Snow Days? Technology to the Rescue

A snow day doesn’t keep many professors and students from meeting remotely. Photo by Kalman Zabarsky

During the University’s snow day closures of the past month, Veronica Priest wasn’t sledding or binge-watching on Netflix. She was listening to David Sullivan deliver a PowerPoint on “lists, a first look at functions,” and “recursion” in her introductory computer science course.

“Professor Sullivan used the same PowerPoint he would have used in the regular lecture, and the voice-over was very similar to what he would have done in person,” says Priest (CAS’16). “While the physical lecture is better, the video fulfilled the purpose of conveying the material given the situation of the snow day.”

In this second snowiest winter on record in Boston, BU students have had five snow days in total—two Mondays, two Tuesdays, and a Wednesday. Another, smaller storm is predicted for next week. All this time off has forced the provost to schedule two days of Saturday classes for the Charles River Campus later in the semester.

But Priest and the rest of her computer class won’t be sitting in a classroom on a Saturday, because instead of a traditional snow day, they did attend class—remotely.

Sullivan, a College of Arts & Sciences computer science senior lecturer, who teaches the class alongside another CAS computer science senior lecturer, Aaron Stevens, started to think of how to cover the material when the second snow day was looming. “Our class meets Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, and when we were going to miss the second snow day,” he says, “I knew I needed to cover more material in order to make progress and get ready for a big assignment that was coming up.”

Sullivan had previously recorded a voice-over to accompany an online lecture for a textbook publisher using the software Camtasia. He got to work recording the next few lectures for his class. “It’s like a screen capture of the PowerPoint slides with my voice over it,” he says. “And then I post the finished file to YouTube and students can watch it there.”

He says the recorded lectures have worked out so well that he and Stevens may continue to record them going forward, since one benefit is that students can watch them over and over again—when preparing for an exam, for example. And in the future, they may ask students to watch the recorded lecture beforehand, and then class time can be spent on discussion, practicing problems, and ultimately, “more engagement,” he says.

Around the University, many others tried to stay productive despite the day off. David Cole, assistant director of the Information Services & Technology Service Desk, says his office saw an uptick in requests from people needing help connecting to the BU network from home and departments asking how to use Microsoft Lync to hold meetings, as well as a handful of professors wanting to know how they could use Adobe Connect to put lectures online (much like what Sullivan had done). The Medical Campus IS&T team had similar requests, Cole says.

On the Medical Campus, Aaron Young, a MED assistant professor of physiology and biophysics, says the time off provided a challenge for his fast-paced physiology course. The snow days meant the future doctors missed lectures, small group discussions, and a couple of quizzes and assessments.

Young recorded videos of the missed lectures with help from MED’s Educational Media Center, which used Echo software, and posted it on the course website. The in-class quizzes became from-home tests through BlackBoard Learn. Young summarized what would have been covered in discussion and posted the handout for students. “Last, to help the students make sure they were on top of the missed material, we offered multiple review and Q&A sessions with faculty once the campus opened up after the storms,” he says.

Nicholas Rock, a College of Fine Arts assistant professor of graphic design, says he used the online messaging service Slack to hold optional virtual office hours, and another faculty member he knows used Skype for the same purpose.

While the virtual learning has its benefits, the professors interviewed stressed that online lectures and office hours aren’t as productive as meeting in person. Sullivan says the classroom discussions missed because of the snow days were big loss to the students in his computer course.

Students apparently appreciated Sullivan’s efforts to hold the class despite the blizzards: he says he didn’t hear any complaints about classroom time encroaching on a snow day. “Hey, it means we don’t have to have the Saturday makeup class, because we are up to speed,” he says. “If we missed three lectures, we would have been in a bad place, because everything builds, and it’s hard not to have the early foundation in the first few weeks.”

Want more information about how to record a lecture or hold a virtual meeting? View tutorials on the IS&T website.