Challenge:

Amidst the Coronavirus pandemic and the subsequent necessity to transition my classes to on- line lectures, the optimal way of doing so was not evident. As an optional course, aiming to give  students advanced physics knowledge in preparation for physics competitions encompassing 12  to 17 years old hard working pupils, the course had a vast and very successful background,  helping former students, myself included, achieve medals in regional, national and international  level competitions.

In sum, the challenge faced by me and my fellow professors consisted in finding the optimal way  to give the online lectures, making sure the students were engaged and learning the necessary  theory.

Selection:

Given the unmatched event and subsequent lack of prior meaningful data about the preferences  and needs the students had, the chosen approach was learning launches, making small  experiments with the format and content of the lectures, gathering both qualitative and  quantitative data about the target parameters via students feedback and attendance  information.

Application:

At the beginning the priority was to establish a reliable and practical way of communication. The  first attempt was a “group” in a famous mobile messaging application. Although this attempt  was able to establish a reliable form of communication, it became clear by both the professors  and the students commentaries that it was an insufficient method, given the fact that the  information was very disperse and hard to find once needed, making it very unpractical and thus  not satisfying the intended needs.

With that mind, a website was crafted with the necessary index of materials and a separate page  for general announcements, making it a far better solution than the prior.

Once with a practical and reliable way to communicate with the students was reached, it was  time to finally find the optimal way of presenting the content. At first, the classes were taught  via recorded slides presentations shared in video at the appropriated place in the site. Although  initially presenting good results, soon the students began to postpone and forget about the  lectures. It became obvious given the increasingly lower views and the students comments  about how not having a certain obligatory date to watch the lessons and the lack of interaction  rendered it very difficult to properly learn.

Given that experience, the classes began to be taught live via a whiteboard where the professors  could address the doubts that arouse from the lectures. This change drastically increased the  number of students seeing the contents and, according to the student’s commentaries, made  the class far better.

Insight:

Using learning launches made clear to me that learning with small steps and not committing to  the things that failed is a very useful and effective approach to solving problems where  innovation is needed, broadening my skillset and giving me more room to experimentation in  future endeavors.

Approach:

In future applications of this approach, I might use more iterations to achieve a final solution. In  this specific case, time was a critical factor, imposing barriers in the number of experiments  possible. Although a success, the solution reached has a few flaws. For example, the number  daily access in the website spikes very clearly in the days where the students must retrieve at  the website the information needed to access the lectures, raising concerns that they are not  using all the resources available to them or not doing so in a constant an programmatic way.

