On January 30, the leadership at Duke Kunshan University (DKU), where I am an assistant professor of history, decided to move all course instruction online in response to the novel coronavirus outbreak. We began teaching remotely on February 24, and I’ve spent most of the past five-and-a-half weeks balancing work and personal life while self-quarantined in a 1,500-square-foot apartment in Suzhou, China, with my spouse and our 4-year-old daughter.
Transitioning to remote teaching while living under strict social isolation has gone better than I expected. I’d much rather be in the classroom, but I’ve learned new instructional techniques while managing to avoid completely dropping my research agenda.
Remote teaching under strict social isolation has gone better than I expected.
Spending more than five weeks indoors with a toddler during a pandemic is no one’s idea of a good time, but I consider myself lucky. The quarantine and travel restrictions that brought much of the country’s economic activity to a standstill did not stop me or my spouse from earning a paycheck. And unlike China’s medical professionals and food-delivery drivers, we could work from home. No one in my household suffers from any pre-existing medical conditions. We are also fortunate to live in Suzhou, a prosperous city in Jiangsu, one of China’s wealthiest provinces. Jiangsu’s health-care system has treated more than 600 novel coronavirus patients without any deaths.
DKU faculty were given just over three weeks to shift to online teaching. The announcement came during our weeklong Chinese New Year holiday, so many professors, staff, and students were elsewhere in China or overseas. Few of those outside the Kunshan area had the chance to return to campus, leaving many without access to their labs, textbooks, teaching materials, or computers.
Institutional support made a big difference. The university provided financial assistance to help students return home. By February 4, the university had set up an online-course support site for faculty on Sakai, the learning-management system we use. The site included discussion forums and online pedagogy basics. Instead of introducing new digital platforms, the site helped us become more proficient in using software we were already familiar with, like Sakai and the web-conferencing tool Zoom. Teaching-innovation experts also held frequent webinars, while division heads and senior faculty helped us modify syllabi and library staff gathered reading materials and other classroom sources. Guidance was crucial, at least for me: With the exception of monitoring discussion-forum postings, I had never taught online.
Students have done a terrific job making the adjustment and keeping up with remote learning. When it comes to teaching, Zoom has worked well for seminar discussions and office hours. In my smaller course on U.S.-China relations, I’ve kept conversation flowing by calling on students directly rather than posing questions to the whole class. In my larger freshman seminar, dividing the class into “breakout rooms” works better. A set of four questions discussed over an hour-long session allows everyone to present once in front of the whole class and field a few follow-up questions. I can switch between groups to monitor the conversation. Zoom’s shared screen function is also helpful: I’ve used it to facilitate in-class peer review and to discuss essay drafts during office hours. For the most part, even with the Great Firewall, varying bandwidth speeds, and students scattered across the globe, the software has served me well.
Zoom’s voice-over functionality helps with larger lectures. I co-teach our freshman core course, “China in the World,” with five other colleagues, and I’m responsible for two weeks’ worth of lectures on war, memory, and identity. Instead of regular 75-minute lectures, I recorded a series of mini-lectures, each between eight and 12 minutes. Zoom generates a URL for each presentation, so there’s no need for students to download. The software also provides a simultaneous transcription, though proofreading is necessary, especially with Chinese names, as I discovered. Zoom transcribed Chiang Kai-shek as “you can cross check,” and rendered Mao Zedong “miles of don’t.” The editing process also helped me to pinpoint a few verbal tics. I’m surprised students never complained on their teaching evaluations about how painfully often I use the word “so” when introducing a new PowerPoint slide. Now I know.
Online teaching cannot fully substitute for classroom interaction. But I’ve gained new skills that I can use after I return to campus. Working in Asia means being away a minimum of five days or six days — plus jet lag — in order to attend a weekend conference in North America. In the past I’ve had to decide between not going or canceling a few days of classes. But now that I know how to put together online lectures and lesson plans suitable for various classroom sizes, I can make sure my students don’t lose out when I take a trip that’s important to me professionally. These online teaching skills will also come in handy the next time I find myself at home nursing a cold or caring for a sick kid.
Nevertheless, I look forward to face-to-face teaching and a normal social life. Despite the connectivity afforded by apps like WeChat and WhatsApp, one misses a lot by not having casual, day-to-day hallway and dining hall conversations with students and colleagues. And it’s always sad to see my daughter’s reaction when I have to tell her yet again that she can’t see her friends or go swimming. But it could be a lot worse. Even during the outbreak’s gravest period in early February, the public-health response in Suzhou prevented panic. As of today, only three coronavirus patients in the city remain hospitalized. Most businesses are still closed, but parks have opened, and more and more people are starting to venture out — though not without their surgical masks and hand sanitizer.
