ARE THERE ANY QUESTIONS?

Matt "Dean Dad" Reed reports on his son's return to college.  Some of it involves developments in classroom management.  "It’s still early, obviously, but he surprised me (and himself) when he reported that a couple of features of Zoom are actually more helpful than sitting in a classroom lecture." The first feature is one that I believe David Friedman once wished for in a traditional classroom.

In a large classroom lecture, it can be hard and/or disruptive to get the professor’s attention. But with the raise-hand function, students can show interest in a nonintrusive way. He reports that the professor stops lecturing every so often to call on the students whose hands are raised. It’s easy because they’re right there, all in a row.

Professor Friedman argued that students are risk-averse about asking questions in class. Perhaps they've had a bad experience or so with professors or instructors having trouble distinguishing a clueless question from an ill-posed profound question. I can claim no expertise in carrying that off, the best to do is always answer politely, and be humble.  Perhaps they're risk averse about appearing to be ignorant in front of their peers.  (Nerd tip: you're in that class in order to overcome that ignorance.)  Thus, when the professor asks if there are questions, nobody raises a hand.  It doesn't do much good for the professor to react to a visual cue, "puzzled," as the student might be puzzling out the logistics of the evening's social activity ...

His solution was to equip each seat with a foot pedal under the seat in front.  (Front Row Kids, by definition, will get involved.)  Then, any time a student has trouble following a point, he steps on his pedal, and the professor can look at a model board in the back of the room, and, when sufficiently many lights are illuminated (that could be as few as one light) stop and take questions.  The odds are that several of the students who depressed the pedal have the same question.

The in-class clickers of a few years ago had some potential for giving the professor real-time feedback on students not grasping the idea, and taking a time out.  Whether the question button in a Zoom conference is sufficient to offset all the other drawbacks of college by video conference remains to be seen.