Utilizing Zoom-stamps in synchronous online workshop implementations

Abstract

In engineering education, and in work life in general, the past two years have been struggling with Covid-19 pandemic. When considering studying, learning, and working, the teachers and other facilitators have been forced to create innovative methods for online working, aiming to good work efficiency, student engagement, and learning results. Along the development of various online working possibilities, it has been noticed that especially interaction among participants in synchronous online sessions is a challenge. Even if some participants are actively discussing and working in online sessions, some participants remain very silent and indistinguishable. Furthermore, even though the technical tools for online working and learning have developed rapidly during the recent years, technical problems still exist quite often. There are numerous ways for increasing interaction in online sessions, including, for example, asking questions, using camera, utilizing chat or third-party applications like Padlet, and small group discussions in breakout rooms. In this paper, we will present how we utilized Zoom-stamps in two types of workshops. The basic idea in utilizing Zoom-stamps was to increase interaction and communication among participants and help them to further develop ideas created and discussed in the workshop. The lessons learnt from the first type implementations were considered when planning the second type implementations. We will describe the pros and cons of the Zoom-stamp utilization in synchronous online working as well as share our future development ideas.