Professor Erin McLeish & Foundations of CS Online
Interview: Erin McLeish and Foundations of CS
Erin McLeish: Well, I only started at NYU in January and I only signed on to teach one online course. It was very last minute, so I didn't have a lot of contacts or resources and I sort of felt like a fish out of water, trying to figure out how to put it all together. When I got started, it was really hard for me to even understand if NYU Classes was the right place to run my course or if I should have a separate web page. I attended an FITL workshop on NYU classes taught by Katerina Skiadis and she directed me to other resources. However, as a new instructor, I found it difficult to determine which tools would work best for specific types of courses. There was a lot of information that Katerina shared about how to create videos from PowerPoint slides or teach online in a way that would be very similar to what would be done already in the classroom environment. I have a lot of experience teaching live, particularly in more math-related, technical classes where there's a lot of nitty gritty. In my experience, if you flash videos with formulas and equations or if you just flop technical stuff on a video screen, students tend to zone out. So, I was looking for something that would allow me to give the impression that I was in a classroom. I didn't know how to set that up in the online environment and I had a lot of difficulty at the beginning of 2020 just knowing where to go.
JL: Did you have previous experience teaching online or were most of your experiences prior to 2020 teaching in the classroom?
EM: Oh, in the classroom! Although, one of the classes that I’d taught previously at McGill University was so large with 750 people and some students just didn’t want to come. In a classroom of 750, you have about 200 that actually show up. I've taught in person where students will come in, sit in the front row, put out their iPhone or an iPad, hit record on an app and close their eyes. That can be very discouraging when you're up there working hard to engage them!
JL: I bet!
EM: So we ended up offering the class both on campus and online. I had live classes and then I did recordings, but they weren't recordings of me teaching in the classroom. I actually did something very similar to what I’ve done here at Tandon and I posted it online so that everyone had access.
JL: Can you tell me a little bit about how Foundations of Computer Science works? What are the course’s objectives, assignment structure, and assessment plan?
EM: The course itself is not required for everyone in the master's program. It's more for those people who are missing the appropriate background and it's essentially there to prepare them for their future courses. There are five written assignments throughout the course, four in the current Summer version of the course. They have two tiny little presentations that they do and there’s a midterm and a final. That's it. The material itself is presented from bottom to top. Often people find technical and math stuff less intimidating when there's just a human being talking it out. So, I made for each lesson what I call a “Chalkboard Lecture'', which is a sort of light, non-technical visual explanation while I notate live and narrate with my voice. Lecture notes are embedded after the lecture on the lesson page. They explain in detail what was happening in the Chalkboard Lecture, but with more of the nitty gritty: Theorem three says this, here's the proof. Usually, I find that the students are more able to read the nitty gritty after they've had a light, gentle explanation of it first with a visual aid. Next there are practice problems for the week. The only live synchronous session that's organized where students are present is when we work through those practice problems at the end of the week together. They’ve already had the problems and we do them together. Each student has to present one of the problems.
JL: A flipped classroom!
EM: Yes! They do most of their learning on their own and then they work out the problems together online. But I feel like it really works best because it's more like a math class where, in the end, the students want to know how to do this stuff. And that's when they want to hear their teacher talk. Usually when you go to a live classroom, the teacher writes on the board theorem one, theorem two, proof one, proof two and then they get their homework and they have no idea what to do.
JL: That's really great. The flipped classroom is an approach that we generally recommend for online learning and I think applies to all subjects. Can you talk about your thinking in terms of audio-only voice narration where we don’t see you, as opposed to a video lecture or picture-in-picture? Was that intentional?
EM: You don’t see me. I actually did a lot of research on that. I looked online and I read a lot about it - different stuff from different universities - and a lot of people did recommend voice only. Alternatively, some of the stuff that I read said that with video, people look at your body, your hand gestures, which can make it seem more personable. But I also read some things online that said that sometimes the students absorb less because they're looking at your hands. So I did make some videos for the beginning of the class with just me talking.
JL: That’s your getting started video in the backyard! It’s great!
EM: Thank you! At one point I got chased by a bee and I had to edit it out. I'm running around in the backyard and my kids are screaming in the background.
JL: That’s too funny! From Tandon Online’s point of view, that video is effective. Not only because you're an expert on your course, but also because it's well lit with natural lighting and we can hear you, which is the most important thing. You've added effective and subtle titles on your own and I was personally a fan of the chirping birds.
EM: Those were real birds!
JL: It’s a lovely touch! Can you talk a little bit about your process for creating that video? What was your reasoning behind going about it the way that you did?
EM: Students want to feel like there's some kind of human contact, otherwise there's too much of a barrier. I was concerned that fewer people might be motivated to attend my office hours and actually interact with me directly, so I did the video to introduce myself. Also, there are statistically less women in math and I was encouraged by other women that I met as a student. I didn’t want to be anonymous. Now that I've taught for several years I have very often had classes where it’s about 90% men. It's nice for women to see women teachers.
JL: That’s really great and very important. At Tandon Online, we generally think it’s effective to see the professor during the lecture and we encourage professors who are currently producing content from home to use Kaltura Kapture with a small video of themselves (picture-in-picture) teaching in the bottom corner of the screen. There is, however, a lot of debate around this.
EM: I would do that if I was teaching a different course.
JL: What's different about this course?
EM: If I was teaching a computer science course that was more about algorithms, where it was less about formulas and technical material, I would use more video. In those courses, which I’ve taught in person in the past, you find that you're talking more about real life circumstances and describing things in your own words. But this course has very little of that. My main goal was to present the content as simply and as cleanly as possible.
JL: That makes sense. Are there any other videos in this course where you put yourself on camera?
EM: There are a few additional videos that I did for events. For example, I sent out a video for Covid where they could see my face and I could explain the situation. I’ll post a video where I describe how the final is going to work. The students can see me and I think it's just nicer.
JL: And do you post that as an announcement on NYU classes?
EM: Yes. I’ll post it to NYU Stream and then I'll just post the link in the announcement.
JL: That’s a nice personal touch and a great way to use the announcement feature in NYU Classes. Can you talk a little about your experience working with NYU Classes?
EM: It’s very similar to the learning management system I used at McGill. There are a few elements that you don't have enough control over, like the assignments tool. I find that students are often going there to look for solutions or other things related to the assignment. I like that I can organize everything in a sort of one-stop shop. I organize everything by the week and I can go into the week and see what I have to do. I think the whole manageability of the system is okay. I would like to have more control over that layout and I never figured that out. Maybe that is possible?
JL: It requires quite a bit of work and I’m not sure it’s always worth it. I noticed that you used the Tandon Online template.
EM: Did I? It was just set up like that.
JL: Okay, good! We hope it helped you organize your content more effectively.
EM: It did! Ah, but then I found the CSS file and I went in there and hacked a few things!
JL: Terrific! And you use a lot of embedded content, too. In each of your weekly lessons, you've got embedded Chalkboard Lectures from stream and you've got embedded PDFs for course notes. I was wondering how that worked for you and if you’ve found that the students enjoy working that way.
EM: I embed this stuff because I think that people get tired of clicking. Everything is there in one place and that makes people feel more in control of what is happening. I don’t know if most students will click to open the PDF file. They will likely download it to read it, although some people want to read it on their phone, so they can do that there without having to download the file.
JL: You've done two versions of this course online now, is that correct?
EM: Three, actually. I’m running one now, I ran one in the Spring, and one in the Winter term.
JL: What's changed between the different versions of the course? Have you made any modifications?
EM: Yes, I redid everything because the videos from last term were crap! I rushed the videos last term, so now I have nicer videos.
JL: No birds chirping?
EM: No birds chirping! I haven't changed anything about the structure of the course or the overall design. I added marks for participating in the live sessions, because I record those anyway, but I want the students to present a problem. Students get a set of practice problems every week and then some of those are in red font and they can pick one of those, not the blue font problems which are too easy. Throughout the term, they each do two presentations during one of our ten live sessions. They get five minutes to share their screen. They don't have to show their face and they talk us through their solution. They can write on a tablet if they prefer. I think it encourages them to participate live, but also just be less intimidated about solving math problems in front of other people. That's a scary thing.
JL: That will always be scary for me.
EM: I just want to provide an environment where students can feel comfortable making mistakes. They’re seeing other students make mistakes, and they see me correct them, and they see that it isn’t the end of the world. Oh, I forgot to mention that, after every assignment, they have an interview - which sounds really scary. After they submit the assignment, they schedule a 10 minute question and answer period on Google Calendar with me. Because everything is marked without an official proctor, even during the exams. It’s a feedback session and they get 20% of their assignment grade just to show up at that meeting.
JL: Wow. And what do you do during those meetings?
EM: I just ask them questions about why they did what they did. Why did you do this? Why did you do that? This was a nice idea! I think it reduces some of the copying or, even if they do copy, at least they're responsible for their own work. They've had to figure out what they copied so that they can answer me. And if they have a blatant mistake, they even get a chance to correct something. It helps to make them feel more like the point of the assignment is to learn and not so much to get it 100% right. A lot of professors have just dropped assignments because they feel like it's not evaluating them anyway and they're all going to copy. So instead I thought, let's make the goal to see how much they can actually learn out of this. And when you give them a 10 minute interview, they're much more motivated to learn. You have to talk to a human.
JL: I think that's a really great strategy for online learning, in particular which can feel so impersonal. And it's certainly incentivizing that part of their grade requires them to show up and have that face time. I think that's a really effective design.
EM: I have small classes, so it's possible. But, it wouldn't be possible if I had more students. I guess I could pick some at random and stagger them.
JL: Yes, or sessions, maybe?
EM: Right, we could do groups or something.
JL: Student feedback is ongoing throughout your course, which is a great design.
EM: Like, I have a lot of feedback. A lot of feedback. People write me emails constantly saying it's great. The only negative feedback I get is that they don't like that I make some of the questions hard. In terms of the teaching, I don’t get much negative feedback. In terms of the assignments, I’ll get: assignment three was a pain in the ass!
JL: It's a graduate engineering course, right?
EM: Exactly! I'm not going to throw you candy off the back of a truck!
JL: Well, I certainly wouldn’t have any hope of being able to pass your course! I wonder what type of online resources do you think you might have benefited from when you first set out to design your course. Like, it would have been great if there had been ...
EM: It would have been great if there had been some place online where I could have gone to find a list of, like: Hey, if this is what you need, then try these things, or try these apps, or try these tools. Every person at home already has some things, right? Like, they might have an iPad with certain apps on it or certain computers and maybe they want to use Kaltura. Maybe they want to use a combination of that. I had no idea. If I was going to do a live zoom session and problem solve, what were the different options that I had for writing and for talking? What happens if I already have a video or a student sends me a video of a problem and I want to edit it quickly? I’d never done anything like that and it took me hours of Googling to figure out what free things are out there and what I could use. A go-to place for things like that. There's lots about how you use Zoom. But then, once you have Zoom running, what should you do with it? What applications do you want to use? Does it make sense to use a desktop or a tablet?
JL: Vetted recommendations.
EM: Exactly. I did get recommendations from friends and other professors emailed me once Covid hit because I was already teaching online and they didn't know what to do. They were asking me about the tools I used.
JL: At this point, everyone's online teaching literacy has vastly increased. Now that you're on the other side of this big push into online learning and you're looking at the prospect of doing more courses online, is there a different resource that you could benefit from? What do you need now that could help you take your online course design to the proverbial next level?
EM: I would say the only other thing would be some kind of guideline that also helps professors learn about how people learn. I Googled a lot of that on my own. When you're educated, you're educated in your specialty area, but you're not educated on how to make a video so people will not fall asleep.
JL: Hahaha! Our team can definitely help with that.
EM: It doesn’t sound so complicated, but actually I think it is. Any kind of resource that would also say, just for people who are interested, click here. Of course, you hear things like short videos are great. But it would be nice to have a place where you could go and look at other possible designs. I had no idea even what another course site would look like because they're all private. I’d like to be able to go and look at somebody else's course design and see what works.
JL: Well, the good news is that what you've asked for describes exactly what we’re working on and what this interview is for. I might send you a link at some point just to see what you think.
EM: Sure!
JL: Thanks again for all your answers and for taking the time to talk with me today. I just have one more question: Do you have any advice that you would provide to other professors who are interested in following a similar process to you in building their next course? What would you recommend they keep in mind?
EM: I would say that, even in the beginning when I thought I was really interacting a lot with the students enormously, I felt like they would have liked even more interaction or communication because they felt like the online experience was less personal than what they had hoped for. So I would say to take how much time you think you're going to do - where you're interacting, either directly or in groups - then double it. At the end of the day, people respond to you just being yourself so find different ways of doing that. Either by interacting with little presentations or interviews, otherwise students can zone out for most of my live sessions. If they know that I'm recording the live session, it’s actually not as effective as I thought it would be. Half the people will come because I'll know that I'm recording it.
JL: Zoom fatigue is real. Thanks so much for your time today, Erin. I really enjoyed talking to you.
EM: Have a great day. Sorry there were no birds today, there’s just construction outside my window.
JL: That’s okay! Maybe next time!
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