How Were the Dean's Online Classes Evaluated? | Akira Wakita, Dean of the Faculty of Environment and Information Studies

2020.08.12

Spring semester classes were held entirely online. Faculty and staff came together to face this crisis, and many students were understanding and supportive of the unfamiliar situation. Everyone fought with all their might during the spring semester.

On the other hand, as dean, I have stated that "SFC faculty give the best classes," and I feel it is necessary to disclose to some extent how SFC's online classes were evaluated during the spring semester. Therefore, as a case study of SFC class evaluations, I have decided to disclose here how the dean's lecture was evaluated by students (taking the plunge as the captain).

The Dean of the Faculty of Environment and Information Studies is responsible for teaching the required course "Environment and Information Studies" for new students. This course is designed to provide an overview of the diverse research areas covered by SFC and to serve as a guide for future learning. In other words, its primary goal is to motivate students. The style is to have faculty members from various fields at SFC participate as guests each time to build the class together.

The long, narrow image below shows the results of the class evaluation for "Environment and Information Studies."

Figure 1: Results of the end-of-semester class evaluation for Environment and Information Studies

What I was most conscious of was providing the most accessible learning environment for students.

In a lecture with 700 students, both Zoom and WebEx become one-way communication. Network problems also become more frequent.

Above all, both faculty and students are unfamiliar with the operations.

To ensure stable communication, a familiar user interface, and interactivity through chat, YouTube Live was the only option.

Of course, the burden on the faculty side was significant, requiring preparation of devices and applications for streaming, as well as detailed content creation. At the age of 45, I found myself joining the ranks of YouTubers (sigh). I studied streaming environments from scratch, and through a process of purchasing hardware and trial and error, I discovered that hardware for game streaming was the most suitable. I acted as a guinea pig, purchasing and testing various devices. The students who supported the class (TAs and SAs) also worked hard. They proactively took on tasks such as creating the opening movie for each class (the sense of excitement for the class is crucial), the class logo, and assisting with slide creation. For the production of the opening movie, SFC's drone circle, KART , collaborated with us.

From the perspective of an environment for students, I also focused on enabling learning that is not bound by a timetable. I made it so that students could choose between on-demand (downloading and watching movies at their preferred time) and live streaming (streaming at a set time for communication with faculty and fellow students).

Guest faculty were asked to prepare a short movie summarizing the interesting aspects of their research field a few days before the class. Students watched the movie in advance, and if they wanted to engage in dialogue or ask questions, they would join the YouTube Live stream during the scheduled class time. Since the stream is automatically archived on YouTube, students who do not want to be tied to the timetable can later re-experience the streamed video and chat interactions at their own pace.

On the day of the class, the guest faculty and I created an open environment by having a conversation on Zoom and connecting it to YouTube Live. By having students watch the movie beforehand, we were able to develop cross-disciplinary topics during the live stream, and I feel that the YouTube UI screen encouraged a relaxed atmosphere for questions and answers.

I also decided to create an opportunity for reflection unique to the online format. Wataru Ishihara, a student in the Doctoral Programs who served as the class TA, is an artist with rare abilities, researching creative ways to interpret fakes and impersonations in online communication. We decided to use a system he created called Alike Wiki to review the class.

Figure 2: Class review using Alike Wiki (students post comments impersonating the instructor)

This system provides avatars for reflection. The class instructor, guest faculty, and researchers or characters related to the content are lined up. Students, based on the class content, impersonate these avatars and write comments that the person "would likely say." Other students who see the posts press the "Alike" button if they feel the comment is characteristic of that person, or the "Unlike" button if they do not. This may seem like a game at first glance, but it is my small act of resistance against the style of simply taking notes, memorizing content, and repeating it back like a parrot (a practice known as psittacism). In other words, students are required not to engage in the mechanical exercise of memorizing superficial knowledge, but to adopt an attitude of trying to understand the heart and ideas behind it.

Come to think of it, the classroom was an easy environment for teachers to teach in, but it was by no means the best environment for students.

Classrooms have been built with a design philosophy that allows a single teacher to monitor as many students as possible at once and to efficiently disseminate knowledge. As represented by the Panopticon, it is said that hospitals, prisons, and schools are built with the same design philosophy. What faculty should emphasize in online classes is not simply transferring the classroom experience to a virtual space, but rather coordinating a new media environment unique to online settings. And it is about continuing to search for the best environment for students, not for teachers.

At SFC, we plan to conduct on-campus classes as much as possible while monitoring the future infection situation, but with no end in sight for COVID-19, the need for online classes is unlikely to disappear for some time. In such circumstances, faculty must constantly continue to reconstruct the best learning environment for students. Is the role of the teacher shifting from the dissemination of knowledge to the construction of a learning environment?

It seems that many students welcomed this experimental class. They taught me various terms, as I didn't even know internet slang like "wakotsu," and gave me a lot of input on requests and tips for live streaming. I am sincerely grateful to the students who helped create a good atmosphere for the class together.

Incidentally, the required reading for this lecture was "Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind (manga version)" and "AKIRA."

Akira Wakita, Dean of the Faculty of Environment and Information Studies / Professor, Faculty Profile