IN-PERSON: Learning. Life. Work

Abstract

During the 5 semesters of 2020 Spring to 2022 Spring, I have taught two interdisciplinary courses online; one in each semester. The two courses are Introduction to Nanobiotechnology and Gene Chips and Its Biomedical Applications both for students in the higher level of undergraduate and those in the master program and PhD Program. Due to the characters of highly interdisciplinary contains of both courses, the students usually come from Departments of Physics, Chemistry, life Science, Biomedical Eng., and Chemical Eng. The same two courses had taught in class during the 5 semesters of 2017 Spring to 2020 Fall. The semester of 2019 Spring are excluded due to my sabbatical leave. The results presented in this paper will be based on the teaching of two interdisciplinary courses for 10 semesters which 5 semesters were taught through online and the other 5 semesters done by in class. We find that if adequately taking the advantage of individual VIDEO CONTACT of the teacher with EVERY student SIMULTANEOUSLY when teach online, medium size online courses could have advantages in teaching and learning than in class courses. The reason of the restriction of medium size is when the class size goes beyond 50 students, the individual video contact of the teacher with every student simultaneously will become practically infeasible. Although the conclusions are based on the 5 years teaching experience on two highly interdisciplinary courses in which students come from diverse background therefore need more students and teacher interactions, we will discuss that the conclusions can apply to other general non-interdisciplinary courses. After all, students and teacher interactions are always very important for teaching in all kind of courses.