Zoom etiquette on syllabus

[the_geneticist]

Some K12 schools are trying to enforce the school dress code while students are learning from home:

https://www.wsls.com/news/local/2020/08/08/school-district-says-kids-cant-wear-pajamas-for-online-classes/

And here I thought wearing pjs all day was one of the perks of remote learning!

[polly_mer]

From the industrial side, the default for our meetings is cameras off.  A good many people are using phones for audio and only bother with a computer log in if slides will be shared.  That's our norm for all the standard meetings and I have multiple meetings per day with 5-50 participants.  The more participants, the more likely the default is only the leader speaks until someone else is purposely called on to contribute and the chat box is active for the minor comments, much like good classroom management.

For small groups, you get to know people's voices pretty well, just as was the norm when we gathered in conference rooms with speakerphones those years ago.

[Golazo]

I am doing group breakouts in my hybrid. Students can choose between chat and Zoom. If you choose Zoom, you need to have your camera on for the small group breakout (except for short outages) unless you clear it before. I agree with doc700 that seeing students is helpful for me and them. Cameras on for lecture is not as important (though I'm not doing much lecture on Zoom), but the difference in quality between my summer seminar with cameras on and my spring seminar with no camera was night and day.

Another thing you can do is a video intro, if you want to be able to put faces to names. For classes in the major, this can be important.

As the host in Zoom (and a lot of alternatives) you can set things up so that you can turn peoples mics off...

[nonsensical]

I would not require students to turn their cameras on. To second some of what has already been said, part of the privacy violation is the possibility of being recorded without one's consent. In person, people can usually tell if they are being recorded and can choose to leave the room, stand behind the person with the camera, etc. In Zoom, someone could take a screen shot and the people in the shot wouldn't even know.

I also would not try to prevent students from eating. Presumably people may be in different time zones and have different schedules, potentially involving back-to-back Zoom meetings. For some people it may not seem like a big deal to wait an hour or two to eat, but others can become ill if they can't have food at a particular time or within a certain amount of time after starting to feel hungry. In general, it is not a good idea to interfere with others' ability to meet their basic physical needs. For the same reason, I wouldn't prevent people from getting up to use the bathroom, etc. 

[tiva]

I prefer to see my students, but I understand that not everyone has the bandwidth or backgrounds. So I ask that they upload a photo into their account, and then I at least see a photo of them when they turn off their video. It really helps.

[Caracal]

I would not require students to turn their cameras on. To second some of what has already been said, part of the privacy violation is the possibility of being recorded without one's consent. In person, people can usually tell if they are being recorded and can choose to leave the room, stand behind the person with the camera, etc. In Zoom, someone could take a screen shot and the people in the shot wouldn't even know.

I also would not try to prevent students from eating. Presumably people may be in different time zones and have different schedules, potentially involving back-to-back Zoom meetings. For some people it may not seem like a big deal to wait an hour or two to eat, but others can become ill if they can't have food at a particular time or within a certain amount of time after starting to feel hungry. In general, it is not a good idea to interfere with others' ability to meet their basic physical needs. For the same reason, I wouldn't prevent people from getting up to use the bathroom, etc.

Isn't this just like good class management in general? My main goal in normal class is to communicate to students that I'm going to treat them like responsible adults, but they need to hold up their end of the bargain. People need to leave the room sometimes, and that's fine, but limit that to actual needs so everyone isn't constantly coming and going. Want to eat a granola bar in class? Fine, but unless its a three hour class running straight through dinner, don't tuck into a full meal.

Seems like with some modification, you can set similar standards for Zoom. If possible, have the camera on. If someone really has a privacy or safety concern, go ahead and leave it off. If you really need to eat something and would prefer everyone not watch you do that, you can switch it off then too. One of the advantages of zoom is that you can go into the bathroom and bring the computer if you prefer, but I think we'd all like to not know about that, so probably that would be a good moment to switch off the camera too. The vast majority of students do fine with these kinds of common sense things.

[AvidReader]

I love having cameras on in online classes, in large part because the facial clues help me a lot as a teacher. However, I never require them.

Since I don't require students to turn cameras on but they can still speak, and some students call in, I usually ask all speakers to identify themselves when they contribute to a discussion verbally, e.g. "Jessica here, and I was just thinking that . . ." It's awkward for the first class meeting (or two), especially when I remind them to add it, but then allows other students to say "This is Jordan, and Jessica's comment reminded me of . . ." By week 3, it usually goes fairly smoothly.

When they can't speak, for whatever reason, I'll interject comments as appropriate, e.g. "I see in the chat box that James thinks [read it aloud]. How does that change our attitude towards . . ."

AR.

[mythbuster]

Our Center for Instructional Technology has boilerplate for all of this. I just send them to the web page with the boilerplate. I love our Center for saving us time with this sort of thing.