What Covid19 can teach us about teaching - and learning - remotely

University-level teaching and learning has been turned upside down, here’s my experience.

I am a bad virtual learner. I have signed up to countless online courses, only to devour the first few chapters, and then forget altogether I am even taking the course.

One of my favourite university experiences was to learn and study with my friends, debating each and every concept until all details were ironed out.

The interaction, usually in pairs or small groups, kept me motivated and engaged. Online courses, despite their best effort with improving engagement through online chats and forums, have not managed to motivate me nearly as much. As a result, my discipline quickly runs out and I quit the course.

The sudden radical change that invested the world in the spring 2020 brought the topic of virtual learning — and teaching — to the forefront. Universities around the world seemed to move all their classes online overnight. In reality, a lot of thought and effort went into reshaping the learning experience. I found myself caught up in the wave as I was teaching exercise classes for a course on Quantum Information Processing. Here’s my experience!

At the start of the semester the course was cruising smoothly, I was teaching a small cohort of about 15 students. The format was an interactive class where…