No preliminaries are necessary here. One result of Covid-19 has been a shift to online teaching by Zoom (or similar platforms). In some law faculties all teaching is online. In most faculties most teaching is online with some hybrid teaching, and in a few (privileged) places in-person teaching remains viable.
It is also a commonplace that most teachers find Zoom teaching inferior to in-person teaching, both from a didactic and a human point of view. The two are oftentimes intertwined.
And yet the impact of Zoom teaching will differ according to one’s style of teaching, and will affect some styles more than others. The challenge in each case, though, is to narrow the quality gap between in-person teaching and Zoom teaching, regardless of the style of teaching adopted.
At one end of the scale are those whose teaching is principally a lecture (with some time for questions at the end perhaps). At the other end are those, like myself, whose teaching, even in large classes, is principally through question and answer – the so-called Socratic method (though I am not sure what Socrates would think of this use of his name and method). Though the class is conducted through Q&A it is, as I tell my students, simply lecturing through their mouths, which has various benefits with which I need not trouble the reader here. I certainly do not want to argue for or against these different poles and the variants in between. Each has its pros and cons.
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