How to Manage Teaching Online

In this season of isolation and shelter-in-place, many teachers have suddenly found themselves teaching at a distance. There are all kinds of technological and pedagogical challenges for this, obviously. But working from home provides another whole challenge of its own.

I had an email from one of my grad students that named this challenge pretty squarely. He reached out, knowing that I teach online a lot, and wondered how I manage teaching online. I was glad he asked! He asked several questions, which I've included below, along with some of my thinking to respond to each of them. 

I should note that while some of these are aligned to research-based best practices, a lot of this is anecdotal examples of things that I have found that work for me. Consider this a case study in managing the work of teaching online, as developed through practice, experimentation, (some) research, and a bit of the school of hard knocks too.

Image by Thomas Lefebvre via Unsplash

Teaching and Learning Online: A Reflection

I am sometimes troubled when I hear people disparaging online learning as somehow being automatically inferior to face-to-face (f2f) learning. I admit, learning online is often different from learning f2f...but different does not mean it is inferior.

Some people seem to think that online courses are automatically less work or less rigorous than their f2f counterparts. Having conducted doctoral studies in the field of Educational Technology entirely online over the past three years, I can assure you that these courses require plenty of work (I average at least 10 hours per week per course) and they are extremely rigorous (I have been stretched incredibly over the past three years, and I have learned so much about my field, both through the readings, writing, and discussion that is part of the course work as well as tacit learning from learning in the online environment.) I'm sure that there are online courses that are less work, or less rigorous...but to assume that all online courses take this path is naive.

I mean, really: are we going to honestly suggest that every f2f course is rigorous and challenging? That every f2f course demands higher-order thinking, excellent writing, and demonstration of deep understanding of the content?

Come on...has every f2f course you've ever taken been amazing? I would argue that statistically, at least half of them have been average...to awful. Some of them were probably fantastic...but not all of them, right? The same is true of online courses: there are probably some really good ones, and some real stinkers, and quite a lot that land somewhere in between.

Speaking as an online instructor, I think it's important to remember that there are many different ways to teach online. We don't assume that all f2f courses are taught in exactly the same fashion, right? Some instructors lecture, others use socratic seminar, others use case studies, others use field-based learning, and still others use collaborative learning. Some instructors use video, others have students read extensively, others place a premium on writing, while others have students discuss topics to make sense of them. Some instructors use deductive, didactic approaches, while others use inductive, inquiring approaches. Some instructors focus on memorization and rote learning, while others strive to have students develop deeper understanding of the concepts being studied, while still others demand students apply their learning to novel situations, analyze complex situations and issues, evaluate the work of others, or even create their own innovative products to solve real problems or otherwise demonstrate their learning.

There are many different ways to teach a f2f course, and the savvy instructor matches his or her teaching methods to the needs of the students, the needs of the content, the needs of the program, the needs of the institution, etc. The instructor makes all kinds of decisions about the methods employed, hopefully in the intent of creating the strongest course possible to result in meaningful learning for the students.

Teaching and learning online--ideally--is no different.

My dog often keeps me company while I am doing my (online) homework.
Image by Dave Mulder [CC BY-SA 2.0]

Online Teaching is Still Teaching

I am facilitating a workshop for a group of my colleagues right now entitled "Introduction to Blended and Online Learning and Teaching." I have led this workshop five times previously--that seems like a lot when I write it down that way! The workshop is designed as an online course with a few face-to-face meetings; this is deliberate: I want my colleagues who may be teaching blended or online courses to have a sense of the uncertainly, the tentative nature, the fear that some online learners have getting started with a course. For some of the participants, this is the first time they have ever taken an online course before...not unlike some of the college students they teach.

So here's the nasty part: in the first module of the course, I deliberately chose BAD PEDAGOGY. I was nebulous about some of the requirements and expectations. I started with a soft open--a general "we will start class on Tuesday" announcement was all I gave them, with no explanation of what that really means. I had a (lengthy!) syllabus, and a (lengthy!) introductory video to give a rambling personal introduction and some expectations for their participation. I even contradicted myself at a few points between the different things I had posted about due dates and times. Oh, and the greatest faux pas of them all: "All of your work is due by midnight on Monday." (Begging the classic question: Wait...does that mean just after 11:59pm on Sunday night? Or just after 11:59pm on Monday night??)

As I say, this was all deliberate. Isn't that horrible? Call it tacit learning: I made it explicit later (I hope!) but I wanted them to have the experience of being unsure if they are "doing it right" as a learner.

Because here's the thing: online teaching is still teaching. We can't be sloppy or doing it half-way, just because we don't have a physical classroom. We still need to be careful, thoughtful, welcoming, encouraging, just as we would in a face-to-face first-day-of-class. And, perhaps even more-so in the online-only classroom environment: we need to be very, very clear about what we mean, and what we expect.

I hope the lesson was taken well by the participants. I promise that I'll make module 2 a better learning experience for them.

"WE" are learning together!
Image by David Mulder [CC BY-SA 2.0]

Bored in Class

In a recent #satchat on student engagement, a Twitterfriend shared this image: (Thanks to @Mrreiff for sharing, and for his permission to use the image here!)

Image via @Mrreiff, used with permission.
Check out his book, If Shakespeare Could Tweet

My Adventure in Flipping the Classroom: Middle School Curriculum and Instruction

I'm teaching a course this semester in middle school curriculum and instruction. While I can't choose one course as my "favorite" to teach (that's like choosing between your kids!), I do LOVE to teach this course!

I'm using the flipped classroom model for teaching it, which has been a great learning adventure for me. This means I record lectures for them to view outside of class (along with other readings and preparation work,) and then when we meet together in class we apply the ideas to real situations.

A screengrab from an online lecture I was recording.
Just check out the passion...or craziness...in those eyes...

Improving Online Discussions

In one of my courses this summer, I was assigned to create a tutorial for online instructors on a topic of my choice. I decided to make a tutorial providing advice for how to facilitate online discussions. Discussions can be one of the best parts of an online course, or one of the worst parts, depending on how they are organized, the kinds of prompts the instructors provides, and the way the instructor facilitates the conversation.

I had the following objectives for my presentation:

• Articulate why online discussions can be a benefit in an online course. 
• Develop skills necessary for organizing an online discussion: articulating expectations, facilitating vs. dominating the discussion, and considerations for assessment. 
•  Explain how to prompt students to participate by using engaging questions. 
• Analyze techniques for facilitating a conversation in an online discussion: grouping, "blindfolding," and using the FY3 strategy for responding to posts. 

I wanted to try and create the tutorial entirely on my iPad, and I was able to do so using the following tools: Haiku Deck for creating slides, Playback, for creating the screencast, and a YouTube playlist for presenting the video segments.

The tutorial is a five-segment video that I put into a playlist, so one video segment automatically leads into the next. Check it out!

Cognitive Presence, Social Presence, Teaching Presence

I have taught online for the past three summers,  and this summer it has felt like a welcome respite to take courses online instead of teaching them. It is good for me to be in the student's seat, and to think about online teaching and learning from the learner's perspective. It is interesting for me to be learning about teaching in an online setting. Since I already have some first-hand knowledge--I have taught five or six courses online now--one might think I have expertise in online teaching. And I suppose I do, to a point, but the things I have learned have mostly come through trial and error so far. This course has been a fantastic way to rethink not only what I am doing as an online instructor, but why I am doing it that way.

Specifically, one of the things I have been wondering about is how to build teaching presence in an online course. Since the courses I teach have been mostly asynchronous (we rarely have meetings in which we all are logged in at the same time to share in realtime), it has been a challenge for me to try to replicate what I do in face-to-face courses.

Image by Phil Norton [CC BY-NC-ND 2.0]