Want to become a better online teacher? Take an online course!
The Educationalist. By Alexandra Mihai
Welcome to a new edition of my newsletter! You may wonder why it’s been so silent around here for the past weeks. Well, I have a good reason. Or actually, a few good reasons. I successfully defended my PhD, I completed my intensive UX design training and I just started a new job as Learning Designer at UCL, in the Digital Education team. As we’re slowly but surely moving towards a new semester of online and hybrid teaching, I wrote down some reflections on how being an online student can provide valuable insights for designing and teaching online courses. I’d be happy to hear any thoughts or comments on that. Have a nice end of the week!
Have you ever tried to look at a familiar object from a different angle? Isn’t it funny how it seems quite different from what you knew and expected? After teaching online and researching online education for more than a decade, I thought I pretty much had it all covered. Until I recently took an intensive online course to add a UX design perspective to my learning design beckground.
Being in the learner’s seat taught me a few important things about designing online courses and teaching online:
Clear, straigh-forward communication is a must. This includes learning goals, guidelines on learning activities and assignments as well as documentation on all the tools used. Teacher availability and contact channels, as well as any applicable course policies, also need to be communicated.
Online it’s all too easy to overwhelm learners with lots of different resources and activities. Try to calculate Time on Task both for you and for your students as realistically as possible. Don’t hesitate to keep a certain degree of flexibility and ask students whether your initial estimations were correct. Then adjust the course design accordingly. It might take a few itarations, but in the end you’ll get it right.
Take some time to think carefully about the “storyboard” or the “map” of your course. Unlike in a face-to-face environment, you need to be really explicit about the course structure, the choice and sequence of topics, as well as the learning activities and assignments. Interaction moments also need to be purposefully planned.
Put in some extra effort to check your course against various accessibility criteria. Think of who your students might be, where they are studying, what devices they may be using, what the quality of their internet connection is etc. Creating an inclusive learning environment is one way to show your students that you care.
Teacher presence: using asynchronous tools does not mean you will need to “teach” less. It also does not mean students will learn less. Whatever tools you use, make sure you provide a clear and reliable support structure for your students. When in doubt, remember to apply the same principles as you would when teaching face-to-face. In the end, good online teaching is “just” good teaching.