Like most of the rest of the educational world, I have been thrust headlong into the world of online teaching and learning. Both from the teaching perspective and the coordinating one. It’s now week 7 of our first term in this brave new world and I have come up for air very briefly before assessments rain down on us between now and the end of the term. I thought I would share a bit of my experience of this term so far and how things are working because I’ve found it useful looking at others’ experiences!
Though we are in week 7, I have so far taught only 4 synchronous sessions as, being an ADoS, I “only” have one group, we didn’t have any synchronous learning in Week 1 (it got up and running from week 2) and Week 3 got wiped out by a University closure day tacked onto the Easter weekend. My Week 7 session is tomorrow!
I use the term ‘taught’ fairly loosely as our approach is not the traditional whole class online lesson one. Instead, we have a two hour slot and the class of (on average) 20 is divided into 4 half hour slots within that (we change these groupings each week). It’s been interesting coming to terms with the new set-up and figuring out what works (and, indeed, what doesn’t!). We are using Blackboard collaborate and like most of these kind of platforms, it has some useful features like allowing students to raise hands, chat in a chat box, be put into breakout rooms and so forth. Of course with half an hour and a small handful of students, as a whole, we haven’t been using the breakout rooms much. That will change next term though! My half hours tend to take the structure of check on previous week’s learning, task, discussion. It seems to work best when:
- you nominate students clearly so that they know when to speak (sounds so obvious but in slot one on day one I had to learn that the hard way!).
- you get used to speaking into the ether and include prompts to get students writing in the chat box or raising their hands within what you say.
- you use visual instructions to back up the oral ones and there is no ambiguity in what you want students to when and in what order and for how long, and how they are going to return/signal their return to the next whole group learning phase.
- you get students to prepare thoroughly for the discussion in advance of the session.
As well as our online slots, we (continue to) use Blackboard for asynchronous content. Given we had 2 weeks to get our course up and running, we were fortunate in that we already had all lesson materials on Blackboard in the form of powerpoints and worksheets, previously with the function of enabling students to review content. The challenge, then, has been to make it more suitable to online learning. We have done this in the following ways:
- Recording start of week and end of week videos. The former review the previous week of learning and talk the students through the lesson content for the current week, while the latter review the week’s content. This has been a laying the track as we go kind of a team effort, with everyone contributing – teachers and ADoSes writing scripts and finding additional materials to support the week’s topic and skills, ADoSes checking and editing scripts as well as adding the additional resources to the relevant lesson padlet on Blackboard, the odd teacher but mainly the TEL (Technology-Enhanced Learning) team recording the videos using Kaltura. Being as there were three cohorts and sets of teachers to manage, this required a complex Project Management Googlesheet to keep track of who was doing what by when. By hook or by crook, though, we have managed to do it! Script checking is complete, script recording ongoing. Materials are released on a weekly basis.
- Using individual class padlets. Teachers have set up a padlet for each of their groups and this provides a means of generating student interaction (with each other, with tasks, with the teacher) outside of the synchronous learning slots. My students have engaged most with the paraphrase challenge – this is the brainchild of one of my colleagues not me so I don’t take credit! It involves putting a sentence or a short paragraph together with source information on the padlet for students to paraphrase either the entirety in the case of the sentence level ones or select an idea to paraphrase from the paragraph level ones. Of course they need to include correctly formatted citations. It’s a good way to provide regular paraphrasing practice – a skill that students tend to need a lot of practice of in order to master, regardless of L1 background!
- As alluded to in point one, supplementing what already existed with extra content for the students to use for skills practice – videos, website links, extra practice activities etc.
- In week 5 and ongoing, end of week quizzes were introduced, using Blackboard’s quizzing tool. These contain questions based on the week’s content to check students’ learning but also as a means for the institution to monitor participation. Script writers have written the questions at the end of the end of week video script, and the TEL team have created the quizzes in Blackboard. I don’t know what we would do without the TEL team!!
Student feedback has been positive but the main thing they want more of is teacher contact points within a week. Thus, next term we will be keeping the short tutorials slot and adding another two hour slot where an hour is more traditional teacher led input and the second hour can be used for tasks with the teacher on hand to provide support. We are also looking add more interactive content to the lesson padlets on Blackboard for next term and for the new academic year (although we have just learnt that there will also be more content being prescribed from higher up than our centre so how that all pans out remains to be seen!)
In terms of asynchronous learning, my students were struggling to keep on top of remembering what they had and hadn’t done tasks-wise and therefore forgetting to do some things. Being younger foundation students, unlike the pre-masters students they haven’t yet learned how to study effectively independently and are used to a lot more structure and hand-holding. So, I made them a record of work to alleviate this issue! Some are even using it 😉
I hope this is of interest to some of you out there and would be interested to hear via comments what you are doing with your students and how that is working out!
Right, see you at the other end of this term (maybe!) <fills lungs and prepares for the next wave to break>
Lizzie Pinard 