The Covid-19-induced closure of schools forced many instructors throughout the world to develop ways to deliver instruction online. Video-conferencing applications became one prominent tool for instructors to continue instruction. We report the perceptions of undergraduate mathematics students and preservice mathematics teachers who interacted in online “workshops.” In the online workshops, students worked on mathematics problems in small groups while preservice teachers supported their work. Two rounds of semi-structured interviews with both groups were conducted, wherein participants compared and contrasted their experiences with in-person and online group work. Analyses revealed three challenges with respect to online communication: (a) limited access to one another’s written mathematical work, (b) limited ability to have one-on-one conversations, and (c) the tendency for students to leave their cameras turned off during the workshops. In particular, we emphasize that the multimodal nature of mathematics requires extra attention to strategies for sharing symbolic, diagrammatic, gestural, and other non-verbal ways of communicating mathematics. © 2021, Springer Nature Switzerland AG.
Communicating Mathematics During Small Groupwork Through Video-Conferencing Applications