• Lecture with Q&A
• Whole class discussion
• Small group work
• Collaborative writing on shared electronic documents or white boards
• Peer review of written work
• Mix of lecture, Q&A, and independent, supervised work time
• Using visual content
• Exit Slips 

With thanks to Prof. Rachel Geer (French) and Prof. Greg Goering (Religious Studies) for their excellent course activity suggestions, italicized below.

Suggestion 1: In-Person Groupwork, Remote Breakout Rooms. If, when conducting breakout rooms from the classroom, students experience audio feedback problems (distracting echo, etc), consider having your in-person students form group(s), and your online students form group(s) rather than mixing the two populations.  

• Create breakout rooms and assign your remote students to the breakout rooms. Mute BOTH the zoom microphone and the audio of the classroom computer during breakouts
• Have in-person students meet for small group discussions (spread out to corners of the room when possible while maintaining social distancing)
• Have remote students meet in breakout rooms

Suggestion 2: Take it online. If you’ll spend nearly all of the class period in small groups, consider moving class entirely online for the day, and use Zoom breakout rooms. This may improve audio quality and allow all students a similar experience of the activity.

Suggestion 3: Try Breakout Rooms in the Classroom. Students in the classroom may experience audio feedback, so try this out with these suggestions in mind:

• In-person students should bring laptops and use headphones to join breakout rooms, and sit as far apart as possible to avoid audio interference.
• It is very important for you to mute BOTH the zoom microphone and the audio of the classroom computer, to avoid audio feedback.

If you, as the instructor, want to join the breakout rooms, you should also use headphones to connect to the classroom computer or via your own laptop or phone. You may find it helpful to track your students’ work in breakout rooms by having them contribute to a shared tracking document, rather than moving yourself from room to room (which can be disruptive and time consuming). 

Suggestion 4: Team Debate. Provide a scenario for teams to debate. They present their findings in a PowerPoint to turn in as an assignment. This has been very successful in classes such as environmental science and statistics.

Discussion in this new class format will take some adjustment and require some creativity. These suggestions can help you implement the discussion that was key in your regular classroom to this new instructional mode.

Suggestion 1: Contact Classrooms Support to ask if your classroom has full-room microphones. These microphones tend to do a better job of allowing all students present in the room to be heard by students on zoom, in courses that rely heavily on discussion-based learning activities.

Suggestion 2: Start slowly and ask for feedback. Take some time in the first days of the semester, to get accustomed to the new conventions of turn taking, hand raising, etc. required when using online communication platforms like Zoom. Students in the classroom might need to be reminded to speak clearly, raise hands to speak, and not to speak over one another, so that they can be clearly heard by remote students.  

Suggestion 3: Change some discussion activities from oral into text. Have students write in a shared document (such as a google doc or online word document, or use a chat app). Try a timed, written ‘debate’ via a chat or shared document, instead of an oral debate.

Suggestion 4: Provide more structure for class discussions.

A faculty suggestion: I find that I have to structure discussions more than I would if everyone is in the classroom. I assign students specific tasks to prepare in small groups for the discussions. The students on Zoom work in breakout rooms and the students in class either work in one big group or in two small groups, depending on how many students are in the classroom. Generally discussions have gone well, and I think they get a real sense of satisfaction from conversing across the screen / classroom divide. I also find that when I assign group work to the in-person students, it helps if I leave the room. They seem to appreciate the chance to work independently without me listening in the whole time. 

Suggestion 5: Keep the cameras on the students.

A faculty suggestion: Whenever we are having a discussion, I project the gallery view of Zoom onto the screen in the classroom, so that the students in the classroom can see the students on Zoom. It was a bit of hit to my ego to realize how very unimportant I was in this new PR classroom, but also kind of cool. I am very much a marginalized presence between the two groups, but that's also in line with my teaching philosophy, so this was actually a very forceful reminder that I am not the center of the classroom experience :)

(Note: If you want to try this approach, make sure your in-person students are comfortable being on camera for the duration of the discussion.)

Visual media can be valuable for helping students understand and retain material. A faculty member teaching a PR course in Fall 2020 reported success with activities revolving around slides.

I use slides for telling stories with pictures. I often introduce a story with pictures only, while I tell the story in the target [foreign] language. The next time through, I present the story with pictures and the accompanying text, while I read it. From there, I ask and have students answer questions about the story in the target language. This levels the playing field pretty well between in-person and remote students.

Both in-person and online courses can make use of “Exit Slips” (also known as Exit Tickets). These activities encourage students to synthesize and reflect on the day’s material and activities. They are sometimes also used to evaluate student understanding of course content (formative assessment), and can be helpful for taking attendance. Consider using the in-meeting zoom chat for exit tickets, if all students join zoom from their devices. If you want students to answer privately, adjust the chat settings so that students are able to chat with “Host Only.” If you want students to see each other's responses, you can allow the chat to be public.

Some questions to consider for exit tickets: 

• What specific concepts became clearer in today's class? 
• What concept is still causing some confusion for you at after today's class? 
• If you could ask one question of another student about today's class, what would it be?