Live streaming education at NGU in the midst of COVID-19
Joshua Boulet, Features and Entertainment Editor
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Several students at North Greenville University are stuck either living with high-risk people or don’t want to take the risk of going to in person school during the ongoing coronavirus pandemic. North Greenville doesn’t offer all courses online; some professors are left improvising to try and stream their class to those at home while also teaching students in person.
Lara Eller, instructor of mass communication, streams her photojournalism class each week to the few students who are working remotely and to any other students who may be feeling sick.
For Eller, there’s a definitive divide between people who skip class for the recording and people who actually show up for the online learning. She worries about too many people depending on the fact that her classes are recorded to just not show up for class at all. Class discussion is a pretty big priority for her, and she doesn’t want students to miss out on that.
“There are more things on my mind for a class that has a zoom component,” Eller said.
The zoom call is a great oppourtunity, but she finds that it severely restricts her teaching style. For typical classes, Lara may move between the top of a desk to her chair, to the whiteboard and back again to the desk while teaching a lecture. But for her zoom classes, she is forced to sit in front of the screen for the entire lecture.
“The class doesn’t work without people in there to keep the conversation going,” Eller expressed.
Eller finds the students learning remotely are the ones who really care; their commitment shows that they would be at class in-person if it was an option.
Ansley Welchel, adjunct instructor at NGU, teaches her oral communication and principles of public relations class with an online component. Like Eller, Welchel started streaming her classes live because of a student who can’t learn in person. Similarly, she initially struggled to find how to teach to people online and in-person simultaneously.
She knew the importance of communication with her students for both public relations and oral communication. She could record her lectures, but interaction is too pivotal to those classes for her to only offer recordings.
For attendance, Welchel wants to make sure her students get their work done first and foremost. However, she also tries to cut the students some slack due to the circumstances.
While Eller uses Zoom for her classes, Welchel stuck to Blackboard Collaborate for the integrations with Blackboard itself. She can use the software just fine now, but it didn’t come without its fair share of issues.
In one of her classes, some of her collaborate students started chatting in the text chat. But with the sound system in the lecture hall, every message caused the notification noise to echo through the room.
She has tried to stay flexible and continues to look for more ways to improve the experience for the people in the classroom and the people in their own rooms.
Both Eller and Welchel highlighted how helpful students have been at times. The new generation of college students has a certain knack for figuring out software.
