{"id":5974,"date":"2020-03-13T11:11:05","date_gmt":"2020-03-13T09:11:05","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/onlinelearning.aalto.fi\/?p=5974"},"modified":"2020-04-02T11:06:02","modified_gmt":"2020-04-02T08:06:02","slug":"enabling-learning-and-teaching-in-challenging-times","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/onlinelearning.aalto.fi\/aol\/blog\/5974-enabling-learning-and-teaching-in-challenging-times","title":{"rendered":"Enabling learning and teaching online in challenging times"},"content":{"rendered":"

Author: <\/i>Tomi Kauppinen<\/a>, project leader of Aalto Online Learning,\u00a0March 13th, 2020 (updated March 14th-16th)<\/em><\/i><\/p>\n

Now more than ever, we need online approaches to facilitate learning and teaching, as students cannot join classes at the university.<\/p>\n

Important<\/strong>: please\u00a0check the timely update from teacher services “How to do remote teaching and learning?” about the tools available and tips on using them<\/a>\u00a0at Aalto University.<\/em><\/p>\n

This blog post available also in Finnish \u00a0“Oppimisen ja opettamisen mahdollistaminen et\u00e4n\u00e4 n\u00e4in\u00e4 haastavina aikoina”<\/a>\u00a0and in Swedish “Undervisning p\u00e5 n\u00e4tet i utmanande tider<\/a>” at aalto.fi.<\/em><\/p>\n

In this post I will share some advices from our experiences on creating online learning facilities and remote instruction. \u00a0\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

Key online tools<\/strong><\/h3>\n

There are many online resources that you can utilize to communicate early and frequently to your students. In our Moodle platform mycourses.aalto.fi<\/a> you can simply send messages to all of the students in your class.\u00a0Use the vast amount of great, freely available podcasts, online videos, tutorials, and articles and actively link to them in your online materials if the licenses allow.\u00a0Use asynchronous teaching as much as possible to\u00a0minimise network traffic.\u00a0<\/strong>In the end the idea is to create a beneficial learning experience for the students, and having excellent materials linked in a coherent structure might already serve that purpose, especially when adding a few synchronous sessions to key moments of the course, for instance at the start, at the middle, and at the end of the course.<\/p>\n

To record brief lectures, and share them to your students, we recommend Panopto<\/a>. We (and many other institutes) have found that online videos are often more effective when broken up into short (2 to 6 minute) lectures<\/strong>.\u00a0In Panopto use your existing slide decks, but split the contents into shorter videos, rather than trying to give full one hour lecture.\u00a0This asynchronous method of teaching allows for students to have more time to independently engage with the material and access lessons even after the course is finished.<\/p>\n

Arrange interactive sessions with your students.\u00a0<\/strong>Think of different communication platforms that you can master very well: is it email, or is it twitter, or is it Teams, or is it\u00a0Zoom?<\/a>\u00a0Zoom is a video-conferencing service which supports video, audio and chat-based multi-user calls. This allows for synchronous remote teaching, facilitating personal engagement between you and your students. Interactive sessions can prevent miscommunications and help student to avoid misconstructing the online material. However, remember to not try and organise everything via video-conferencing, it simply uses a lot of network traffic and can easily have surprises. You can also create an interactive learning experience by chats in social media.<\/p>\n

Communication is the queen & content is the king<\/strong><\/h3>\n

Remember that it is very much about creating trust, and feeling of community in your course<\/strong>. So if content is the king, then communication is the queen<\/strong> (or other way round!). Thus it is essential to allow students to interact with each other<\/strong> and the course facilitators for co-creation, co-learning and collaboration.<\/p>\n

Your course will likely benefit at times from a\u00a0virtual meeting space, be it organised as a chat room in social media (#hashtagYourCourse), or via video conversations. In an online conversation use a timer to let all students to have an equal opportunity to participate in the lecture (e.g. one minute per student in a class of 20 students for one task). Decide and communicate clearly about the order in which people are supposed to present.\u00a0What communication channels you and your students already master\u00a0and can\u00a0you use those?<\/i><\/p>\n

Ask and listen to what students wish to share, not just about learning but also about their personal experiences in this challenging situation in March 2020. Bring today empathy and the four C’s of future education to your course: communication, collaboration, critical thinking and creativity.<\/p>\n

Or as Irene Celino beautifully puts it: \u201cI\u2019d suggest students to exploit those online channels not only for studying individually, but also to find a new way of socializing, by creating study groups or by increasing their opinion and help exchange, not only about the courses, but also in relation to their feelings and fears. I think it is of utmost importance to make sure that the online experience is also and foremost a human experience\u201d.\u00a0<\/em>Educators, please also share your students advice on how to \u00a0maintain daily routines<\/a>\u00a0and get help when needed.<\/p>\n

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How to arrange the course contents and structure?<\/strong><\/h3>\n

Check\u00a0Design with Movement <\/a>or Smart Svenska<\/a> for examples on how to arrange lecture materials as a web site and for sharing with your students. A good practice is to think of materials as an online textbook and design a communicative structure serving the course. There are many example designs available to check and learn from<\/a>, some having also automatic assessment for rapid feedback for students about learning<\/strong>. Our Moodle-based learning management system\u00a0mycourses.aalto.fi <\/a>offers many options for uploading course materials, preparing quizzes, or organising peer review, and essentially to manage the course, communicating with participants of the course and doing grading.<\/p>\n

There is also an open version of our Moodle called openlearning.aalto.fi<\/a>. You can use the platform for either organising your course in a MOOC-fashion, or provide self-study courses, see Introductory Finnish<\/a> for a good example of that. Existing courses\u00a0sometimes allow to use their learning materials elsewhere, see for instance what Climate.Now offers.\u00a0<\/a><\/p>\n

The key question now is: which relevant learning materials, podcasts, videos and articles can you provide to your students from existing online sites, and what can you realistically and timely yourself provide?<\/em><\/p>\n

Essential in all of this is the same as with all course designs: what are the learning objectives, and how are they targeted during the course. What will happen before the course, e.g. are there some online test to make, what will happen in week 1 and in the following weeks? For example, you can plan to have a weekly zoom session (for e.g. one hour) with the students, and ask them to submit the weekly assignments the day before the session<\/strong> so that you can help filling the gaps.<\/p>\n

For bigger courses (>25 students) you might need to create multiple \u00a0zoom sessions for different times, or allow students to meet themselves. In the latter case it is highly advisable to hire leaders\/facilitators for each of the online sessions. Alumni of the course are awesome choices for facilitators, or from within the course you can also recruit active facilitators for each session.<\/p>\n

“Learning by doing” mantra works also in online learning, so actively ask your students to write reflections of the course topics<\/strong>, and give other assignments that let them learn by doing<\/strong>. Can they build or create something at their homes as an assignment, and communicate that back for assessment of their learning? Arrange your course as sprints in an agile way. If you arrange students to peer review each others works online, they can grow to be experts that can help each other to learn and learn themselves at the same time. Think also how much you will lecture, and how much students can be asked to make presentations to other to learn, and to show learning.<\/p>\n

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Frequently Asked Questions:<\/h3>\n

How to arrange an interactive conversation session with Zoom?<\/strong><\/h4>\n

Announce to your students well before, preferably at least one day before, that you will use\u00a0Zoom<\/a>\u00a0(or another platform) to arrange remote instruction and video enabled conversation for your course.<\/p>\n

Some Zoom-specific questions:<\/p>\n