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OK, I'm back. I'd like to talk today about a topic that's floated around a bit on the blog over the past year or so, for example here, and is the subject of a timely (and institutionally relevant!) NYT article here: online teaching. This year I got a small start up grant to run an online seminar in constitutional history for advanced graduate students, and so I thought I'd spend this post reflecting a bit on what it's been like.

(But wait, you say, I thought you said you were on sabbatical this year. Well, yes. I think technically I'm teaching an overload while on sabbatical. Let's just say that I'm a little nuts.)

Anyway, as a result I'm teaching a webinar that meets once every three weeks, or so. This semester we're doing readings to test out the system. Next semester I hope to have some guests come visit and present papers.

How's it work? Technically, what I've done is two things: I picked out some common readings and set up a wiki page for the webinar. The discussant for each session uploads a paper on the readings to the wiki a week before the meeting. A second student is assigned to comment on the discussant's presentation. So we go into each session with a solid base of commentary already set and that provides the foundation for the rest of our discussion.

To carry out the discussion, we're using a webinar program that let's me set up an online meeting of up to 15 people. There is no video (though there is the capacity to do power point presentations or share documents), it's basically a conference call run out of my computer with the addition of a chat box to the side. We've had some gliches: we tried the first run with some people not using head sets and got a lot of ambient noise, one day one of the participants somehow managed to log in through a browser with ads, with the result that we had commercial interruptions every couple of minutes until we figured it out. But generally the system has worked fine.

And the seminar itself has been very good. The first week, everyone was a bit shaky. But by the second week we were generating some very good discussions and exchanges and that carried over to the third week as well. The intellectual content has been as good, if not better than what I normally see in either a graduate or law school seminar. The participants are prepared, they have spoken to one another far more than to me (this is always my biggest problem in seminars), and we have had some complicated discussions. In each hour we've met (and our sessions are roughly an hour long), we've covered as much material as I would assign for a three hour seminar and done so in considerable depth.

So in many respects, I'm very pleased. But I do have some reservations. And that's what this post is about.

First, I think most of the credit for the success of the seminar goes to the participants. These are upper level graduate students. One is getting his PhD this semester, two are writing their dissertations, two others are still getting ready to take their PhD exams but have several years of grad seminars under their belts. And, with one exception, these are students who knew each other from other seminars and have also studied with me before. So we know each other, trust each other, and have a sense of intellectual commitment to one another that predates this experiment.

Second, these are folks who are talking about legal issues that are central to their research and writing. So they are committed not only to one another, but to engaging the topic and wrestling with the material to see how it fits with what they are doing.  So they are willing (so far) to put up with the hassles and technological challenges to try to make it work.

Third, completely by accident, I managed to find some readings that were on very different topics but circled around some basic issues. This has allowed us to build each new session on the discussions in the earlier sessions and has meant that there has been a real conversation over time.

That's all good. But it also suggests my reservations. I am pretty sure this would not work for a first year graduate seminar, or a law school seminar. In each of those cases, you are dealing with people who are not experienced with seminars.  In my experience, people coming to the seminar experience from undergrad or from big law school courses need lots of face time with their professor and with one another. In particular they need a longer session so that they can work through both the materials and the processes of exchange.  This is particularly true when the seminar includes a mix of students from various disciplines, since their the process of learning to talk to everyone involves finding common language, as well.

I'm also pretty sure this would not work in a seminar that some people were taking to get a writing credit or seminar requirement out of the way. The level of commitment required is too high, and the potential that a bored or frustrated student could be disruptive (even by accident) is too high. Before this experiment I hadn't realized how important it was to my teaching style to be able to glance at students, or otherwise use body language and gestures to communicate.   When you take that away, you really have to depend on each participant to engage without prompting or encouragement. And that's a lot to ask of someone who is only in the class because she needs it to graduate.

I don't think this sort of thing would work as a one off thing, a mini conference to exchange papers. Here, I have two concerns. All day mini conferences can be exciting and interesting, but they are also exhausting. In my experience you need the feed back of people glancing around, talking directly to you, shuffling papers and grabbing more coffee to keep you alert. And you simply don't get that in a webinar.

But more to the point, I worry that the learning curve is too steep. Stuff goes wrong the first time, and it's easy to get frustrated and tune out.  That can poison the entire process and turn what could be a fascinating exchange of ideas into a problem.

So those are my initial thoughts. I have some ideas about where this process might be useful, for law schools and for graduate programs more generally. But this post is already long. So I'll return to those aspects of the topic next time.

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