Believe it or not, this may be the easy part. The answer is to put the power and profit in the hands of the teachers themselves, and in turn, back into their communities. By building teacher cooperatives this can become reality.
As remote teaching and learning become more common–if not the standard in many places over the next six months–I thought it might be useful to offer some remote teaching tips to engage students in distance learning.
As with all content, how useful and relevant any of these are depends on your context–experience, grade level, need, priorities and strengths as a teacher, etc. Some are possibly too general to help (e.g., ‘Simplify’), but hopefully out of the 25 remote teaching tips below, one or two might stick and make your planning a little easier–and more engaging for students.
This blog was kindly contributed by Dr David LeFevre, Director of the EdTech Lab at Imperial College and the founder of higher education platform company Insendi, part of Study Group.
Last month a subtle warning shot was shot across the bows of universities still struggling to manage the disruption caused by Covid-19. When the Minister responsible for higher education announced that UK students would be charged full tuition fees for online study, she added a caveat – the assumption of quality. If students ‘feel that the quality isn’t there’ she said, ‘there are processes that they can follow’ to seek redress’.
Amid talk of pandemics and economics, it may seem like a comparatively minor discussion to have: the difference between remote learning and online learning.
But, with COVID-19 forcing schools around the nation to move their classrooms online and more and more scrutiny leveled at the sustainability of doing so, it’s a conversation that education experts increasingly insist should happen. Making the distinction, some say, could shape the future of online learning for years to come.
The shock has passed, the sadness comes and goes, and the stretchy waistband pants are becoming a mainstay. Your college or university is staying online for the rest of this academic year, as well as summer, and you wonder about fall 2020.
While the trauma of the COVID-19 pandemic persists, it may be time to settle into an educational environment that will be more online than previously imagined.
Warning: You will not get through the same amount of content during this pandemic. Please do not try.
If you’ve been paying attention to education news lately, you’ve probably noticed that the conversation around technology in the classroom is shifting. When edtech first burst onto the scene almost three decades ago, access to more technology – devices, broadband – was everything. Educators, policymakers and parents all wanted to know how to get as many devices into the hands of students as soon as possible. How students leveraged technology to support learning would not become a primary focus for many years to come.
I have to agree with the article, it is a major source of stress to transition from the traditional classroom method to a more technological focus. The shift was very rough for both teachers and students. We need a more gradual transition, and allow both teachers and students gain a better grasp of the current situation.
We’ll all be teaching infolit online for the foreseeable future (I hope) and it is, as anyone who’s done much of it will tell you, a very different experience to being in a room with people.
I do a lot of training online already for overseas audiences, so I have some familiarity with this. For what it’s worth, here are some tips for retooling your sessions to work in a webinar type environment.
With online teaching and learning becoming the norm for so many teachers and students during the COVID-19 climate, it is important to be aware of what makes an engaging, creative and effective web-based teaching and learning experience.
The situation with the covid-19 is something that anybody expected and none of us was prepared to face. Everyone has a big challenge to work, study and do their daily activities. In terms of education, students and teachers must do their best to keep learning and teachng at least in the 50% because we all know that online classes will never be the same as classroom classes but we cannot stop it, This kind of articles are very usefull for teachers and students since all of us must find out the best ways to keep with our process. We need to use all the plataforms, the apps, and the websites that we can and give them the best use in order to learn from our professors and their classes. I think that the cahllenge is bigger for teachers and professors because most of them did not have experience with technological devices, online apps nor virtual classes. And for most of them this is difficult but they are doing their best to share their knowledge with us.
As the pivot to online gathers apace, some colleagues have been discussing if we have useful resources at the Open University to help. Lots of other people are doing excellent work online, so I won’t try and collate everything that is out there but rather just focus on OU resources. While we do know a lot about distance & online learning, it’s important to recognise that what is happening now is quite different in nature. This is an emergency, swift response in switching classes to online, which is not the same as a carefully planned 5 year strategy.
A number of schools and universities may be required to close due to the coronavirus outbreak, but how can you quickly move your teaching online?
The sudden closure of universities and schools across the globe has created a demand in delivering educational content online. The Open University has long been a front-runner in distance learning, specifically online. Did you also know that we provide FREE content on OpenLearn, written by Open University academics? We offer a variety of FREE courses, interactives, academic insights and animations on a range of subjects.
Closures are often accompanied by promises that teaching will continue to be done remotely. Unfortunately, many school districts and universities lack the tools and training to move an entire cohort of students online with little or no time to prepare. Below, is a guide of free resources and tips to help get up and running with your online language class!
For online learning to be successful and happy, participants need to be supported through a structured developmental process. The five-stage-model provides a framework or scaffold for a structured and paced programme of e-tivities.
The five-stage-model offers essential support and development to participants at each stage as they build up expertise in learning online.
When hundreds of spring and summer undergraduate courses were abruptly moved from onsite to online delivery in the wake of COVID-19, several faculty and students nationwide reacted with panic and uncertainty. Currently, instructors are busy preparing for the 2020-2021 academic year where several students will continue taking courses online. At my institution, fall academic courses will be primarily virtual (along with several others across the nation), with some in-person and hybrid instruction for performance-based, clinical, and laboratory courses, and some students living on campus.
One of the key questions that faces you as you make your transition to online education is that of resources. In order to make the best of your online teaching/learning experience, you will need to have access to the right materials that can help facilitate this transition. EdTech and mLearning's distance learning section has some good suggestions to start with.
With some schools already announcing they will not reopen normally in the fall, and many others considering their options, educators are hoping to take advantage of the summer to improve on this spring’s sink-or-swim plunge into distance learning. Much of this reflection is likely to take place within the often siloed communities of practice in K-12 and higher education.
Dr. Mark Bullen demystifies instructional design by providing a simple and easy to understand explanation of the concept. His key point is that instructional design is all about crafting learning objectives at a level appropriate for the knowledge and skills that are being developed, then
When I was asked to create an online course 20 years ago, I simply transcribed my face-to-face lectures into 10–15 page Word documents that I posted in our LMS. Don’t ask me how my students managed to get through them.
Things to Consider as You Move Your Teaching Online
Uneven resources always exist, but the move online makes this structural inequality more obvious.
A variety of needs for privacy should always be accommodated in learning communities.
An online class is not the same thing as a class with physical persons gathered to learn together in a brick and mortar classroom in real time and physical space.
You don’t have a “flipped classroom.” You no longer have a classroom at all!
Reject calls to highlight prestige, peer institutions, and imitation of star systems on other campuses and instead explore what is needed and best about where you work and then also foster connections across difference.
Embrace DIY peer-to-peer improvised faculty and student connections, as did the first FemTechNet connected classes: https://femtechnet.org/docc/
Reject the push and rush to “learn” the technology; do this in your own way; admit that you are learning as you go.
The supposedly “born digital” generation needs just as much help as others.
Your online course is not simply about imparting information in one direction.
Consider what co-presence means in any learning situation and how we relate to each other newly through screens and with various technologies.
Consider how international students can be supported in a time of widespread anti-Asian racism.
Consider how to recognize and thank everyone who is participating in the class.
Online experiences can be unsafe. Please see our resources at the Center for Solutions to Online Violence at http://femtechnet.org/csov/.
Differences around race, class, nationality, gender, sexuality, and ability don’t disappear in online environments. Online experience is as racist and sexist and homophobic as anywhere else.
Feminists have been thinking about digital learning since its inception. Please see our white paper on Transforming Higher Education with Distributed Open Collaborative Courses (DOCCs): Feminist Pedagogies and Networked Learninghttp://femtechnet.org/about/white-paper/"
Things to Consider as You Move Your Teaching Online
Uneven resources always exist, but the move online makes this structural inequality more obvious.
A variety of needs for privacy should always be accommodated in learning communities.
An online class is not the same thing as a class with physical persons gathered to learn together in a brick and mortar classroom in real time and physical space.
You don’t have a “flipped classroom.” You no longer have a classroom at all!
Reject calls to highlight prestige, peer institutions, and imitation of star systems on other campuses and instead explore what is needed and best about where you work and then also foster connections across difference.
Embrace DIY peer-to-peer improvised faculty and student connections, as did the first FemTechNet connected classes: https://femtechnet.org/docc/
Reject the push and rush to “learn” the technology; do this in your own way; admit that you are learning as you go.
The supposedly “born digital” generation needs just as much help as others.
Your online course is not simply about imparting information in one direction.
Consider what co-presence means in any learning situation and how we relate to each other newly through screens and with various technologies.
Consider how international students can be supported in a time of widespread anti-Asian racism.
Consider how to recognize and thank everyone who is participating in the class.
Online experiences can be unsafe. Please see our resources at the Center for Solutions to Online Violence at http://femtechnet.org/csov/.
Differences around race, class, nationality, gender, sexuality, and ability don’t disappear in online environments. Online experience is as racist and sexist and homophobic as anywhere else.
Feminists have been thinking about digital learning since its inception. Please see our white paper on Transforming Higher Education with Distributed Open Collaborative Courses (DOCCs): Feminist Pedagogies and Networked Learninghttp://femtechnet.org/about/white-paper/"
As universities rush to get all their courses online quickly, there’s a high probability of error but also a lot you can do to succeed. Problems may occur due to overtaxed technological infrastructure, your students’ disorientation and fear, and your own learning curve. On the positive side, you learn for a living, so you are good at it! Being open to the current crisis-driven educational opportunity is a call to action. The reputation and integrity of your institution—and you!—depends upon your offering engaging online classes. (No pressure.) Below are a few tips to get you started.
E-tivities are frameworks for enabling active and participative online learning by individuals and groups. E-tivities are important for the online teaching and learning world because they deploy useful, well-rehearsed principles and pedagogies for learning as well as your choice of networked technologies. They focus on the learners- the people I call the participants, who are contributing, providing, reworking, interpreting, combining most of the knowledge. They overturn the idea that learning depends on one big expert and his/her conveying of knowledge. They are based on the strong idea that knowledge is constructed by learners through and with others.
Elizabeth E Charles's insight:
Useful tips for planning your online activities/e-tivities.
Firstly, the Californian association for information literacy, LILi, has set up a page for sharing resources about teaching IL online. "Inspired by CCC COVID-19 Website Google Doc, Lifelong Information Literacy (LILi) created this blog post to collect online instruction information from all libraries in California. Please share in the form or comment below for discussions. The LILi Web Committee will summarize important information and resources in this blog as the situation evolves." This is at https://lili.libguides.com/lion/COVID-19
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