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.
A Universal Design for Learning approach can increase student engagement and academic success and more importantly, make all your students feel included.
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.
Create an online experience with available tools for your students by scripting a memorable experience for them by bringing your pedagogy forward.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
