Hybrid teaching is going to be more and more common and it adds several challenges (Raes et al., 2020). I normally try to avoid it because I know that I prefer to do it on-site or complete remote because it always feels like it’s hard to have an interactive lecture where the remote student will have as good experience as the local ones.
This time I was running my Creative Concept course as an on-campus course. Due to a recent outbreak of COVID in the class, several students were feeling well but still in quarantine and did not want to miss the lecture so they challenged me to do it in a hybrid mode.
This lecture was focusing on engineering sketching (i.e. creating quick illustrative sketches to use in early phases to enhance communication)
In the LMS of the course, I have a short instruction on how to prepare and behave in a distance lecture ”How to survive a zoom meeting” including basic info and netiquette that I expect from students – that all students should use cameras in group work, preferably use the headset to avoid audio feedback, mute when not talking etc.
Overview of the lecture
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Phase
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What
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Local mode
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Distance mode
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Preparation
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Provided a lot of pens, post-its, and paper for the lecture. Set up a camera with PTZ and a microphone speaker with good echo cancellation.
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Prepared a Mural with different areas for each phase of the lecture.
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Intro
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Introduction to lecture
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Students in Multi studio arranging their own team zones. Using large whiteboards, flexible tables on wheels.
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Introduces the mural with the different phase
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Recap
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Going through a recap with the teams where they present what they have done in the team since last time
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Ensuring on-site teams to move in front of the camera when presenting
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Complementing the local team when needed
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Warmup
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The Heist – a warm-up game
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Sketching on an A3 paper taking alternative turns
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Sketching on Mural taking alternative turns.
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Why Sketching?
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Describe why we do sketching
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Presentation using zoom and local projector
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Show the video Solving problems with pictures by Dan Roam.
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Presentation using zoom and local projector
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Show a couple of examples
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Presentation using zoom and local projector
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Exercise –Engineering Pictionary
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Run a Pictionary game
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Students gather around whiteboards
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The remote team forms one group
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Reflections from Pictionary game
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Open discussion
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Present brainsketching
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Presentation using zoom and local projector
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Power of pictures
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Present and discuss why pictures often are easier to remember than text and what advantages they have over text.
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Presentation using zoom and local projector
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Exercise –Visual brainstorm
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Test a visual brainstorm
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Brainstorm on large post-its on the wall without talking to each other
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Brainstorm in Mural
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Presentation & reflection
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Visit each team and discuss the ideas, using an iPhone attached to a gimbal
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Present on the large projection screen
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Creating customer journey
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Presenting customer journey method
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Presentation and video in zoom/projector
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Exercise Red day-Green day
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Performing a short customer journey
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In teams on the whiteboard with posters
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In Mural
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Presentation & reflection
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Visit each team and discuss the ideas, using an iPhone attached to a gimbal
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Present on the large projection screen
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Zoom out
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Summary, to-do next step, references
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Presentation using zoom and local projector
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Feedback
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I like I wish
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Post it on the whiteboard
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In Mural
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Some detail for the more interesting parts is described below (with reflections in italic).
Warm-up game – The Heist
This part is done to get some energy into the room and is quite easy to perform both in a remote and local setting, and was not that hard to perform in hybrid mode. The game is inspired by a workshop run by
Howell & Hoftijzer (2018) at the Design Conference.
Intro to the course and the explanation of the warmup game.
The Heist warmup game in local and remote mode.
This part of the workshop worked well and both the remote students and the local students liked the exercise. It was quite obvious observing the interaction and fluency of the sketches that the remote session is much harder to perform, one of the participants had access to an iPad with a pen and could sketch much easier. It is pretty difficult to sketch with a mouse.
Exercise – Engineering Pictionary
This is an exercise that I run to convince the students that you can convey quite complex situations with just simple pictures. Normal Pictonary rules apply (draw a picture without using any letters, numbers, words, gestures, verbal cues, or nonverbal cues, and the team has to guess what word corresponds to the picture being drawn). In this case, we have quite complex sentences like “Changing the engine in a washing machine”, “Performing a chemical experiment”. I used the personal chat in zoom to send the sentence to the remote team (and the local ‘sketchers’ could see the sentence at the same time).
Engineering Pictionary
This is a fun part and appreciated by both the local and the remote team. Unfortunately, I forgot to mute the mick sometimes and it was very hard for the remote team to hear each other over the guesses from the local teams.
Visual Brainstorm
This was performed as a visual nonverbal brainstorm using pos-its for the local team and using Mural for the remote team. The challenge for this brainstorm was to enhance the visibility of dogs at night.
One of the ideas from the remote team.
To enhance the presentation part for the remote team I used an iPhone on a gimbal so I could walk around to the different teams.
A short animation from the presentation part (from the zoom session)
Bringing the iPhone with me around in the room was something that was really appreciated by the remote students and they felt “like being there”.
Exercise – Red Day – Green Day
This exercise is a variant of a customer journey where you describe two different scenarios a bad day (Red day) a good day (green day).
Red day – Green day from one of the local teams as well as the remote team
Also, this part went very well for both teams. Also here I used the iPhone on a gimbal to move around to the teams.
Reflections from students
The students liked the session and thought it was quite tricky to draw using a mouse. Audio is a problem for both teams, it was a bit hard for the local team to hear the remote team and vice versa. Also during some of the exercises, the remote team was both disturbed by the others and at other teams, they did not see what was happening in the rest of the classroom.
Feedback from the remote team
Final reflection
It is quite challenging for the teacher to run a course in hybrid mode. It is also quite demanding from a technical point of view. How to create an including experience for the remote team, good video and audio is a very important part, but it’s tricky to both collect audio from local students as well as send the audio out from the remote students to the local students. This time I used a Logitech conference camera with PTZ and a speaker/microphone box that worked fairly well, but the audio level was a bit too low to be heard clearly by the local students in the back of the classroom.
Also, it’s quite stressful to keep up with both the local and remote team, it would be nice to have a producer that can focus on controlling cameras, muting, adjusting audio, sharing the right things, and keeping an eye open in the chat window if something happens.
More about the course
This lecture is part of my Creative Concept Development course M7016T where I really challenge myself and test different teaching ideas. You can find a couple of other posts about my creative concept course here, and my experiences of running it in remote mode last year. I also have a paper (Törlind, 2020) describing the basic pedagogical approaches.
REFERENCES
Howell & Hoftijzer (2018) Exploring the future of Draw/sketch context in design education, Workshop Design Conference 2018
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Raes, A., Detienne, L., Windey, I., & Depaepe, F. (2020). A systematic literature review on synchronous hybrid learning: Gaps identified. Learning Environments Research, 23(3), 269-290.
Törlind, P. (2020). Implementation of integrated learning experiences and active learning in a creative concept development course. Bidrag Från 7:e Utvecklingskonferensen För Sveriges Ingenjörsutbildningar, 115–121.
