Digital Learning and Teaching Links

Practical tips for synchronous sessions

Practical tips for online synchronous classes

Gems: "While education technology has grown as an industry, its acceleration isn't up-to-speed with other sectors, such as business and health care." "It's up to edtech companies to give... unis tools that can help them adapt to changing needs... And it's the responsibility of HE decision-makers to incorporate these tools into their vision for modern education" Yes!

Some good reminders here, including this one: "Endless talking heads on Zoom is not nearly enough."

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."

Relevant online short course focused on flipped learning and flipping the classroom.

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

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

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.

It's probably an obvious change coming, but it's important to keep an eye on.

USQ-based panel discussing education and COVID-19 influences. Good example of the use of Voicethread for asynchronous discussion.

Not obviously linked to education, but in terms of technology this is a pretty interesting read and could be beneficial to engineering/architecture students.

George Veletsianos shares his insight into online learning and course design.

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.

Excellent blog post about how to manage social media as a professional. Valuable advice includes keeping profile pics and bios up to date and use of different tools for distribution, retweeting etc.

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.

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