Exploring Practices and Systems for Remote Teaching

Abstract

In early 2020, remote teaching became a generalized life reality. Compared to in-person classes, the online educational experience is incomplete for students and technically frustrating for educators. The main cause is that the online educational process is just attempting to passively pass knowledge to students using unsuitable platforms which were developed for conference calls. This paper studies various components of the online teaching process, as observed at Carnegie Mellon University during 2020, and proposes improvement guidelines derived from the feedback offered by instructors and by students. The result is a series of guidelines, practical classroom configurations, and delivery methods which were appropriate for online or hybrid teaching, were scaling for a large number of instructors with various degrees of technical abilities, and were providing a student experience closer to in-person teaching. Of particular interest was enriching the interaction between instructors and students by allowing information flow in various ways which were neglected by the existing teleconferencing platforms.