{"id":124397,"date":"2021-03-18T11:38:30","date_gmt":"2021-03-18T10:38:30","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.erasmusmagazine.nl\/en\/?p=124397"},"modified":"2025-12-19T11:25:29","modified_gmt":"2025-12-19T10:25:29","slug":"how-this-lecturer-overcame-his-aversion-to-online-instruction-and-how-it-wasnt-as-bad-as-expected","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.erasmusmagazine.nl\/en\/2021\/03\/18\/how-this-lecturer-overcame-his-aversion-to-online-instruction-and-how-it-wasnt-as-bad-as-expected\/","title":{"rendered":"How this lecturer overcame his aversion to online instruction \u2013 and how it wasn\u2019t as bad as expected"},"content":{"rendered":"

Evert Bisschop Boele is endowed professor of Culture Participation at the Erasmus School of History, Culture and Communication. Before the lockdown, he used to travel once a week from Haren, Groningen to Rotterdam to lecture master students enrolled in his subject. While he personally felt a lot of resistance against lecturing online, his students actually proved highly appreciative of his efforts.<\/p>\n

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\u201cI started out as a music teacher in secondary school, and I\u2019ve always enjoyed teaching. In addition to holding an endowed chair at EUR, I am a professor at Hanze University of Applied Sciences in Groningen \u2013 where I focus solely on research. So when I started working at EUR five years ago, I looked forward to combining education and research activities. I teach the subject Ethnographic Research into Culture Participation within the Arts, Culture and Society master programme. In short, this means trying to understand how your research subjects deal with culture from their specific perspective. The students are also performing a small-scale study of their own, with participating observation and an unstructured interview.\u201d<\/p>\n

Inner resistance<\/h2>

\u201cMy lectures were scheduled from November to the end of January. In the months leading up to the series, I kept worrying how I should go about this. I felt a lot of inner resistance against online teaching. I was in no mood for it whatsoever. Holding a lecture in a room with twenty or thirty students is very enjoyable: you get to discuss certain points in depth afterwards and so on. I wasn\u2019t looking forward to missing that \u2013 and indeed, I did miss it. But the alternative was scrapping lectures altogether, and I didn\u2019t want that either.<\/p>\n

\u201cI discussed beforehand how best to handle my interactive lecture with a staff member from the faculty; that helped a lot. My lectures usually last around three hours and alternate between theory, discussion and exercises. But three hours of continuously staring at a screen is far too long for people. And a group like that is too big for effective interaction.\u201d<\/p>\n

One-Way<\/h2>
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Evert Bisschop Boele at his home workplace.<\/span><\/p>

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\u201cI reorganised my lectures to keep this interactive quality. I divided them into two separate hours in which I interacted with groups of ten students, followed by a third hour that offered room to go into students\u2019 individual questions. In advance, I asked my students to watch two 10-minute videos that I had recorded, which dealt with theory. A PowerPoint presentation with a talking head \u2013 very traditional. I\u2019m sure that could be done better if you\u2019ve been teaching online for years. Oh well\u2026<\/p>\n

\u201cMy first lecture went a lot better than I had expected. Still, it became clear after a few lectures that there was still too much one-way traffic. Students sent me questions in advance. But as a result, I was the one talking most of the time during the online sessions \u2013 to answer those questions. After four lectures I decided to rethink my approach. I provided written answers to the students\u2019 questions, meaning we could talk a lot more about the assigned texts in the final hour of the lecture. That gave a fresh boost to the whole thing. We had very interesting conversations.\u201d<\/p>\n

Positive reactions<\/h2>

\u201cI don\u2019t feel that I have had to make any compromises in terms of in-depth discussion. And while the closure of museums and theatres made it hard for students to perform their own research, I was nevertheless satisfied with the quality of their papers.<\/p>\n

\u201cI was very happy with the students\u2019 positive reactions during the evaluation. However, I still feel I could have done more for them. I didn\u2019t feel like arranging an online version of the hands-on section of the lectures \u2013 in which they use role-play to learn how to conduct interviews. So I scrapped that from the programme. I regret this now. I\u2019ve done what I could, but it was sub-optimal.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\t

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Read more in the series Lecturers are hanging in there<\/h2>\n\t\t\t\n\t\t\t