Negotiating Fusion-Pairs – We iterated assigning students in same-mode pairs (room-room or online-online) or mixed-mode pairs (room-online). It was important to do this as we wanted the whole class to feel like a single cohort. We changed the setup every hour, student pairs had to negotiate: how they work together, who leads, how they interact with instructors.

Ghost Helper – In an in-person class students can request help from the in-person teacher. In a fusion mode, an in-person pair can do the same. But if one or both of the students are online the helper must be online. For a student in the room, this can come as a surprise, when the person they have just interacted with appears in their ear, like a friendly ghost. This requires a cognitive shift and can divert attention. During mixed-mode pairwork we consciously switched to online helpers only, so students were initially spooked by the ghost but they found it friendly. Boo!

Micro-Interactions – Small moments of joy and frustration are when learning can happen. We used:
1) Relentless feedback: Asking for hourly snap feedback using a whiteboard to take the temperature of student learning.
2) Chat blast: asking all students to type something small, a micro contribution, into the chat at the same time.
3) Amplification learning: all student questions were repeated in front of the class during each debriefing session or students could disseminate their own solutions through the chat.