During 2020, I had to start using digital teaching more than I was used to. I have had some digital classes before, but typically for students that had met before. Now I had to design a PhD course for a group of 12 students that had never met before. And this seemed extra challenging. I decided to use gather.town for this purpose. This is a digital platform where people are represented by small icons, that can walk around and talk to eachother. My colleague Marie helped set up the platform, which featured areas for group work, areas for discussion – and a fire place.

The course lasted 3 days and contained 2 lectures each day, followed by group work and a discussion in plenum. The talks were given in Zoom, which we accessed through a link inside gather town.

The zoom feature worked nicely. The group work was done in designated private areas where only those inside the coloured parts (called group 1,2,3 in the first picture above) could hear eachother. Here, some of the students had connection problems and were kicked out of the conversations. As this happened repeatedly over the 3 days, we suspect it is a problem of gather.town. The discussions in plenum were made difficult by the fact that there is a limited number of people that can be seen at the same time in the screen (see figure below). So if someone raised their hand, but they were not on my screen, I did not see it. Also, in contrast to e.g. Zoom, the names are not shown on top of the video. So while this may be similar to a real life teaching situation (you better remember the names of everyone in the class!), it still is more practical with the names visible. We moved the group discussion to zoom, and that worked better.

So in conclusion, the gather.town functionality had some interesting aspects – especially being able to walk around and ‘bump’ into eachother, but for a digital course, the advantage of it was limited over e.g. Zoom.