I’ve seen a lot of law professors engage with one another on blogs or Twitter, swapping advice about tips and tricks for teaching with Zoom, teaching in a remote environment, and so on. I wanted to contribute my best, small piece of advice to that discussion: ask for student feedback.

The student’s (or “user’s”) experience may look different from the professor’s experience. Small details about sound settings, lighting, or screen sharing may look quite different to the students. Students may have anxiety about details like class discussion format or technology that professors may either not be aware of or simply fail to raise with students.

The best thing I’ve done so far is to solicit feedback from students, both before I started teaching in a virtual classroom and after. In the before, I discovered their concerns and anxieties and could try to address them as best I could before our first class—address them in providing them transparency and guidance, and to be aware as we started our class together. After the first week of remote teaching, I did the same so I can tweak details like how my PowerPoint slides display on the shared screen and so on.

It wasn’t much to solicit feedback—an anonymous Google form with a single open-ended prompt in both cases.

But I think that it’s probably one of the most effective ways to figure out what students concerns are and to address them in the specific class environment, adapted to the specific professor’s teaching style.

We’ll see how the remainder of the semester goes, but it’s brought my attention to matters I wouldn’t otherwise have considered, and I hope it improves the experience for students in the weeks ahead.