Thread on online teaching. (I’ve done lots)
Students in UK & elsewhere are being offered online or ‘blended’ (online + face to face) learning. @Andrew_Adonis tweets that students should be offered a refund. Lecturers say online teaching is harder and more labour-intensive.
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20 years ago I set up one of the UK’s first fully online courses – an MSc in International Primary Health Care at UCL. It was UCL’s first ever online course, and was seen as avant garde, experimental and – to quote a critic on a key committee – not “proper” teaching.
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Actually, we had good reasons for teaching online: it allowed our part-time students to remain in-country and it also provided a great infrastructure to set up online, global communities of practice which extended beyond the end of the course.
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But it was hard – for both tutors and students. We made every mistake in the book before we won Online Course of the Year in 2005. The course ran for over a decade and took students from 56 countries. Here’s some things we learnt.
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The online environment needs to mirror the on-site university. Material structures enable the student to navigate the course (e.g. the corridor leads to the library and the bookshelf has authors in alphabetical order). Your online course needs similar clear scaffolding.
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The first week of the course is mainly social. Meeting fellow students, meeting tutors, drinking/tasting, forming-storming-norming-conforming, finding a group ‘like me’, finding out that there are others ‘not like me’. […contd]
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=> Your online course needs lots of social activities and options in wk 1. Not naff icebreakers, real ways to relax, have a laugh, share hopes and fears. Don’t try to lead this, tutors, any more than you’d be on the dance floor in the freshers’ disco. But make room for it.
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There are 3 kinds of interaction in an online course: student-courseware interaction (e.g. drill-and-practice MCQs), student-tutor interaction (e.g. emails, phone calls, 1-1 video), & student-student interaction (e.g. in virtual café or Facebook group). All support learning.
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Students learn actively when they’re doing stuff. You know that. So you’ll need – in addition to the reading lists and lectures you’re posting online – activities (individual, small-group and large-group) which support active learning.
[…contd]
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Individual active learning includes ‘read-and-make-notes-on’ exercises (timetable a report-back session). Small-group ac lng includes things like online role play (try it!) & group presentations. Large-group ac lng can be supported with mass survey tools like Mentimeter.
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Daily touch-base sessions can be great for troubleshooting. Tutor is online (e.g. Teams, Zoom) for 15 min at start and/or end of day. All the students learn vicariously when one admits they don’t know how to xyz and it gets explained.
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You are not available 24/7. Make this clear. Timetable a time when you’ll be responding to student emails. You don’t have to respond ‘by return’. If you create forums for students to ‘meet’ in small groups, they will do a lot of the troubleshooting themselves.
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Your online course is probably a face to face course hastily re-jigged. Be honest about this. Admit the downsides. Admit it’s stressful. But also emphasise the upsides e.g. we’ll all have a log of all the conversations; the lectures can be played as many times as you like.
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Reflect and make sense collectively. You and your students are on an unwanted learning curve because of Covid-19. Create some time-out sessions where they (and you) can complain about how hard it is, and develop solutions as problems emerge (they will).
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Finally, get interested in quality standards in online teaching and how you will meet and exceed them. Old papers from my team here (things have moved on lots since then):
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https://www.bmj.com/content/326/7381/142.full

https://d1wqtxts1xzle7.cloudfront.net/46284797/Using_the_online_environment_in_assessme20160606-2405-hgnsr5.pdf?1465233477=&response-content-disposition=inline%3B+filename%3DUsing_the_online_environment_in_assessme.pdf&Expires=1601222542&Signature=TrGN2uWVaz5uoo8d1a6hKn8l7~fgC05V6S8JQUhIITHV1t6hfA8oGoGfzbuz4iaiYGe57YVhrgCvJfkQDAjZOSkbELmJ48nNrGaeQFQ0FsrGWOBTWJ3YURtEPCdle91OpBInCFjdOwbCdUTZoh6Z3PAM8imk7v634M7l6gWADk28tQ4CWDr7iLNmDPm6ubZ7cg3LPHfmq7LFtfFX-pVDAnJkMgWanGRiqJcrWJ74yJBU9K4SmIwSaLn1Yx9gFMfsPIqpfo1UJN~lq3Z~J-lbUTrCaS90sAeUaZJeaU4y2DCVrIcWDKtpuU~ROUM28p4h5mYMFnS3TrHG2mJELI~PDQ__&Key-Pair-Id=APKAJLOHF5GGSLRBV4ZA