Large interactive touchscreens as an opportunity for hybrid teaching during COVID-19 pandemic and beyond

The year 2020 will be remembered as the year of COVID-19 and its subsequent lockdowns. This pandemic has profoundly changed the way we teach by forcing many institutions to offer their courses online. The time to come back to face-to-face teaching has arrived, but the shadow of the disease still hangs over teachers, students and society more generally. Disruption in teaching can still occur for students, or even teachers, if they are either diagnosed COVID-19 positive or contact case and forced to self-isolate. In order to limit the impact of self-isolation on learning, hybrid teaching (i.e. teaching face-to-face to students in a classroom and to online students at the same time) was successfully implemented owing to the combination of a videoconference software and a large interactive touchscreen. The set-up presented in this paper allows to broadcast courses to at-home students (i.e. voice, visual pedagogic support and, more interestingly, indications handwritten by the teacher) while simultaneously teaching face-to-face to students in the classroom. It also allows to self-isolated teacher to teach tutorial from home to students in the classroom. This paper focuses on the use of large interactive touchscreens for hybrid teaching. In order to evaluate this pedagogical approach, a questionnaire was completed by students and results discussed.