Teaching

Derek header image of phone apps

Micro-videos as an online assessment submission format

Videos are a great way to mimic classroom activities. You normally ask students to tell/show/demonstrate in your classroom, why not the same now that they are at home? A great thing about online digital submissions, is that they can be any format – pictures, sounds, video, let students be creative.

Supporting Social Interactions in Online Courses

Building and maintaining social connectedness in online learning can help build more positive instructor-student relationship. Encouraging student interactions can also help support their mental health and well-being… There are various ways instructors can support students to interact and stay connected in an online course.

Scripting the Online Experience

Create an online experience with available tools for your students by scripting a memorable experience for them by bringing your pedagogy forward.

People holding hands

Culturally Responsive Online Teaching and Learning

In these unprecedented times, as instructors, we need to make sure our students feel supported. The unpredictability in every student’s lives can contribute to harbouring negative emotions, experiences, and opinions. In addition, our classrooms are filled with students with diverse backgrounds and we must not be trapped in our comfort zones that rely on teaching strategies we have traditionally relied on. Therefore, instructors need to foster students’ social supports that are culturally responsive and motivating.

Girl using her laptop

How to create online discussion posts

When I think of online discussion posts, I think of them as text-based artefacts that capture elements of our thinking that we would have “said” in a face-to-face interaction. However, since we are not beside each other we need to represent these ideas/thoughts in the medium that our environment permits.

Meme of a person thinking

Anticipate the Unexpected

For teachers and students in this upside-down world, we have to think about how to anticipate the unexpected. What if you are sick? Right now we have to be very careful to not get run down, and to stay healthy. If you are sick, as an instructor, have a plan in place.

Threaded discussions and Polls

How to Keep Things Interactive in Online Courses

Supporting interactivity means providing opportunities for students to engage with the course content, the teacher, and their peers in ways that make their thinking visible…There are lots of ways that this kind of interactivity can be supported through online learning environments.

Structuring Assessment in Online Courses

We now have the opportunity to re-think them with a different mindset…I have listed some ways that online instructors can consider structuring both formal and informal assessments, as well as types of assignments.

Multiple hands on a laptop

Structuring Group Work in Online Courses

Instructors may wonder whether group work is feasible in a fully online course…like most things with online teaching, group work is possible, it just takes some thinking through in order to structure it meaningfully.