Sue Small-Kreider – In Motion Staff Writer
With over a month since Daytona State College transitioned over to an online campus only, students and faculty are working out how to communicate and keep their courses going.
Holly Hollins, Department Chair and Associate Professor of Oral Communication, has been reaching out to her students by phone and the Bongo virtual classroom app. She teaches three classes of the required speech course, which has students making three to five speeches during the semester.
Because giving a speech relies heavily on body movements or “body language,” much of the unspoken presentation cannot be seen when recording speech presentations on a cellphone or in a virtual classroom.
“Transitioning to online has been challenging, making learning for all of us different,” Hollins said. “Some of our professors are having students do the improvised speech on the virtual classroom with five or six students at a time.” Others are having students post a link to their filmed speech and then answer classmates’ questions via online discussion boards.
Ariel Leininger, who is a tutor for American Sign Language, general psychology and the Trio program, as well as working on her Associates of Arts degree at DSC, said that switching over from face-to-face to virtual classroom has been a rough start for many students and professors as everyone learns how to use the technology. She appreciates her speech class where only groups of five students are in a virtual classroom using a Bongo virtual classroom. Her Photography as Art course it is not going as well.
“We are starting to get the hang of it,” Leininger said. “Trying to get the right number of people who can be on screen at one time is challenging when there are 15 people in the virtual classroom.”
Before Spring break, the photography class was working with the large 4×5 frame cameras and developing film in the darkroom. Some students in the class had the cameras checked out from the photography department’s stockroom for over the break and have no way of returning the cameras or developing their film until the stay-at-home orders are lifted.
“I think the best thing to come out of this transition to online classes is that students are learning the importance of communicating with their professors. They are less afraid to ask questions,” said Leininger.
Dr. Jennifer Bell, Director of the Environmental Science Program and advisor to the Science Club and WISE (Women in Science Education) club, has found the experience of taking her chemistry course and labs online to be exciting and opening new doors for her.
“The virtual classroom wasn’t working for me to see the student’s work,” Bell said. “It took me about a week to get on board with using a gaming platform and another week to learn Discord.com.”
Now she can show her solving of chemistry problems on a whiteboard that students can see. Students in turn can share their screens with her to help figure out problems. Chemistry labs are happening virtually now. Students still must prepare their pre-lab procedures, watch a video of the actual lab experiment or a simulation of one, and then receive a data set from the virtual experiment to write their conclusions from. Students can leave the virtual lab to have chats as a study group and then come back into lab and Bell can see what students are working as well.
“This new process has let me reach to a whole new group of students who are helping me with recording our sessions,” said Bell.
Because of her quick adaptation to the Discord platform and because she reached out to faculty at Eastern Iowa Community College, she is going to be part of a beta testing team for one EICC’s new computer projects.
Bell noted that the Science Club and WISE are still meeting weekly with speakers in their Bridge to Careers series. Click here to connect to speaker series.
TV Production student Candy McClure is staying in a positive mood by cleaning and gardening while doing the work for her three courses that had all been face-to-face and hands-on courses. Two of her classes normally would have covered filming sporting events of DSC teams and producing the FAN show on the college’s television station, WDSC TV-15. Her third class is an acting class.
For her Practicum for Television Broadcasting course instead of filming games, McClure is watching videos of games and critiquing them for good and bad filming angles, cut-a-ways and other aspects of taping live games. The writing of scripts and timing of rundowns is still part of her Workshop in Studio Production class that normally would be producing the FAN show on Tuesday nights on WDSC TV-15, but there is no hands-on time in the control room gaining experience on the equipment.
“These are unprecedented times. No one knows what is going to happen. It is no one’s fault that classes have had to go online,” McClure said, “but I feel like I’m missing out on the experiences that the courses were going to teach me.”
McClure’s Acting for the Lens and Camera and Lab class is closer to what it would have been like in-person. Students are rehearsing scenes together with their professor via a virtual classroom. She will have to perform a monologue either in the virtual classroom or video record it and submit it. As to her scene with a partner, McClure will have to perform it in costume with a backdrop as close as possible to what the scene calls for in the script. Her partner will do similar and somehow with the magic of a virtual classroom they will come together as one performance.
For students finding themselves unable to complete a class right now and would like to retry the class next fall or spring, the college is offering an option to unenroll from the class with no additional cost. April 20 is the last day DSC students can unenroll from a from a Spring 2020 full term or Spring 2020 B term class. According to the COVID-19 – Student FAQs webpage, unenrolling from a class will not affect your Spring 2020 GPA nor will it count as an attempt or affect Satisfactory Academic Progress (SAP), which is required for scholarships.