Information and digital literacy in education via the digital path

Allowing for greater flexibility, a HyFlex teaching model enables higher student engagement and options as opposed to completely hybrid or in-person learning.

It is often assumed that online collaboration, teamwork and communications is inferior to face-to-face equivalents as we miss the visual cues, facial, body language and so on. His would suggest that collaborative teamwork or meetings may be better with VIDEO ON, as opposed to JUST AUDIO.

 

Yet, this fascinating paper from Tomprou et al. (2021) at Carnegie Mellon, who looked at group ability to solve a range of different problems, found something quite counterintuitive. Visual cues have no effect on collaborative work. In fact, teams without visual presence were more successful, not only in synchronising their vocal cues but also speaking in turns and on solving problems. The authors rightly claim that this calls into doubt the conventional wisdom that you need video support.

Teaching in a hybrid in-person/remote model requires significantly more planning than teaching in the traditional classroom model. Tasks that were once quick, such as monitoring students’ progress during class and following up on late and missing assignments, have become laborious, and everyday activities like making sure that students have access to material from the school library and determining the best technology tools to meet students’ needs take a tremendous amount of planning. More than ever, it’s important that I use my time efficiently and allow myself time to recharge.

Are you experiencing videoconferencing outages? Frozen screens? Lagging audio?

Videoconferencing platforms have become the backbone of education during the pandemic, and having lectures disrupted by technology problems is a frustrating experience for everyone. But there is no need to panic. Here are some easy fixes and troubleshooting tips to help you return to your virtual classroom.

When hundreds of spring and summer undergraduate courses were abruptly moved from onsite to online delivery in the wake of COVID-19, several faculty and students nationwide reacted with panic and uncertainty. Currently, instructors are busy preparing for the 2020-2021 academic year where several students will continue taking courses online. At my institution, fall academic courses will be primarily virtual (along with several others across the nation), with some in-person and hybrid instruction for performance-based, clinical, and laboratory courses, and some students living on campus.

The shock has passed, the sadness comes and goes, and the stretchy waistband pants are becoming a mainstay. Your college or university is staying online for the rest of this academic year, as well as summer, and you wonder about fall 2020.

While the trauma of the COVID-19 pandemic persists, it may be time to settle into an educational environment that will be more online than previously imagined.

Warning: You will not get through the same amount of content during this pandemic. Please do not try.

As educators, we often hear about the importance of teaching critical thinking skills to our students. What we hear about less, however, are the most effective techniques for teaching those skills …

On Monday, the Queensland State Government ruled that Queensland schools will reopen for term two for vulnerable students and the children of essential workers. All Northern Territory students will return to school grounds on April 20th. In South Australia, parents can choose to send children to school or keep them at home. But what about everyone else? For classrooms that continue to exist online, what can educators do to make online teaching fun, accessible, and more efficient? Here are a few tips.

If there ever was a time to create a flexible structure for student learning and success, the time is now. One of the most empowering and compassionate practices that we can integrate into our classrooms is scaffolding, an instructional strategy that provides students with a framework to guide and support their learning (Wood, Bruner, & Ross, 1976). Scaffolding can offer a weekly structure that supports student growth, creates autonomous learners who are responsible for their own learning, and gives learners more confidence in acquiring new skills.

One of the perks of teaching online is that there are so many great tools that make facilitating an online course easier. For example, not having to manually grade and enter grades for online exams since most learning management systems can automatically evaluate student responses and submit scores to a gradebook without the instructor needing to do a thing. 

With the ability to automate so much of an online course, along with the physical separation from your students, it can be challenging to find ways to let your personality, teaching style, and personal touches shine through in the online environment. 

Here are three easy strategies that you can begin trying and implementing in your teaching today to bring a bit more of your personality to your online courses. 

Different generations of students have enrolled and graduated from higher education institutions for many decades. Throughout these decades, educators have been using the same strategies despite what generation is present in their classroom. Schwieger and Ladwig (2018) discuss a newer generation of students, Generation Z, who have unique characteristics and expectations. Individuals from this generation are born between 1996 and 2012. Like millennials, they were raised with technology. However, for Generation Z, technology is part of their everyday life activities. The question is, is it important for us as educators to evaluate our own teaching strategies year by year? Many may not think it is necessary, but educators must be conscious about these new generations who come into the classroom with unique characteristics.

When I was asked to create an online course 20 years ago, I simply transcribed my face-to-face lectures into 10–15 page Word documents that I posted in our LMS. Don’t ask me how my students managed to get through them.