Spring 2020, or the term I taught on Twitch
It’s been over a year and a half since the Semester the World Shut Down, also known as the term in which the Covid-19 pandemic forced all of us out of our classrooms and places of work into our homes, which in turn became living space and classroom and place or work all in one. I’m writing this even as the Delta variant is surging around the world and there’s a lot of uncertainty about whether our hoped-for return to the classroom is even going to stick.
If we do need to spin back to remote teaching, I know I can make that transition with a minimum of fuss. I’ve got a year of teaching remote using Discord and OBS and, if my students’ evaluation comments are anything to go by, I managed to make something of a silk purse out of the sow’s ear that the online environment could be. However, before settling on Discord for the fall and spring terms last year, I experimented with another platform: Twitch.
As I’ve mentioned on this blog earlier (back in January earlier), I turned to Twitch as soon as the faculty was asked to take our classes remote in March 2020. As a gaming nerd, it made sense to me. Easy to access and use, the ability to archive lectures for up to fourteen days (longer if you’re an Amazon Prime member), and a platform that could easily be moderated. I only needed to use the ban hammer once when a random visitor got obnoxious. I ended the term with over 2.5 K views from mid-March 2020 to mid-May 2020. Most of the viewers were the enrolled students, but sometimes it was students watching the stream with others in their household bubble, some were students from other schools, some were viewers who stopped in for the stream and kept tuning in, class after class. For movie streaming, I used Kast, a video streaming platform that allows for groups to gather and watch video streamed by a single person. For that platform I opted for the paid version for additional security and an increase in the number of people I could host at any given time. Finally, our university course management system is Canvas. The resultant mix created what several of my students described as being closest to the classroom experience that they had found among their courses.
For me as the instructor, the experience was largely positive and helped to maintain some sense of schedule and normalcy while giving students the flexibility to access the course in a way that was most conducive for their success. One of the issues I had with it was that there was no real way to track who accessed the lecture videos through Twitch. I can say, though, that the guided notes/ “quizzes” that the students needed to fill out each class period let me know who was still engaged with the course, even if it wasn’t consistently, and who had let it slip due to whatever circumstances might have led them there.
I know that the sudden switch and just as sudden lockdown put all of us under a lot of stress. My primary goal was to meet the students where they were, whether that was at home, working, caring for family, or working through their own mental health issues. Many of my students shared their frustrations with classes that went online and then seemed to be a self-guided program without much guidance. There was a deep need for communication and consistency and my students let me know that we found a way to make that work, even if it was just an hour at a time, three times a week. My students responded with patience, compassion, humor, honesty, and vulnerability.
However, as a peer review observed, Twitch is a public platform. For the following terms, I’d need to find something a little more secure and I knew just the program: Discord. I’ll recap my experiences with Discord in a future post.
