Moving maths online - Tutorials in 301

In moving the university online very suddenly, finding new ways for learning and teaching mathematics has been challenging and interesting. Hope Thackray works in the Maths and Statistics Help Service (MASH) and Jenny Hughes is an ex maths teacher who joined the digital learning team in March (the same week the university moved online!). Together we’ve been sharing ideas and testing out tools. This is a series of blog posts about some of the things we’ve tried.

The first is from Hope about the experience of running tutorials in 301.

Tutorials

The sudden shift from face-to-face to online meant that overnight, online teaching became a real (and daunting!) thing. This meant finding a way to change lectures, tutorials, seminars and 1-1 meetings into something which would work well for both the students and staff. Lectures were easy enough to fill the immediate gap, with most lecturers having previous versions of lectures available thanks to Encore, but anything smaller than that needed to have that interactive element between student and staff.

It became clear Blackboard Collaborate was suddenly the saviour of the online teaching problem, especially for us in 301. For 1-1s, staff and students alike could use the sharing features to take pictures of maths problems or draw on the interactive whiteboard. Since I had an iPad and Apple pencil, this was really useful for going through problems with the whole group. It wasn’t perfect but with it we found a whole new cohort of students who liked the privacy and flexibility that online learning gave them. They didn’t need to leave the house and find the building, and could ask difficult questions about their work without leaving the comfort of their own homes. 

Similarly, tutorial-style sessions, such as 301’s workshops, could be adapted to work within the Blackboard Collaborate environment. It was very quickly clear that the larger the student group, the harder it was to get a good flow of input from both the person leading the session and the students themselves. Anything beyond a ratio between staff members and students of about 1:8 meant that students were more unlikely to join in with conversation, whether using the microphone or on the chat. Similarly, if the students were resorting to using the in-built chat function, it would be a case of having to look out for both questions asked audibly and through the chat, which is very difficult to manage with one staff member alone.

Thankfully, Blackboard Collaborate’s Breakout groups function came in extremely handy for splitting up large groups of students into more manageable sizes. The groups could be either used to target specific problem areas (such as in the case of revision sessions) or just to make sure each group was sufficiently small to facilitate proper discussion. Once in the groups, students were automatically able to share content and discussions between others only within that group. The polling function was great for seeing where students' attention should be focussed (for example suggesting two different topics for revision and seeing which one students preferred).