Tag Archives: online teaching

Growing up with your students

05 Saturday Jun 2021

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I think that the most rewording aspect in teaching is my own learning, together with students. Such learning occurs on various levels — from the course planning and preparation of the learning materials and throughout the teaching process in the classroom. Due to the nature of the subject that I teach, that is, visual communication and the interpretation of the visual, there is always something new to discover together with students, even using the same image or the same activity in several courses. It is so fascinating that while teaching with and about visuals, you can never get bored.

If you would need to describe this course in three words, what would they be? – students’ course evaluation in a form of a word-cloud.

Just yesterday, I had the last class of an intensive one-week summer school course in visual communication, which I was co-teaching with my colleague, Rasa Zakeviciute. This was the first time we were teaching together in an online environment. What is more, we not only designed a completely new course, but we also designed it especially for an online teaching mode. In this sense, we were more lucky than many of our colleagues, who, under pressure of time (and often without sufficient knowledge and experience) moved their face-to-face courses online. We could plan the course from the start as a fully online experience.

We had two main goals when we were planning the ‘Visual Communication as a Way to Improve Working Life Skills’ course. The first one, built on the approach we have already implemented in the ‘Visual Research Methods’ courses, that is of visual pedagogy. The other was to create a balance between synchronous and asynchronous teaching, that is, to constantly keep in mind that we are planning an online course, not a face-to-face one (an aspect of which many teachers do not think). For that reason, students received all the learning material in a form of video-lectures, other videos and readings as well as individual assignments and group work. Thus, the two-hour online classes per day could have been devoted solely to activities and discussions, based on the learning material (which students could have explored beforehand in their own peace). That kind of approach can especially benefit students of various linguistic backgrounds (they can use dictionaries, or listen to lectures several times), from different geographical locations (we worked between time-zones of 8 or even 11 hours of time difference) and busy with other commitments (they can schedule their study time).

In this course, we had a really great group of students. It was so rewarding to work with all of them. Their ideas and ‘ways of seeing’ enriched my experience as a teacher and visual scholar. We also had fun all together in the course. The online teaching is any worse from the face-to-face classroom. Actually, when well planned (and with an intention for good online teaching), it can be a truly rewarding learning experience, both for students and for their teachers.

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Seeing an online teaching as a place to growth (as a teacher)

23 Sunday May 2021

Posted by in #ONL211, Topic 5: Lessons learnt – future practice

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Photo by Emmanuel Mbala on Unsplash

I am in a privileged position: I was not under (pandemic) emergency to move my teaching online (mostly due to the fact that I have been teaching on an hourly basis). Thus, I have had time to plan and prepare, or even more — to first educate myself in pedagogies for online and blended learning and teaching. One of such courses that I have recently participated in was the Open Networked Learning (ONL211) — an international open course on e-learning in higher education. My good friend, Dr. Judit Hahn, recommended me this course as she herself completed it earlier.

Since the beginning, I have had rather mixed feelings about it. This was mostly due to the pedagogical approach, on which the course was designed, that is, the problem based learning — approach, which was completely new to me. For each two weeks, following a specific topic related to online education, we were confronted (i.e., eight learners and two facilitators) with a scenario, based on which we created our learning. In addition, once per week there was a lecture or workshop by na expert, organized to support our thinking within the given topic.

At first, I did not like a relatively unstructured way of learning — a learning that each group and each individual learner have had to create. However, the longer the course lasted, the more I have been enjoying being my own facilitator of learning, taking agency with peer-learners in the process. I must admit, I have always been rather skeptical to asynchronous online courses, not really experiencing learning in such contexts. However, my main take-away from the ONL is that learning, indeed, can happen in such format if only the course is well-designed and if learners are sufficiently motivated. Our motivation as learners was high. Thus, I think that as a teacher in online environment, I should even more work on the course design, because I may not always be able to influence students’ motivation.

The topics that I explored during the ONL course helped me to see that there is a lot of potential in online education. Challenging is, however, to come out of one’s comfort zone in order to see this potential and to learn as a teacher. Still, isn’t it that we should constantly develop our skills as teacher and broaden knowledge?

Designing for a meaningful (5-day) online learning experience

14 Friday May 2021

Posted by in #ONL211, Topic 4: Design for online and blended learning

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Currently, I am planning an online 5-days intensive course for the summer school. This is not an emergency, ad hoc transmission to the online environment as many of my colleagues have experienced with their regular courses last year (tough, the summer school has always been organized in my institution as face-to-face teaching throughout four weeks, with one course per week).

Photo by Duncan Kidd on Unsplash

Considering the fact that, in principle, I have more time for planning, I wanted to create a truly “online learning experience”. However, almost immediately came the first obstacle — students who signed up for the course are coming from the very different time zones, which makes it impossible to bring all of them together at the same time. Thus, we decided with my colleague (with whom I will be teaching this course) to have two, the same, synchronous classes for each of the “time-zone group”. All other activities will be taught asynchronously, and thus, they have to be designed to enhance students’ engagement in the learning process. At the moment, we think about one overall scenario for the course (like a game, in which you collect scores) and a number of group activities leading to a group project, all supported by learning material packages per specific topics.

Blended learning is not only about blending online and offline teaching, but it also means to blend various forms of teaching — and I prefer to understand it this way. In an online course, the teacher acts as a facilitator of learning, who helps students to navigate between synchronous and asynchronous activities, guiding the learning process. Until this summer school course, I have not realized that planning an online course (especially in its intense format) is much more demanding than planning a face-to-face teaching. I am thinking here, of course, about a meaningful learning experience, when students are truly engaged in the course material in various ways (games, group collaboration, scenarios, projects, etc.). In his lecture, Steven Mintz (2021) points out that students learn when they are mentally involved, when they are engaged in hands-on activities, when they are in the process of discovery, investigation, interpretation. In a similar vein, Marti Cleveland-Innes (2021) highlights that students who are given choices (in terms of the learning material, activities, forms of assessment), perceive that they are making contribution to their learning environment and this increases engagement.

The more I read about the design of online and blended learning, the more I get fascinated about possibilities it offers for students. However, will I be able to implement some of them in an intensive format of the summer school, considering the obstacles of time zones and limited time for students’ reflection on their learning process?

References

Cleveland-Innes, M. (2021). Blended and online teaching and learning: Identifying pedagogical change in higher education. ONL211 topic 4 Intro video (9:35 min). Video on YouTube

Mintz, S. (2021). How to Design a Course for Maximum Student Engagement: Seven Innovative Approaches. Webinar presentation (60 min) Recording