1. Briefly summarize & reflect on each of today's readings (what did you take away from these readings). Reflect on your experiences or thoughts with online education during and before the pandemic. What are the advantages and disadvantages of teaching online, or in some cases using a blended model?

2. Briefly reflect on your thoughts of course and learning management systems like Google Classroom what are the advantages, disadvantages, affordances or concerns in terms of their use in education or professional practice? How could you use this tool in your own professional practice?

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(1) Kaup, S., Jain, R., Shivalli, S., Pandey, S., & Kaup, S. (2020)

Sustaining academics during COVID-19 pandemic: The role of online teaching-learning. Indian journal of ophthalmology, 68(6), 1220–1221.

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This article is about ophthalmic education and apparently written for teachers who train students to become eye doctors. The pandemic has awakened these educators to a reality where they now feel they should deliver the same or even better quality of teaching to their students through online delivery of their lessons.

Developing professional training for teachers so that they can do a better job at teaching online is a very good idea because we teachers were unprepared when the pandemic started. The authorities suddenly asked us teachers to switch online and we did not have sufficient training to be able to do it properly. Therefore, it is time that we did something like this. By providing professional training for online teaching, we should meet the professional needs of teachers as they gear themselves for the next pandemic and the next online teaching.

On the other hand, I have one issue with online platforms. This article talks about “unified communication” that was made available through platforms like Microsoft Teams:

Unified communication and collaboration platforms like Microsoft Teams, Google Classroom, Canvas, Blackboard allow the teachers to create educational courses, training and skill development programs.[4] They include options of workplace chat, video meeting and file storage that keeps classes organised and easy to work. They usually support the sharing of a variety of content like Word, PDF, Excel file, audio, videos etc. These also allow the tracking of student learning and assessment by using quizzes and also the rubric-based assessment of submitted assignments (Emphasis Added; Kaup et al.)

The problem with “unified communication and collaboration” is that unity can sometimes translate into standardization and alignment, and this may not be good for creative teachers like me. It appears that teachers should uniformly follow the lesson ideas of the department and download the same lesson materials and use the same rubric. However, every teacher has a different teaching style and they interact with their students differently, so we should allow them to have some freedom in content and delivery. Online platforms such as Microsoft Teams should not be used as a means to restrict the individuality of teachers for the sake of unity and standardization.

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John R. Bryson & Lauren Andres (2020) Covid-19 and rapid adoption and improvisation of online teaching: curating resources for extensive versus intensive online learning experiences, Journal of Geography in Higher Education, 44:4, 608-623,

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This article talks about problems related to online teaching in developing countries like Pakistan. It was written by Samreen Mahmood. However, this writer’s name is, I believe, a mismatch with the writer of the article cited above. Please double check to see if I am discussing the correct article. Maybe the hyperlink is not correct. I have copied the link from the course outline: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/hbe2.218

Anyway, this article shows a lot of issues related to developing countries and the pandemic. Basically, it talks about IT infrastructure and human resources that were not present when the pandemic hit Pakistan. However, the same thing happened in more developed countries like China. When the pandemic started, I was in Montreal teaching Chinese students in China and was making delivery of British Columbia curriculum English 10 through online teaching.

Those days, I had a chaotic experience with the teaching staff and administration and online platforms such as Canvas and Microsoft Teams. Even though I was teaching Chinese students online, the school was not flexible enough to listen to my lesson ideas and discomfort in general. They only asked me to align my lessons with those of other teachers. We were teaching a large number of Grade 10 students, who were divided into four classrooms one of which I was in charge of teaching. The school said that it would be easier for the teachers and admin and it would also reduce the complaints coming from parents if we Grade 10 teachers downloaded the same materials from Microsoft Teams and delivered the same lessons and applied the same rubric to grade our students. I was the only teacher teaching online from Canada whereas the others were doing their teaching in their physical classrooms in China. Because of this disparity, I felt that my content and pedagogy should be allowed to be different from those of others. However, the school principal repeated my duty of aligning myself with the school policy, and the other Grade 10 teachers provided no emotional support for me while I was going through tough times.

The lesson I learned from this experience? I think we teachers were caught off guard when the pandemic hit us. We did not have enough time to develop our responses to the sudden switch to online education. Now that we can discuss all these issues with ease in EDEC612, I am happy to know that teachers and researchers are getting down to business and developing plans for all the contingencies related to online teaching, so that I can get ready and become more comfortable teaching online when the next pandemic hits.

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Albrahim, Fatimah A. Online Teaching Skills and Competencies. Turkish Online Journal of Educational Technology - TOJET, v19 n1 p9-20 Jan 2020

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Again, this article is similar to the other two articles in that we teachers need to develop certain skills for online teaching. The article delineates six skills that teachers must have if they are going to do online teaching successfully. What stands out for me from these six points is management and institutional skills:

Management and Institutional Skills: As classroom management is an important aspect of face-to-face education, managing courses and learning is essential in online learning environments. An awareness of institutional policies and norms is also an important aspect of being a successful online instructor. (Bailie, 2011; Bawane & Spector, 2009; Craddock & Gunzelman, 2013; Munoz Carril et al., 2013).

Right now, I am providing online private tutoring for three Korean students. The experience with them is fantastic because I am my own institution and I do not have to toe the line while the administration is constantly watching me. I have had difficult moments with school administration in my professional life because I am not a ‘typical’ Canadian teacher. I am originally from Korea and I grew up through my childhood and teenage years in Korea. I never went through any of K-12 years in Canada, so I could not easily connect with the Canadian education system. Also, when I teach in Canada, I should consider the sociocultural factors surrounding my teacher identity. Anyway, my point is that I need to develop institutional skills. I am a creative teacher, so the administration sometimes view my teaching as if I am going out of alignment with their school policy. Since online teaching is virtual, the school might find it even more difficult to control teachers and their lessons. Yet, I want to prove to them that I am doing my work properly, even in the context of online teaching. In order to make the administration happy, I think that there should be an online platform made available where I can comfortably communicate my lesson ideas and classroom activities with the administration. The platform should be easy and simple to use; it should not be complicated because I do not want to spend hours navigating the click buttons and explaining my teaching activities on a sophisticated communication platform.