Holy Coronavirus! I have to teach online?

You can’t become an online teaching whizz overnight.  It takes weeks to build good online content and months to develop virtual teaching skills.  So, what can you do to fast-track a solution to this awful problem?

Miss Jane has managed online learning for a while.  Here are some suggestions.

Know what LMS (Learning Management System) platform your educational institution uses.

Common ones include Moodle, Canvas, or Google classrooms.  Your institution will have a licence for this platform and if all goes well teacher, lecturer and students will all have access.

LMS’s operate in similar ways – they provide a repository for text content, videos, and links to online or embedded resources.  They enable a lecture to accept assignments and almost always grade them.  Most would be able to link to some type of academic integrity checker, such as Turnitin.

The lecturer/teacher would have direct editing access to the LMS.  Don’t worry, you don’t need to be able to ‘write script’ to edit and dump content in a page.  In the current crisis, your students won’t need impressive or pretty, they just need content, understanding and an outcome.

Check what your platform is, make sure you have access, and locate the support website for it.

Find out if you must deliver live lessons or recorded lessons.

If you need to deliver recorded lesson for students to stream or download then your task is easier.  You can use a program such as PowerPoint to record a voice-over of your slides.

You will not get the feedback from students and they will not see your face, but hopefully, the important content is there.  Think old school Uni lecture.  You do not need to worry about breaking up the content to provide relief as students will stop and start as they need to.

I would recommend that you also include a file of the PowerPoint without voiceover so that students can see the summary later.

GAME ON

If you still need to deliver ‘live’ lessons (we call these virtual lessons) you will need to have a few tricks up your sleeve to try to recreate the lecture environment.  The issues you face are:

VISIBILITY They probably can’t see you and you probably can’t see them.

• Create an avatar that is a comic representation of you and encourage your student to do the same.  If the bandwidth doesn’t hold up, then at least you have something to remember each other by. 
• Create an avatar using PIXATON.COM

HUMOUR   We are human – we laugh with people, not avatars.

• Add links or images to jokes which they need to comment on. 
• Think “Caption this image in 25 words or less” competitions that you leave open during 5-minute breaks and share the results afterwards.

BE PREPARED – have all your links and files ready

• If you plan on showing your students links to online content, academic paper, blogs, research and assignments make sure you have an online copy of those links ready to go in a word do (or better the tab open in your browser) to cut and paste to send to students.

QUESTIONS   Forget the tutorial camaraderie – there are no hands up here.

• Make sure you clearly explain to students how they can post questions to you – via email, discussion board or some other group chat. 
• Work out how you will share questions and answers so that you are not dealing with each student individually when they have common questions. 
• Easy online options are PADLET.COM or ANSWERGARDEN.CH which will allow all students to add questions simply by being given the URL of the page. (No login required)

CONFUSION Bonus is no blank looks, danger is blank minds.

• It is not nice to have a room full of students look at you like you spent your life studying the LEAST interesting thing on earth – but they will have to write a paper on this so it would be better to know what they don’t get!
• How do you see the blank look when you can’t see the student? In secondary school, we call it ‘formative assessment’ or ‘checking for understanding’ or ‘exit slip’. 
• Create an online quiz so that students can self-check.  Target content that is vital to the subject – definitions, formula, examples –but things that can be marked by a computer. You won’t have time to provide individual feedback. 
• Online programs which can be embedded in most webpages include; QUIZLET.COM   H5P.COM

IT MELTDOWN

• Yep, you are still reliant on their internet (and yours).Make sure that your LMS can record the lessons so that students can replay later or be prepared to make another copy at home. 

• If you are not sure how the first ‘online’ lesson will go record a draft so that at worst the students who miss out get your first recording.

This post was created post-haste so I apologise if it doesn’t address all that you need. I manage a team of 9 online teachers who between them deliver nearly 100 hours of virtual content directly to students every week. I don’t pretend to be an expert in preparing teachers for the impact of the shut-down of schools which traditionally deliver face to face learning in the wake of the coronavirus but hope that these suggestions help.