By Carolina Kuepper-Tetzel

With online teaching becoming a reality for many educational institutions in the coming semester/year due to COVID-19, the questions are what the key challenges in education will be and how to overcome them. An obvious challenge is the transformation of teaching material and delivery to accommodate the online format. However, in today’s post I’d like to highlight three additional challenges that I have identified by working closely with colleagues at my institution (shout-out to my amazing colleagues in Psychology at the University of Glasgow who have worked endlessly to ensure a positive student experience in these challenging times) and speaking to educators worldwide. This list is not meant to be exhaustive, but it formed a framework for preparing for teaching in these difficult times. Before diving in, it is important to keep in mind that these points are not special to online teaching. In fact, they apply to and are crucial for all teaching contexts – it just seems that with the change in how teaching is delivered, there is a greater priority of discussing these aspects.

Communication & Signposting

Transparent and timely communication with students is crucial. Students will have to know where they find information and how they can ask for help. Clearly communicating to them what channels will be used for what purpose is vital to avoid confusion. Consistency is the keyword here. This way they know exactly where they have to go to find a specific piece of information. For example, one channel to post material and another for more interactive discussions are the approach that I am using in my teaching this semester. Prepare an initial ‘Welcome’ message or video to students to describe the procedures and offer reminders along the way. I cannot emphasize this enough, but providing consistency and structure is appreciated by students (1) - always, but particularly in the times we are living right now.

Progress Tracking & Study Tips

With teaching being done remotely, there will be a larger load on students to engage in self-regulated learning. Students can find this difficult and so supporting students to plan study sessions and track their progress will be important. There are different tools that can be used to help students track their learning journey. I have seen educators using checklists on the virtual learning environment or creating weekly task lists in Canvas. I’m using the checklist activity on Moodle (which is our virtual learning platform) and have set up weekly progress trackers for students. This allows them to have an overview of all weekly tasks and it allows me to monitor engagement and contact students to offer help. Progress tracking is one aspect, but the other one is to encourage students to use effective study strategies. When and how should they revise the material they are expected to know in the end? We know that prompting students to retrieve taught material from memory at different points in time not only highlights to them how much they have understood, but it also serves as a learning strategy to better remember that information in the future. Thus, embedding quizzes throughout the semester formally and informally and providing students with study tips are two things that I have done. In addition, I created a time management resource to help them stay off distractions when they are engaging in focused studying.

Peer-Learning & Community

When teaching is face-to-face, it is easier for students to discuss issues or make plans to meet with their peers. With remote learning, this is harder to achieve. The sense of belonging and of being part of the learning community needs to be explicitly put in place in times of remote teaching. Encouraging students to create groups with their peers as part of an assignment and use these groups to also meet outwith the education context (e.g., schedule Zoom or Teams meetings), can be one option. Using communication channels that are more like chats where students can post questions and answer each other questions can boost peer-learning. We are using Microsoft Teams for this and students seem to be very active on there. I have seen educators use FlipGrid for that purpose, too – where students and teachers can post short videos to contribute to a broader discussion. Another one is to schedule informal coffee sessions where students can stop by and chat about things that go beyond the teaching content. Last, but not least, a friendly competition can help with community building: So, this year again, we will have our already famous pumpkin carving competition (#GreatPumpkinCarveOut), but there are other competitions or fun activities that you can do quite quickly such as ‘post the best meme‘ or ‘In a gif: How are you doing?‘.

Hope this is helpful. You’ve got this!

References:

(1) Scutelnicu, G., Tekula, R., Gordon, B., & Knepper, H. J. (2019). Consistency is key in online learning: Evaluating student and instructor perceptions of a collaborative online-course template. Teaching Public Administration, 37(3), 274–292