“Zooming to Class” – A Faculty’s Perspective
Written by: Professor Johannes Schmieder
The last weeks have been quite eventful and the transition to teaching via Zoom was quite an interesting experience. I’m currently teaching EC 752, which is part of the second year PhD sequence in labor economics. After Spring Break we had our first class on Zoom. The technology worked very well for that and it was nice to see everyone again face to face after the upheaval in the previous week. Everything was in flux at the time, with some students having returned home and being quarantined there and others figuring out whether or not to leave Boston. Everyone was adjusting to this strange new world.
Given the circumstances the class went well. The topic was very timely as we were just beginning to cover the design of unemployment insurance (UI) and the empirical evidence regarding the causal impact of UI on outcomes of the unemployed. The next class continued on this topic and we held the class just hours after the US experienced the largest new number of UI claims in a single week ever and had passed a $2 trillion dollar stimulus bill. During the class I asked the students to form small groups of three students and to develop a short presentation to discuss the labor market components of the stimulus bill: the expected impact, the pros and cons, and how one might be able to improve it. I asked them to tie this closely to the recent literature on UI and to discuss what we know and where there are important gaps in our understanding of the current situation. For this I first let the students get started by working in their small group (using the Zoom ‘breakout rooms’ function) to develop a plan for developing the presentation. The following class the students presented their work and we had a very lively debate about the current policies, the likely impacts and possible research directions coming from this.
Overall, I felt the transition went relatively well. There are certainly challenges with online teaching and students being so far away from each other, but it helped that the current events are so relevant for the class. Three hours of teaching (the normal class length for this course) seems too long for the online format. So I kept it to two hours, which together with the group activities kept everyone engaged.