I teach data science and I spend a lot of time lecturing over zoom. Zoom lectures are tough, it’s so hard to get the same visual, audio, & energy feedback from an in-person classroom. Delivering lectures is like putting on a show! Here are 5 tips to improve your zoom lectures.
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Tip 1: Design your lectures to be interactive as possible. This can be done by having regular breakout sessions, short activities scheduled in, and constantly asking your class if anyone has any questions.
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Tip 2: Don’t speak for more than 10 minutes at a time without some sort of interactive break.
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Tip 3: For every hour, have at least one breakout session where students can interact with each other on an activity. After the breakout, call on one or two volunteers to show their work.
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Tip 4: This tip is more towards Data Science related lectures, but when teaching students on how to do something, such as coding a pipeline with sklearn. Use the Show & tell method. Instead of talking over a bunch of slides. Have a jupyter notebook ready, they can act as your slides, and type in the code in front of the students. Have them code along with you.
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Tip 5: Cap a zoom lecture at 2 hours. Anything more and the students will start zoning out. Utilize 5-10 min camera off & audio off breaks after 1 hour. Breaks are important, it breaks up the flow, and allows the student to chill, stretch, & reflect a bit.
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Bonus Tips: I always ask every student to keep their camera on. I don’t like it when it’s off. Seeing the students’ faces really helps me somewhat gauge how well I’m holding on to their attention.
I do my best to actually listen to my advice but sometimes I break my own rules, that is okay, try better next time. Preparing and building lectures takes an incredible amount of effort, especially if you want to make it more entertaining/interactive. Anyways, happy lecturing!
Also, please share any other tips you may have learned in lecturing over zoom.