院长安迪·博因顿
太阳城官网日期：2020年10月27日
在一个宜人的夏末早晨, 我们的聪明和适应力强的学生回到了我们中间, 匆匆走过小路，轻快地穿过富尔顿庄园的大门. 他们戴着面具，彼此保持着额外的距离, but chattering and waving to familiar (though partly covered) faces as they always do. I can’t tell you how gratifying it was to look out my window in Fulton and see this familiar scene for the first time in six months.
幸福的, 我们的学生仍然和我们在一起, 学习并与教授和同学互动. Yes, there’s a road ahead (and many students will undoubtedly exercise an option to 感恩节后远程完成学期)，但在我们学校，有一件事对我们来说是清楚的. 通过必要性, we have spearheaded new ways of teaching and learning that will carry us through the remainder of the COVID era, 并将对我们未来的工作产生影响.
I say this because bringing back students has required nothing less than a reinvention of the academic experience. 我们不得不发明新的教学方法, 建议, 在课堂内外调动学生的积极性, while maintaining strict safety standards including physical distancing. Our most absorbing efforts have focused on the courses that are taught simultaneously in class and remotely.
让我后退一点.
Like many universities, 太阳城网赌平台 reopened with a mixture of online and in-person instruction. Of special note are those hybrid classes, which offer a blend of in-class and remote instruction. 在卡罗尔学校, 我们把重点放在混合学习上, 用一种特定的方法跑步. And the keyword here is one that most of us haven’t used much since we were maybe seven years old—hopscotch.
Hopscotch is a teaching model aimed at reducing density in the classroom, with only half of the students (50 percent of a room’s capacity) physically present at any time. 在这种方法中, 教员在教室里现场讲授材料, 但是学生们被分成小组. 在星期二和星期四上课的情况下, 例如, 一组在周二亲自上课, 另一个在星期四. The ones not attending in person connect remotely in dorms, study rooms, and other spaces. 简而言之，学生们轮流在课堂上跳来跳去.
Roughly a third of Carroll School undergraduate courses are using the hopscotch hybrid model (another 40 percent are fully in person and the rest are fully online.) This is, no matter how you slice it, a crucial part of our fall offerings. 这也是我们面临的最棘手的挑战.
不用说, 我们的目标是让每个学生都能充分参与课堂活动, 与教授和同学互动, 不管他们那天是否碰巧在教室里. 我们能够在9月初实现这一目标, after a relentless innovation effort that centered on testing and experimentation and no small amount of staging during the summer.
We began by holding a session to test our existing capabilities in our classrooms. 有人扮演了教授的角色, with a sprinkling of us assuming the part of students in the classroom. Still others participated as “students” using Zoom from dorms and study spaces remotely around campus. 麻烦的地方开始出现.
Just one example: We noticed a significant time lag between what was happening in class and what the students online would be hearing remotely. It was a real problem because the delay would make it all but impossible for the full class to genuinely take part in the flow of conversations, 问题, 和交互. 我们必须尽快找到更好的办法.
经过多次原型, our solution involved deploying a combination of simple technologies: We placed small, 房间里到处都是廉价的麦克风, 去倾听教室的声音, so that remote students online could hear in real time the professor and any 问题 asked by their classmates. We also used the cameras on laptops rather than sophisticated classroom cameras to capture the action in the room. (幸运的是, 教室里已经配备了扬声器, enabling the remote student “Zoomers” to have their 问题 and comments heard inside the room.)这个解决方案奏效了! 教授和学生，无论是在课内还是课外，都会保持同步.
在这一点上, 我们把所有教员都请来了, 就我们迄今所学到的内容举行Zoom会议. Many faculty were already adept at Zoom and had terrific ideas about how to go forward. 下一阶段：练习，大量的练习. The faculty began their own live staging—groups of three coming together with a Carroll School staff member to run hopscotch practice sessions in classrooms of different shapes and sizes across campus.
在这些会议中, the professors grappled with logistical and technical 问题 big and small, 比如如何在放映幻灯片的时候出现在屏幕上, or even how to convey to students that they’re smiling behind the masks (one professor practiced smiling with her eyes, 尽管明智地使用表情符号有所帮助). 而教职员工则负责排除故障, a staff member would decamp to other parts of the building with a laptop, 登录Zoom, and make sure they could hear the voices in class and be heard through classroom speakers.
I won’t go on about the many other aspects of our experiment with hopscotch hybrid as well as online courses (ranging from virtual whiteboards and breakout rooms for student teams to constant technical support and the facilitating role played by teaching assistants). Suffice it to say that our “invention factory” (to borrow a phrase from Thomas Edison) is still chugging. 教师 members have continued to come together on Zoom and share their teaching practices and challenges for the current normal. 他们加入了自己的创新, like using not one but two devices in the classroom—one for showing remote students the whiteboard, 另一个是同时向他们展示整个教室.
更重要的是，我们的学生的反应是令人振奋的. 许多人表达了他们对上课的感激之情. They appreciate the opportunities for dynamic real-time engagement with their professors and classmates—whether they’re physically present, 在他们上校区的房间里, 或者在欧洲或亚洲.
我相信这些想法和成功的秘诀, 虽然是由百年一遇的流行病引发的, 会有战略应用吗. 那是另一个故事了, but we all know that the future of higher education was already pointing toward a creative blend of in-class and remote learning, 在冠状病毒之前. Without ever letting up on the experimenting and the staging, we’ll be ready for the next normal.
Andy Boynton is the John and Linda Powers Family Dean of the 太阳城网赌平台 卡罗尔管理学院.