Video chat side channel in a remote class (or an experiment not good enough to keep)
Video chat side channel in a remote class (or an experiment not good enough to keep) Talking about failure is hard. Talking about an experiment that didn’t completely fail but didn’t wholly succeed, is something that I could easily “sweep under the rug.” However, I think it’s important to share the good, the bad, and the ugly. It shows we are human and no one is perfect. Moreover, for this particular experiment, I could see myself rationalizing trying again, and I want to make sure I remember the lessons I learned. In Spring 2021, when we were teaching our CS2 class fully remote due to covid-19, I had a crazy idea. What if we gave students a second video chat outside the lecture Zoom meeting? What if we used this video side channel to simulate the “talk to your neighbor” practice that I used a lot in my lecture teaching? It did not go as well as I had imagined, and this blog post is a reflection on why we did it, how things went, and what we did when things weren’t working. [Also p...