Done.
Takeaways and stayaways.
Photo by Andreas Dress on Unsplash
The end of Fall Term 2020 draws nigh - in 16 days, come hell or high water, I will submit my grades, shake the dust from my sandals, and be done with the semester. It has been an excruciatingly busy term for everyone; many remark how they don’t remember having such a difficult term.
That doesn’t mean that it hasn’t been a profitable term. The pandemic has disrupted everyone’s lives, and instructors and students experience this disruption daily as they confront the complexities of online teaching and learning. The conditions are not ideal (but then, were they ever?), and the level of anxiety is higher than usual, and that is affecting performance.
It is nevertheless important to stress one point: good learning and good teaching is still happening despite these obstacles. Naysayers call this term a failure or a disaster - pandemic pedagogy doesn’t work and we need to return to the way the did things in the Before Times.
Do we, though? Do we really want to return to a time where we generally ignored pedagogy? Because that’s what we did in the Before Times. If nothing else, the Great Pivot has forced instructors to confront how they taught and students to confront how they learn.
I’ve been writing this series of blogposts for my graduate seminar on online teaching and learning, and this is the final instalment. Last week I gave my students a final reflective assignment in which I asked them to think about their “takeaways and stayaways,” the things they learned in the seminar that they would incorporate into their own teaching or would avoid like the plague. They’ve been confronting their notions of teaching and learning all term, as have I, and together we’ve been reexamining every aspect of how we teach. Here’s a brief summary of some of our important takeaways and stayaways:
full-fledged, 100% synchronous courses do not do anyone any favours. If an instructor thinks they can lecture via Zoom as they normally would in a classroom and that students will respond as they normally would, they’re probably mistaken. Or actually, perhaps they’re correct: students’ minds will wander as they tire of the extra effort needed to remain engaged in the online video format.
instructor presence is a necessity - students want it and need it. This doesn’t mean the instructor needs to be the centre of attention by cultivating an online teaching persona or dominating every discussion. What it entails is that the instructor facilitate learning experiences that benefit the students, that they demonstrate awareness of obstacles students might be facing (especially during the pandemic), and that they give students opportunities to feel connected to the course, to the instructor, and to other students. It’s a lot to ask of instructors, who not only need to be content experts, but group dynamic experts as well, and this in an online environment. It will not always go well.
we need clarity and simplicity in our online courses. When all the courses are online, most people have trouble managing all the things. This may require a rethinking of a basic tenet of online pedagogy that to keep students engaged, you need to assign many smaller learning tasks.
give students more authentic learning opportunities. Let them show what they can do in formats other than tests, term papers, and presentations.
collaborate with students. Create tasks and assignments where you work with the students in some capacity. Think of the students as apprentices.
build flexibility into courses. Do it on the housekeeping front in order to reduce your own need for managing extension requires, and also in order to help students manage the pressure the comes with high stakes learning. But we also need to do it on the format front and created blended and hybrid courses that create an engaging mixture of online and on-the-ground elements.
My final takeaway is a very personal one: teach a course about online teaching and learning. I’ve been teaching online for years, but I’ve never taught a course about it. I’ve learnt so much about what I’ve been doing all these years, and that has been enlightening. It has been a struggle to teach a grad seminar as all encompassing as this, but my students have been wonderfully patient with me as I’ve worked through what I thought about the topics at hand, and I’m grateful to them for that.
For Fall Term 2020 this blog will be exploring issues informing education during a pandemic. It is appearing as part of a graduate seminar on online teaching and learning. You can read more about the seminar or see the other posts.
Post 60/60.
