"The switch to the new format went extremely well."
Valentin Bosshard is doctoral student at the Department. Together with lecturer Professor Peter Jossen and around 20 student teaching assistants, he helps to run lectures and exercises classes for approximately 500 Bachelor’s degree students of the Analysis lecture. In this interview, he talks about how the Department made a quick change to remote teaching and what challenges it had to overcome.
Your main job is to organise exercises classes for the Analysis lecture. What does that involve, specifically?
I organise how the exercises are run, which mainly means writing problem sheets with the help of Peter Jossen, who’s the lecturer. A problem sheet is a collection of exercises relating to the material covered in a lecture. Students have to work through them over the course of a week, and then they get together in small groups to discuss them. The student teaching assistants look after these groups – I don’t work with the students directly.
How did you first react when the ETH Executive Board announced that all teaching was being made to switch to a remote format from 16 March?
We were expecting something like that to happen. When the decision finally came, we had to get to work straight away – though we didn’t know exactly how to proceed at that point, of course. To work things out, we organised a meeting with the student teaching assistants the day after the decision came and discussed any ideas we had about moving in-person teaching to a remote format. It was a bit chaotic at first, because we didn’t know what was and wasn’t expected of us.
How did the new lecture format go?
The lectures didn’t really change because they were all being recorded anyway due to the number of students attending them. The new format just meant that Peter Jossen was now in the lecture theatre alone, and he set up a Zoom meeting for each break so that students could ask questions. ETH’s Multimedia Services team also created a YouTube stream for the lecture theatre so that we could have a live feed of everything happening there around the clock.
Another new addition to the lectures was a forum that students were able to use for discussion and questions if they had difficulty understanding something. Peter Jossen and I would then comment on these.
How did the exercises classes change?
Peter Jossen had the idea of presenting the solutions to some of the exercises by video – this meant the student teaching assistants coming to ETH and recording a video as they presented the solutions on the board. This worked fine for the first week, but then the teaching assistants weren’t allowed to come to ETH any more. The students really liked the videos, though, so we had to find another solution – and that’s when the teaching assistants started recording themselves presenting solutions from their own homes. They were doing it entirely voluntarily, of course, but they were all really enthusiastic about it and tried out lots of different methods. Some people came up with really creative solutions using whatever technology they had at home.
It sounds like the switch to the new format went well. Did you come up against any difficulties?
Yes, the process of correcting the exercises became more complicated. Students had to submit their solutions by email or upload them to a Polybox folder. The student teaching assistants would then correct them and return them to the students using whatever method was suitable. It was tricky because some of the teaching assistants didn’t have printing facilities at home, or had no way of electronically correcting and returning the tasks.
What positive and negative experiences are you taking with you?
Aside from the correction work, the switch to the new format went extremely well. With the help of our teaching assistants and some amazing, creative video solutions, we really pulled off the exercises successfully.
Further information on exercice classes
In addition to running its own degree programmes, the Department of Mathematics is responsible for mathematics tuition in all of the degree programmes that ETH offers. Together with the Department’s lecturers, around 240 doctoral assistants and student teaching assistants not only ensure that lectures and exercise classes run smoothly, but also look after the needs of more than 5,000 students. Exercise classes represent one of the most important aspects of mathematics teaching and provide a similar experience to internships in other disciplines. More than 300 classes meet every week in the Department alone, and provide students with the opportunity to solve problem sheets based on the lectures and to discuss them together.