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The global pandemic has pushed educators around the world to a transformative moment for online learning. Since February 2020, an unprecedented number of teachers, students, and parents have become exposed to a new mode of teaching. Teachers did not have the luxury of options, as online education came towards them, shouting "Ready or not, here I come!" The transformation is deep and wide: All levels of teaching, from pre-k classes to doctoral programs, moved to the cloud. Every discipline, from physics to physical education, from chemistry to creative writing, has a chance to test their limits and potentials in the new modality of teaching.

"Join A/Prof. Chie Adachi (Director, Digital Learning), A/Prof. Marcus O'Donnell (Director, Cloud Learning Futures), Dr Jo Elliott (Lecturer, Digital Learning Innovation) and Joan Sutherland (Senior Educational Developer) as they capture, share and celebrate the stories of teaching staff who share their personal experiences and provide insights into what is needed to innovate in the digital learning space. These insights into what they have learnt along the way, what has worked, and what they are doing to further enhance the teaching and learning experience at Deakin can influence your teaching practice. Topics range from the power of social media during COVID-19 through to facilitating connection through digital polling in the online space. "

An engaging video on how to make short, simple videos for teaching online. Definitely worth a watch. "The hard part can be getting the confidence to talk to the camera, but making simple videos for online teaching can help you engage with students."

A new guide from Times Higher Ed on digital teaching, covering a huge range of topics including choosing tech, maintaining inclusion, establishing virtual labs, encouraging faculty engagement...

There are two misconceptions that we think hinder teachers' creativity when thinking about teaching online. The first is a tendency to think of ways of approximating their face-to-face teaching into an online format as much as possible - instead of considering the possibilities afforded by the new medium, with the diverse opportunities for engagement and communication. The (problematic) assumptions behind this include a belief that text is less personal, that immediacy is inherently more valuable, and that approximating face-to-face is beneficial. The second, which relates to the first, is the belief (as Kolowich suggests) that increasing the "human" element of an online course is best done by either showing the face/voice of the teacher (e.g., as in pre-recorded lectures used in many xMOOCs), approximating a non-interactive lecture-based face-to-face class, or interacting synchronously (as in Google Hangouts), approximating a discussion-based face-to-face class. An automatic preference for synchronous (usually audiovisual) interaction with students is often a "mistake". It would, teachers imagine, be just like a face-to-face class, only online. Right? Actually, usually not. Maha has had experiences facilitating web-based video dialogue, and even though she sees it could have enormous potential when it works well, very often it does not. When we learn online, we are not together in one room, and we need to recognize not only the limitations of that, but the openness of its possibilities. The strengths of online learning, especially in massive courses such as MOOCs, and especially for adult learners, might lie in their asynchronous interactive components.

This article is part of the guide https://www.edsurge.com/research/guides/sustaining-higher-education-in-the-coronavirus-crisis Experts in online teaching have been debating and researching the question of synchronous versus asynchronous for decades. Since the 1990s and the rise of online video conferencing, though, it has been possible for educators to choose which activities in their distance-education courses to conduct synchronously and which to leave as asynchronous. The overall advice from experts is to mix both formats in any given class.

This paper uses the community of inquiry model to describe the principles of collaboration. The principles describe social and cognitive presence issues associated with the three functions of teaching presence-design, facilitation and direction. Guidelines are discussed for each of the principles. Garrison, D. R. (2006a). Online collaboration principles. Journal of Asynchronous Learning Networks, 10(1) pp. 25-34.

As educators who deliver online courses in a teacher education program, we wanted to find the most effective ways to facilitate online learning and teaching. We collected survey data and conducted interviews with three hundred university students about how they engaged with their online courses and found that, above all else, teachers help students feel connected and supported in their online studies and are essential to students' emotional engagement.

Digital first pedagogical guru Dr Kate Davis shares how she keeps up to date with online news and resources for higher education.

"As online learning becomes a more common model for higher education courses, institutions and instructors should investigate the benefits of including both synchronous and asynchronous elements in online learning to maximize the benefits of both these environments." Bichronous? This is a new one to me. Interesting disucssion around why this term is so relevant to online learning and teaching today.

Excellent overview of synchronous and asynchronous learning modes and when to use each in higher education and beyond.