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Teaching online courses should be taught in the same way on-ground courses are taught: with responsiveness. Each group of students will be unique. Their understanding and personal relationship to the content will vary. Effective teachers must be able to capture these shifts and change the course to best meet the groups needs. However, when teaching an online course, you do not have the same methods to gauge where your students are the way an on-ground instructor does. How does one "read the audience" virtually? Becoming a dynamic online instructor requires a great deal more work to assess and shift curriculum to meet the needs of students. The extra work of creating dynamic classes and adopting dynamic practices will create relevancy and meaning for students. The connections created for the students will ensure that true learning can occur.
Best practices for dynamic teaching
Best practices for dynamic teaching
Re-Learning to "Read" the Learning Environment
Re-Learning to "Read" the Learning Environment
Dynamic online instructors should refrain from thoughtlessly rolling content over from semester to semester without flexibility or change. In a system where the majority of classes are simply lengthy written lectures and PowerPoint lectures, this is a big task. Chunking content into smaller pieces and building modules of pages where a variety of more interactive pieces can be embedded has a lot of benefit. First and foremost, working with a larger amount of smaller items makes it easier to shift new things in and out. If I learn that one group of students is largely pre-nursing majors, I can shift out small videos or interactions exemplifying care of children and instead sub in content that exemplifies developmental norms that would impact health care related issues. In both, I am covering the same concept, but I can ensure a deeper connection for the student as the example is more applicable their future and is more likely to overlap with their other coursework.
To best do this, dynamic instruction should utilize a large variety of learning modalities and learning platforms. Using Zoom, Flipgrid, Adobe Spark videos, Canvas Studio, Ted Talks, Padlet, Kahoot!, and a variety of articles in addition to discussion boards and video lectures can engage students in a variety of ways. It is also important that instruction be threaded with student feedback consistently to best ensure relevancy. Once a thoroughly dynamic course has been created, it is easy to relax, but rolling over dynamic content with considering each class as a unique group will quickly ensure that the course becomes stale and unrelatable.
Reflections
Reflections
Where I was.
Where I was.
Before I began taking courses through @One, I thought that my online classes were dynamic and more engaging that most of my peers courses. I was relatively new to the online teaching scene, so my training was more current and "techy" than my peers. I used discussion boards regularly, but sometimes had videos embedded as the prompt. I created video lectures that showed my powerpoints and I could be heard lecturing and the slides were filmed. I knew how to transcribe my videos. I rolled over this content from semester to semester, with little change.
Where I am.
Where I am.
The area of dynamic teaching is the area of least growth for me, so I still consider my courses to be much less dynamic than they could be. I am using Padlet and Flipgrid in each course, but only once or twice over the course of the semester. I have added one Adobe Spark video to each course. I have also added my face in screen-in-screen to any video lectures I have created since taking this course. However, I am still lacking in many ways. I have been taking all of the @One courses and in addition to teaching, that has taken up most of my time. Creating a dynamic course is a slow process with lots of work.
Where I'm headed.
Where I'm headed.
In the future, I have many plans to make my courses more dynamic. I plan to break up the courses into smaller chunks. Some of these will be video lectures in the same format (but with me in them visually) but they will be shorter and contain some type of pre and post low stakes assessment. I then plan to add in a rotation of technological platforms that can be swapped in and out depending on the group. I also plan to use student surveys to gauge where students are, what they are interested in, how they best learn, and which content items spoke most to them. I plan to re-make one class per semester starting in the fall.
Examples
Examples
Here is an example of one of my earliest lectures. It is shorter in length, but only as I had not yet purchased a subscription to Screencastomatic, so I had a 15 minute limit. Later, my videos would become longer. I cannot be seen anywhere in the video, so when I talk for longer periods of time, students are left with nothing new to look at no person to connect with. There is no before and after check in, poll, quiz, or survey to help students understand important points or help me assess understanding and relevancy.
In the image above from my Flipgrid dashboard, you can see that I have created a great deal of videos. These are almost all responses to individual students videos. I am gauging the students interests and perspectives at the start of the semester with these videos to better connect with them and make the material relevant.
I have also created a Reperformance Request and I am using this to allow students to reperform formative course items that they did not go well. I do require the students to take steps to analyze the issue and make a plan for the future. This is not something I have done in the past, but thus far it is going well. I have given out many this semester and most of the students have returned them and then completed the work correctly.
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