Aspects of teaching online during COVID-19 that I want to retain when returning to a “normal” classroom environment

For ten years I have been teaching graduate level acoustics courses simultaneously to 15–20 resident students and 20–25 distance education students. Prior to COVID-19, I live-streamed my lectures from a specially equipped multimedia classroom, but my attention during any given class period was primarily focused on the resident students sitting in the classroom. Any interaction with the 5–8 distance students attending my “live” lectures was limited to sporadic short questions posted to a chat window. During COVID-19, I have been teaching entirely online from my home and all 25-30 students (both resident and distance) who attend “live” class meetings participate in the same way: online through Zoom. As I reflect on 2.5 semesters of teaching acoustics to both resident and distant graduate students entirely online, there are several positive aspects of my online interactions with students that I hope to retain when I return to a “normal” classroom environment. In this presentation I will share several of the ways I successfully engaged and interacted with students while teaching online, both during and outside of class meetings. I will also discuss possible challenges of bringing some of those positive online interactions back into a “normal” classroom setting.