Tips for working with students online

Adjust your planning

One of the most common issues that tutors report is is that everything takes longer online, so you need to expect to cover less in each sesson

Online learning is also tiring - students need breaks from the screen. Some ideas for addressing this are

• Give regular activities to do off screen for 5 or 10 mins,.

• Remember to give students comfort and tea breaks!

• Try flipped learning - ask everyone to read something offline before or during the session then come back on to discuss

Find ways to encourage participation and discussion

Managing participation is harder online. And students can miss those opportunities to chat with each other. Some ideas are:

• Remember to use icebreakers as would you do in a live class

• Make sure everyone knows how to indicate they want to speak eg use the 'hands up' feature, or ask them simply to raise their hands.

• Try and draw in quieter students by asking a direct question. It can be harder to join in discussion on Zoom, even for more confident students.

• Use break out rooms for small group discussion

• Use the chat room - ask students a question and get everyone to respond in chat.. You can also use a feature on Zoom called 'polling' to do this

• Leave Zoom/Google Meet on so people can chat during breaks

Remember some of your students may be on a tablet on phone

Although it is possible for students to have a satisfactory time on a small screen you need to remember that their experience will be more limited. Some key things to remember are:

• make sure you use a large font if you are screen sharing so people can see on a small screen

• don't ask your students to flick between Zoom/Google Meet and Google Classroom (or other websites) as you cannot have both open on a tablet or phone. So if you need to ask people to look on Classroom don't carry on speaking or using Zoom/Google Meet.

Rethink ways of checking progress

You might need to plan more written activities, quizzes or other tasks to get more detailed information about student progress.

There is more on checking progress online on the next page