Transmission vs collaborative learning

One of the things I'm noticing is that on-lin teaching is probably better suited to a transission model, or at least, that's where the balabnce more naturally sits.  It's easy to tell people things, but the pairwork is harder. This doesn't sit easily with me,  as it makes for a much more teacher centred classroom and I felt last night as if I were dragging them through it (another lesson to keep learning is to limit the amount of material.....

The main problem is that the breakout rooms are a bit isolated - you can't keep your eye on them in the same way that you can in a class, and it's less easy to see whether they are stuck/ finished etc. One of the suggestions from feedback was to put a timer on the breakout sessions, so that they knew when they were coming back.  I did this last night and I think it was a good thing overall, but one comment was that in one case, they were given too long (it was only 2 minutes...) for a particular task.  You can easily move between rooms to check out how they are, of course.  The difficulty when they don't have microphones is that the breakout rooms are laborious for them and difficult to quickly assess for me.  Hopefully, in the next group, I've emphasised sufficiently that they need a mic and they'll mostly have one...