Hello, hello, hello!
I thought I’d just pop on to flag a few hot, top tips from the Digitally Enabled Learning Course and provide a brief summary of, and links to, the sections. While the first point is more vital for Module Coordinators, the rest really relate to general teaching for lecturers, and seminar tutors as online facilitators.
For ideas about alternative to exams or presentations it’s definitely worth looking at the Assessment and Feedback section. There is a whole document listing alternatives, and another document with worked through examples of how some alternatives would look in practice. There is also a really helpful Planning Checklist document – handy for anyone planning changes. There are useful points about the potential for academic dishonesty in open book exam formats and suggestions as to how to get round this issue.
Creating a Sense of Belonging provides guidance on how to help students feel included in the online teaching environment, the idea being that this will increase their motivation to engage. There is guidance here on simple, fun activities to do, early on in the semester, that aim to encourage a sense of belonging and provide scaffolding for more sophisticated or complex online work later on. One key idea is that sense of belonging isn’t just something to think about early on though, it’s something we have to bear in mind right the way through a module and there is guidance for this too.
Well organised learning provides guidance on how we can present online materials. There are loads of useful things in this section! Two top tips from this would be:
- provide lectures in small chunks, direct students to do relevant activities in between – this might be a good use of activities that were previously done in a seminar environment
- direct all module queries to a discussion board – this could reduce the correspondence load on individual tutors
This section provides some great ideas and useful tools; again a useful checklist document is provided to help with planning.
Planning and facilitating student interaction covers some ideas that are touched upon in other sections but in more detail. There is guidance here on using discussion boards, blogs, wikis, quizzes, and other activities, to encourage engagement. Importantly there is a section on accessibility too. Something I took away from the accessibility section was that I will have to avoid leaving uploading lectures to Student Central till the last minute and try to plan to upload them much earlier to allow time for Blackboard Ally to do its accessibility reporting, and to allow time for me to respond to the report.
Finally Teaching Presence provides really helpful pointers on facilitating group work synchronously and asynchronously. I found this handy having previously had difficulty encouraging students to engage with discussion boards and group video chats on Teams.
As ever please feel free to instigate chats in the comments below. Additionally, in the About section of this blog, there is a form you can use if you would like to share any ideas or plans you have for your teaching in Semester 1.
Take care all,
Charlie