assignment; announcing that a case will not be graded in the end, but that each student will get feedback.
  • Finally, as far as possible, I indicate that I am open to any requests or concerns, and that students can contact me at any time.

What about yourself? Would you have any advice on the topic of communication in times of confinement?

Today I am starting a sequence of reflections on e-learning, following the Coronavirus crisis. Indeed, even if to date the French government has not yet taken a position on the shutting out of universities and grandes écoles, I prefer to anticipate, even if only mentally, on how I am going to move my face-to-face courses to online classes.
I will use these posts to document, like a log book of a journey, the progress of my thoughts.
Context is extremely important here: it is not a reflection carried out in advance to design a future distant course. We are in the middle of a crisis, my school may close overnight, and I would have to transform all my face-to-face courses into a 100% online equivalent with 24 hours notice… Thus I wish to share my reflections as a work in progress, and I hope to receive suggestions, comments, and sharing of experiences on this subject.

Before talking about the practicalities, it seems important to me to define a few fundamental principles that will serve to guide my choices.

In the moral compass that I set for myself, there will be a double magnetic north:

• My top priority will be to take (even greater) care of my students. This crisis is extremely difficult for them, knowing that the majority of my students are non-French. We have a lot of Italian, Chinese, Indian, German students, and so on. These students are far from their families, they are housed in Paris or the surrounding area, in (basic) student accommodation. In a normal situation, they are already very often in need of advice and support (and it is an important part of my profession to answer those questions). If my school were to close and their only contact became the online courses they would have to take, it would require even more listening, understanding and adaptability from my part.
• The 2nd magnetic north that will guide me is the conviction that a rapid transition from a face-to-face class to an online course can only result in degraded conditions. My current courses were not designed to be taught online, and if some people think that it is enough to have a film shooting of themselves teaching, they clearly demonstrate their incompetence on the subject of online courses. IMHO, the mistake comes from the vocabulary used: I see a lot of business schools talking about immediately switching to online classes. If I had to find an image, it wouldn’t be the image of the switch, which makes it seem as if you just flip a button to change the modalities, but rather the image of the machine translation. A machine translation allows us to quickly get a text in another language, but the speed has a negative counterpart: the product that is delivered is a (very?) degraded version of the original text. This can be used to understand the general meaning, but without the quality and subtleties of the original text.

Before moving on, I would like to specify 2 personal things:

• As far as online teaching is concerned, I was not born yesterday. I have designed several courses that were intended from the very beginning to be 100% online, some of them even being totally self-supported (i.e. my role was limited to moderating the discussion forums, answering students’ questions by e-mail, and grading the final exam – zero hours in teaching). I also had the chance to collaborate in writing pedagogical videos, I lead a pedagogy seminar in the school’s doctoral program, and for more than 2 years, I have participated with pleasure in pedagogy co-development groups, where we regularly work on online teaching issues in different programs. So it’s not like I’m discovering the subject today (even though there are people who are far experienced on this topic…) But I persist: switching overnight to a 100% online course will automatically result in a downgraded product.
• On the other hand, all this thinking and planning comes as an unexpected addition to a rather busy agenda. I have 2 books I’m working on for my publisher, a research article to modify, a magazine to publish, one or 2 conferences to organize, a son in internship and a daughter who is going to take the French Baccalaureate… So my posts will probably be short and badly written 🙂 (remember : it’s a log book).

Now let’s get to the subject: where to start?
I started with the most urgent: my next course sessions, which were originally planned to be held face to face in an amphitheatre, and could be converted into online sessions. For me, the first thing to do is to make a typology of each session. Indeed, not all course sessions are the same: some sessions consist in correcting a case previously handed in by students; other sessions incorporate activities that the students have to carry out, followed by a discussion; others consist of a more controlled course, where I show concepts and ask questions. It is therefore necessary to measure the characteristics of a given session in order to see what can be done in terms of distance learning.
For instructors / lecturers / professors who might be interested, I am sharing with you my first draft of a basic typology. It’s a tentative list of the main characteristics of what will happen during the lesson (to be improved):

• Distribution of speaking time or activity time: my students x% vs. myself y%
• Is the course delivered by several instructors (on different sessions, within the same session, invitated professionals…)
• What percentage of the course is devoted to students’ questions?
• What is the percentage of the session that I devote to the different media: slides %; writing or drawing on white board %; work on the computer with projection (Excel); video %…
• What percentage of my session is dedicated to student reflective work? How do the students give me/hand me back their reflections?
• How do I interact with the students? Do I choose who I ask the question to, or do I wait for someone to answer?
• Do I have focus more on a one-to-one style (I show my students that I recognise their individuality) or a more universal style (it doesn’t matter who asks the question, or who answers it, as long as it’s interesting)?
• Do I have a lot of students coming to see me at break time or at the end of the course? Do they ask the same questions they might have asked during class, or do they come at these times because they have a particular request they don’t want to make in front of everyone?
• To what extent do I feed on interactions or reactions? (even if only nods from the audience)

I’m sure the list can be expanded to provide a more accurate mapping of what the lecturer expects from a given session before it begins. While perusing this list of questions, you probably saw the value of doing such a mapping: it helps to know what is (more or less) transposable to an online class.
As a matter of fact, I put those class activities into 3 categories:

• Activities that can happen in more or less the same way whether it’s a face-to-face course or an online course. For example, displaying slides and commenting on them. This doesn’t challenge my idea of degradation: staring at your computer with a slide on it while you hear the teacher’s voice on the speaker is not the same as being in a classroom with the same experience – just because it is NOT the same experience.
• Other activities are not transposable as they are. They will require to find an « automatic translator »: how to replace writing on a whiteboard? How to question students online in order to create a dynamic? How to deal with individualities?
• Finally, there is a third category: activities that cannot be transposed online. Example: instantaneously capturing subtle reactions, or dealing with chatter (which indicates either a loss of interest in the class, or, on the contrary, a renewed interest in the subject that requires an exchange with classmates). In this 3rd category of things that cannot be put in an online class, what should be done? Should we reinforce the first 2 categories, at the risk of losing part of the wealth of the 3rd? Or should we be looking for shortcuts or innovations to meet the needs of the 3rd category, at the risk of spending a lot of time there, considering this is an emergency, last-minute situation? Once again, we have to accept that the course will be degraded.

That’s where I’m at right now. What are your thoughts on these subjects?

I was asked by a student – for the purpose of a school newspaper – to suggest to students « A BOOK THAT WILL CHANGE YOUR LIFE and WHY. »

Tricky question indeed.

I answered with the following :

Dear Student,
I have not one, but three (four) books in mind, none of them being a Finance book unfortunately 😉
The order is not important. If I were to advise only one, I would choose #3 The Mind Gym, but that would be a shame not to mention the others.

1) David Allen – Getting things done – the art of stress-free productivity
http://tinyurl.com/457jdvp
(in French :
S’organiser pour réussir
http://tinyurl.com/4ljuur5 )

David Allen presents and helps devise a system to organize yourself at work. Know what to do, in which order. How to access data, how to deal with projects, how to make sure nothing is forgotten. A very practical book that can save you hours in organizing yourself by finally focusing on the one important thing : doing things. Surprisingly enough, this is not taught in Business Schools…

2) Stephen Covey – The 7 habits of highly effective people
http://tinyurl.com/4f7yxuf
(in French :
Les 7 habitudes de ceux qui réussissent tout ce qu’ils entreprennent
http://tinyurl.com/4qsnbpj )

Bestseller. This book is a more profound version of the Getting Things Done book. Here, focus is made on Principles and Values, not on operational effectiveness. This is a very useful complement of the preceding book, not asking « what should I do next », but « what is important for me to do, and how to identify it ». It takes more time to digest, but it is definitely worth a read.

3) The mind gym (collectif)
http://tinyurl.com/5susrzx

Devised in 22 independent chapters, and based on research in neuroscience and sociology, the Mind Gym helps you « re-train » your brain to be more effective. Themes include the effects of optimism, the impact of visualization, the reduction of stress, how to be listened to, how to announce bad news, how to be more creative / do brainstorming… Every chapter is filled with real-life illustrations and ends up with exercises to « muscle up » your spirit. A must read for future executives.

4) I have other books in mind, but I feel they are more oriented for older people (35-40 years). Based on Carl Jung’s theories, they deal with personality type, and help to better understand how our personality is constructed, and how to deal with other personalities (e.g. at work, in teams). The operational tool is the MBTI test of personality type. The best book, but somewhat hard to digest, is Gifts differing, by Isabel Briggs Myers, http://tinyurl.com/6e2jqy4 . A much easier book (in French) is Deviens qui tu es, by Cauvin and Cailloux, http://tinyurl.com/4r8payt .

Sincerely,
Christophe Thibierge