World of EdCraft: Challenges and Opportunities in Synchronous Online Teaching

Abstract

Online teaching at higher educational institutions has become a much higher priority in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic, but most faculty and staff at these institutions are ill-prepared to adapt their teaching methods and content to this new medium. This article guides the reader through three teaching studios developed for online synchronous teaching to very different student populations: a large (90-student) graduate-level healthcare finance course at MIT, an even larger (200-student) undergraduate-level statistics course at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, and a medium-sized (50-student) graduate-level operations management course at MIT. As we began building these studios, we found few applications in higher-education settings to rely on. Instead, we borrowed ideas and tools from the gaming community. Since different faculty will have different teaching styles and objectives, we have adopted a tour guide approach that describes the intent of each studio design, a complete listing of the software and hardware used in the studio, and a representative example of what the studio can achieve in practice. We conclude by documenting how other faculty have produced minimally sufficient studios for online teaching.