 I first started using a virtual classroom or a webinar environment for online office hours. I thought that was a really good way to test out the software and for me to become familiar with how this works, how this process works. So I started by just telling my students, here's a URL, click on it if you want to join my online office hours and I will give you the opportunity to ask questions. And generally they're done through a chat window, students type in their questions and I respond using audio and video. I've often given students the option of using audio and video but they're very reluctant to use it. They often seem to prefer typing in their questions. So that worked really well. It was extremely popular. The thing that I think they liked the most is it's not just me talking but I can easily show them PowerPoint slides or do a software demonstration or a web page, anything at all can be shown, shared with them so that they get a much more richer experience out of it than just hearing the answer or question. So once I was comfortable with that, with the webinar environment, I started experimenting with using it in class as well in a regular face-to-face class. So what I was doing was that at the beginning of the class I would open the webinar virtual room and students had the option of either attending the class in person or they could attend it online. And I would try to make sure that students in both environments felt comfortable asking questions. I would monitor the chat room in the online environment and I would answer their questions during the regular live lecture in exactly the same way that I would answer a student that was right in front of me. So this gave students a chance to access the lecture portion of it live in person or online as well as then I was recording the online webinar and letting students access that again later. So they had these different options in terms of how they could attend the lecture in person, online, synchronously or asynchronously. And it's been extremely popular. Students really love having that flexibility and also that students know what works best for them. Some students really prefer to be in the classroom face-to-face. Other students are very happy to learn online and so I feel it's really helpful and useful for them to be able to have those choices. There are 100 to 150 students. So there's a lot of stuff that goes on in the chat box. It's really quite dynamic. I've recorded some, I've taken a few of them and saved them just because they look so great. You scroll through them and you just go, wow, that's really, you know, some really healthy dialogue that's going on there. And there's some students in the class that provide a lot of value. Even student, the peer-to-peer thing is they provide a lot of value to the class. They're answering all their friends, their peers' questions on there. They just keep going and going and stuff. And some of them, I mean, this is a second year class and there are students in second year, third year and fourth year and even beyond taking these courses. So the senior students, the content is maybe even, you know, old hat to them. They understand it. They're in there to get the credit that they never got and maybe to learn some advanced stuff. But you're teaching at the second year level. We are benefiting from having those students in the class and they get to help their, you know, less experienced or less knowledgeable peers out a lot. And it comes out in the chat box really, really clearly. I find, found, and my experience continues to be that students that are typically really shy will really open up in this context. I also, what I really love about using this is that it's multi-player in that people are communicating on task all the time. And so there can be multiple conversations going on at once. They can make use of different areas in the environment. So one group can work in one area of the campus. Another group can go somewhere else. They have access to online tools such as the WebRender so they can do research, pull up a Google, pull up a YouTube. They have access to collaborative drawing surface. It's amazing. And every time I see the students use it, new things play out and I just find the space is getting richer and richer. When I get frustrated with it, maybe in terms of quality of sound or voice problems, I think that it's just been a disaster and the students are still really excited about what's happened. So it doesn't seem to bug them at all. I use video games in my teaching and I use them not so much, hey, here's a game, go play. You'll learn something about the French Revolution. But rather as a way of showing students how digital media in general or anything that's mediated through a computer has various rules and it's these rules and how they interact that create the experience that we engage with. And that's easiest to see with a video game. When you play a video game well, the thing that the video game teaches you is how to play the game. So if you are good at playing that game, you've internalized those rules and you've internalized that world view of how the world should work. And this is one of the reasons why there's always these moral panics about video games. But if you turn that around and say to students, alright, this is the understanding of history that we want to communicate to people. How would we encode that in a video game? The students begin to see just how powerful the algorithms are that mediate a lot of our experience right now. You do need to pause and provide time and opportunities where you do turn your attention to it. So just like you might pause in a live face-to-face class and say are there any questions or you even pose a question to students for them to put their hand up and answer, you do the same thing synchronously. And then you spend time exclusively on the discussion board and not on just lecturing. So that's been my personal strategy how I overcome it and it tends to work very well. Students kind of, they understand that you're not paying attention and even if they pose a question, why didn't get that or what did he say, other students answer for you, other students answer them. So that's why I said it's a very healthy thing that goes on in the chat box. The students are just helping each other learn. What did he say or how do you spell that or something like that? Students answer each other and I really like that. And then I turn and focus and ask them are there any questions you need anything clarified or you pose a question does anyone know this or and you follow the discussion board for a while.