Tip 1: Plan and prioritise a fewWhen you adapt your seminars/lectures to online mode, you will realize that you need to lessen the content you usually deliver in traditional classes. In other words, if you normally achieve six teaching objectives face-to-face, only 3 or 4 of those objectives will be realistic when teaching online. Therefore, you should be planning to achieve a few objectives (usually 3-4), especially in your early days of teaching online. Tip 2: Set clear instructions for participation normsCommunicating your expectations for online class participation early and concisely can increase student engagement. To do this, here are some tips:
Tip 3: Put social presence first before the cognitive presenceLecturers tend to complain that their students often go back to their shells when asked to speak with their microphones or turn on their webcams. The same may be true when asked to work together. This might be because you might not have built proper rapport with your learners, as a result of which they feel shy or insecure. Chat before your sessions start to know, for example, how your learners are doing. Start with some warm-up activities, which aren’t necessarily content-related. Turn on your webcam and keep it on during your sessions. Ask students to share their experiences and perspectives. To bring your learners back from their shells, try the following techniques, especially during your early sessions:
Tip 4: Vary activities and introduce them graduallyIt is a typical student misconception to think that online classes are boring. Learning online can be engaging for students, provided lecturers know how to use rich interactive tools with appropriate pedagogies. Videoconferencing tools comes with many features, such as polls, shared notes, breakout rooms, etc. Instead of sharing slides and reading them out to your students, you can employ the: Public Chats
Shared Notes
Share Screen
Breakout Rooms
Introduce tasks and activities with videoconferencing features gradually, as students may need time to be comfortable using new tools. What’s more, ensure that these tasks tightly adhere to the teaching objectives of your sessions. Tip 5: Have a backup planTeaching live classes online has never been easy, even for expert lecturers. Unlike humans, technology can’t speak or explain why it is troublesome. You need to figure out the roots of the issue on your own. Therefore, having a backup plan can always prevent you from a possible disaster. Here are some potential issues you may encounter with videoconferencing technologies like Zoom and ways to deal with them:
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A very simple experiment carried out on myself revealed that course presentation materials (teacher commentary, text books and etc) are not the only sources of learning for me. What I did was to list what I have learnt from an online course and match it with the sources of that understanding. This thought experiment resulted in the following channels of learning:
Having realized this, I learnt that there is no point in dumping a torrent of information on learners through text or video in online courses. Even worse, I concluded that not seeing channels of student learning other than presentation materials means inhibiting student from learning. Implications of the thought experiment for me have been the shift in my attitude to teaching online. I have started thinking more about the followings:
An obvious conclusion that follows is that teachers should always consider other channels of learning and accordingly build in opportunities for students to learn through them. |
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