10 Tips for Innovation Educators in the Virtual Classroom
1. Record Class Lectures
The unique learning environment introduced by Covid 19 has required additional flexibility. Anything from unstable financial situations to unstable wifi connections can cause additional student absences. Recording classes not only allows missing students to stay up to speed, but also allows students to replay portions of lectures and feedback that they may have missed or have trouble remembering.
2. Record Presentations
Consider allowing student teams to pre-record their weekly presentations to save class time and so that the Teaching Team and peers can prepare feedback ahead of time. This can free up class time for those teams to meet with the Teaching Team or TAs to ask clarifying questions and work together with oversight. (This is often done in breakout rooms, while the Teaching Team roves throughout them.)
3. Increase Brief Check-Ins
Student accountability is not an issue unique to the pandemic, but it can be harder to track in an online environment. For this reason, in addition to keeping abreast of personal, economic, or medical situations that may be impacting a student’s performance, it is extra necessary to schedule one-on-one check ins with every student. In innovation classes, which require a fast tempo and significant outputs, make sure your students are progressing appropriately, and you can assist and intervene if something is preventing them from doing so (before Final Presentations)!
4. Utilize the Online Environment to Recruit Additional Mentors
The pandemic has had some positive effects as well; make sure you are taking advantage of them! One of the most important, is forcing everyone to get comfortable with virtual workspaces and video conferencing tools, while simultaneously giving people back commuting and transition time. Use this to your advantage by trying to capture additional mentors to motivate and assist your student teams. Many universities have leaned on mentors as extensions of the Teaching Team in the virtual environment.
5. Don’t Forget the Ecosystem
Don’t forget that the social ecosystem is a vital part of innovation. Find ways to nurture this ecosystem in the online environment through virtual meetups, coffee hours, or happy hours to keep students, mentors, and Problem Sponsors engaged. Round table “speed dating” of student groups and various mentors has been a successful method of cultivating new relationships in the past, as have in-class discussion techniques.
Allow time and space for students and the Teaching Team to connect on topics outside of class material. Encourage the type of bonding that would naturally occur in the classroom.
6. Find and Use Great TAs
Teaching any class in the virtual environment includes unique obstacles. TAs can be crucial to surmounting them and ensuring class runs as seamlessly as possible. TAs can provide another touchpoint for student teams, can ensure all virtual platforms are operating as they should for each class, and can help troubleshoot everyday challenges as well as the unique challenges presented by virtual or semi-virtual classrooms.
7. Find Ways to Encourage and Ensure Student Participation
One university uses a “Chat Bomb” method, in which the professor asks a question related to that week’s focus, and then has students all type their responses and hit send simultaneously. This encourages 100% participation in a virtual environment, in which less outspoken students can hide behind computer screens. Others grade class participation and explain the terms on week one of class (for example, typing a comment or verbally engaging may count for participation). ○ Another university assigns different students as “business advisors” to teams that are not their own each week. The “business advisor” offers peer critiques and an outside perspective, and gets participation points for fulfilling the role.
Similarly, another school has each team rate their top 3 peer comments each week and uses that as an additional metric for student participation grades, taking into consideration how helpful students are to one another in addition to how much they may or may not speak up in class. ○ Other Professors encourage “cold calling” from a full class roster to make sure students are remaining engaged with the material to encourage understanding.
Many Professors advocate for breaking the material into shorter lecture and activation blocks, breaking students into breakout rooms to complete activities related to the material in between lecture blocks. This also offers an opportunity for more timid students to engage. 8. Find the Technological and Communication Tools That Work Best for Your Classroom and Implement Them Ahead of Time
Slack, Microsoft Suite, Mural, Blackboard Collaborate, and Strategyzer are among the tools other professors have found helpful. For Slack, you can make a 3 channel for each team, in which they can communicate with one another and with TAs or the Teaching Team as needed.
9. Practice (Virtual) Interview Techniques
As they often do in person, students find the Beneficiary Discovery interview process online to be one of the most challenging aspects of the course to master. For this reason, professors have found it helpful to share interview techniques and offer mock Zoom interview sessions so student teams can master interview skills and learn about their problem as efficiently as possible.
10. Take Risks, but Solicit Feedback
This teaching and learning environment is very different from the one most Teaching Teams and students are accustomed to and have been prepared for. For this reason, it will sometimes be necessary for Teaching Teams to take risks and try out new techniques and tools to ensure their students are getting all that they can from your course. Lean into this classroom innovation, but as we encourage our students to, we suggest that you solicit feedback eagerly and often, and make adjustments accordingly in order to optimize your classroom for your specific cohort. Fear not, and innovate on!
The Best Practices in Covid-19 document is available for download here.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 International License. Licensees may copy, distribute, display, and perform the work and make derivative works and remixes based on it only for non-commercial purposes. This work was originally authored by Steve Blank, Pete Newell, and Joe Felter. Copyrights in this work are jointly owned by The Common Mission Project and BMNT, Inc.
For permission requests, e-mail contact@commonmission.us or write to:
Common Mission Project
410 Sherman Ave.
Palo Alto, CA 64109