Context.

This seminar is built around one key idea: that there are three contexts informing the design and delivery of every online course. These are course context, instructor context, and learner context.

After a preliminary module that introduces you to some theories of learning (e.g. behaviourism, cognitivism, constructivism, Bloom’s theory) and course design frameworks (e.g. Community of Inquiry, Universal Design for Learning, UXDL Honeycomb), the seminar is divided into three modules consisting of six topics each. The topics are, well, topical: they address some of the principle, and sometimes controversial, issues surrounding education during a pandemic. In the final week of the course, we explore some specific technology and apps that are particularly helpful in online teaching and learning.

Course Context.

Here an instructor thinks about the course in terms of its role in the program or university, its content, its reputation, its physical or virtual space.

1. Instructional Design

2. Online Course Structure

3. Online vs. Face-to-Face

4. Synchronous vs. Asyncrhonous

5. Online Course Management

6. Inclusion and Equity

Instructor Context.

Instructors, either explicitly or implicitly, make decisions regarding their course based on their preferred teaching style, their confidence about the subject matter, the pressures on their time, their levels of motivation and stress.

1. Creating Community

2. Instructor Presence

3. Content

4. Open Educational Resources

5. Discussion Forums

6. Disposable vs. Authentic Assignments

Learner Context.

What do we know about our learners in terms of their academic careers, their personal wellbeing, their goals and aspirations, their interests, even their location? What impact do these factors have on their ability to learn the material we’ve set out in the course? What level of engagement will our students be expecting?

1. Accommodating the Learner

2. Academic Integrity Online

3. Learning Languages Online

4. Ungrading

5. Online Collaboration

6. Co-Creation

Discussing.

The seminar offers many opportunities for asynchronous discussions of the readings. The discussions are embedded with the readings, either on the Teams site using the commenting feature, and sometimes externally by using hypothes.is, a free-to-use annotation tool that provides a “conversation layer” over any webpage. In addition, we conduct weekly Zusammenfassung discussion activities to summarize some of that week’s learning. These take on a different form each week so that you can get an idea of the variety of options available when organizing asynchronous discussions.

Interviewing.

This is one of the most popular features of the course. Instead of doing a standard presentation, you work with the instructor to create live webinar podcasts. Prior to the webinar, you have two meetings with the instructor, a Research Meeting where you discuss your topic and the focus you might take, and a Production Meeting where you set up the interview. Then on the day of the podcast, you’re the expert and the instructor interviews you to get your take on the issue at hand.

Here are two examples of webinars. (These are in their “raw” form, i.e. no post-production involved; for the open textbook - described below in “Working - in the open” - the audio from the webinars will be used to complement the text. Each webinar lasts about 30 minutes and is then followed by ProfChat, the live open discussions we sometimes hold in the seminar.)

• Online vs. Face-to-Face with Bill Najah

• Synchronous vs. Asynchronous Learning with McLennon Wilson

Observing.

It’s one thing to read about online teaching and learning; it’s quite another to see it in action. For that reason one of your seminar obligations is to observe an undergraduate course in your discipline. You share your observations at different points in the term, centring them on topics under discussion at that moment in the seminar.

Doing.

We’re on a path in this seminar: theory > observation > practice. Practice comes in the form of designing your own course; you’ll prepare a syllabus and outline the structure of a course you’d like to teach.

Here are two examples of course design projects completed in the Fall 2020 offering of the seminar:

• Erica Swyers: Introduction to German Communication

• Laurence Côté-Pitre: Environmental Literature between West and East Germany

• McLennon Wilson: Developmental Psychology (this timeline syllabus is in use during Winter Term 2021)

Reflecting.

I'm a big believer in reflective learning, i.e. that as part of the learning process we should devote time to reflecting on our learning. To that end you develop a learning portfolio to capture and reflect on your key learning moments in the seminar.

Here are a couple of examples of the portfolios that students put together in the Fall 2020 term.

• Jana Koepcke

• A PhD student (name and internal links withheld)

Blogging.

You have to work hard in this seminar, so I should as well. The term has 60 lecture days, which means that I’m publishing 60 blog posts in the ProfBlog that comment and expand on the topics we’re dealing with at that moment in the seminar.

The link above takes you to all 60 posts for the Fall Term 2020 offering of the seminar, but here are links to some of my favourites:

• Don’t Teach. Facilitate

• Co-creation

• Cheating

• Authenticity

• Teaching Languages Online, Part Two

• Inclusion

Working - in the open.

I’m an advocate for open - open access, open educational resources, open data, open ice cream containers. This seminar has a number of open features:

• all of our coursework is done in the open - tasks, assignments, and other contributions are shared with our classmates.

• the work I produce for the course - for example the ProfBlog - is made freely available under a Creative Commons Share Alike license.

• in preparing the initial offering of this seminar in Fall 2020, it became clear that the material available for teaching online teaching and learning was very much focused on a “best practices” approach. I feel a graduate seminar must do more than provide solutions that can’t possibly take into account all contexts: it must teach students how to think through the intersecting issues related to online teaching and learning. To that end, I am now putting together an open access textbook that captures both my and the students’ work.

• I’m providing access to my course evaluations for the first offering of the seminar (Fall Term 2020). Students could enrol in two different course shells, so there are two different summaries of the evaluations, here and here.