Principles of remote teaching
- Keep things simple – a short message but it’s worth repeating! Repurpose existing resources, incorporate easy to find materials, and use the activities built in to Teams and My Studies.
- For the moment, use the main pieces of software supported by the University:
- My Studies (as the main point of communication, for sharing materials and setting online activities)
- Teams (for synchronous activities such as live lectures and meetings with students such as tutorials)
- Pre-recorded Lectures (for creating screen recordings or narrated PowerPoints before sharing them on My Studies)
- eSubmission (for use as normal, as well as alternative assessments that are being introduced in this period)
- Don’t stick rigidly to your teaching plans – work towards your learning objectives through a mixture of activities. Think realistically about the amount of time you and your students can or should be spending in, for instance, Teams.
- We are undertaking remote teaching, rather than moving our courses online – but we can still draw on the principles of online learning to ensure continuing student engagement and learning.
There is a huge amount of research and information on online learning. An overview of some key approaches and links to further reading in this area can be found here.
The main points to reflect on now are:
- The importance of interaction between students, and between students and staff to help students to feel confident with this new style of working, support their learning and keep them engaged.
- This involves creating online interactive learning activities alongside the sharing of resources (e.g. through synchronous presentations in Teams or asynchronous videos in Panopto)
- Students need to quickly develop their online social presence to create effective support and develop learning relationships
- You need to develop an online teaching presence to support students’ shift to online social presence, to make them feel confident and to support their learning through giving guidance and feedback online.
- Find out what may help or hinder students’ engagement via email – let them share as much or as little about their circumstances. Will they be looking after other people such as older people or children? Will they be self-isolating? Do they have a space at home to work, with a computer and good wifi?
- Encourage groups of students to stay in touch to keep a daily check on how each other are doing, and updating each other on sessions or activities they’ve had to miss.
This focus on interaction and collaboration may differ from your experiences of learning online through short CPD courses and MOOCs, where there is minimal interaction with either peers or instructors. However, if you’ve studied or taught on programmes by, for example, the Open University, you will be much more familiar with this kind of learning.
In the following pages you will see various ways that these approaches have been woven into our guidance. Hopefully the ideas that involve interaction between you and your students, or between your students, or that allow students to express themselves in the online space should stand out.
This short video by Virna Rossi provides some key points about moving to remote teaching.
For further advice and guidance, and to share your good practice, please visit the Remote Teaching Teams site.
NEXT STEP – Enhancing synchronous Teams sessions >>>