Happy with your current online education strategy ? — This could make it better.
Now that we’ve had our first experience with extended teaching online with COVID some interesting developments are showing up. We’re beginning to realize that the initial online classroom model is unworkable in the longer term.
Today’s online classroom, the replication of a majority of what we have been doing to teach in class most commonly shows many defects. Some of those that have been pointed out include:
- Students can’t pay attention for extended periods of time.
- With the typical meeting a student looks at a fellow student or a teacher’s face on the screen and not at the camera which usually sits at the top of the screen.
- As a result, eye contact, micro expressions and non-verbal clues are often missed.
- The focus on the face also loses other communication cues such as hand and body movement and gestures.
- No matter how “good the connection” the extensive signal processing that is carried out on the audio and video signals results in loss of information and fidelity.
- The lack of support for the normal simultaneous speaking and overlapping of conversations, the inability to easily keep a picture of a whole class hinders the ability of student and teacher to actually communicate.
As a result of these effects, trying to interact with and understand you and the lesson leaves pupils feeling frustrated and disconnected from the learning process and from their classmates.
All this has led to a realization that learning in this internet age is not merely a question of providing information to the students or expecting them to be able to follow along a stepwise journey or through the narrow semantic channel offered by today’s online communication solutions. It is becoming clearer that education really needs to have a strong interaction between student and teacher and requires the ability at the same time for a student to be able to work independently or in conjunction with a teacher. So, what this brings us to really is a new model for teaching.
I say a new model, although when you hear me describe it, you will actually see that elements of what I’m talking about, have actually been used as a teaching methodology for a very long time. If you look at the learning model practiced in Oxford or in Cambridge, the main focus is on teaching sessions held between the teacher and the student or a small group of students. In these sessions students discuss the work they have done since the last session. While there are more traditional classes, these sessions, called tutorials are the primary focus of teaching.
You begin to recognize that what is actually happening in these tutorials is the creation of a small controlled interactive learning environment that potentially maps well to an online learning framework.
- As a student you examine concepts on your own, and then interact with the group and your tutor in shorter, more concentrated bursts.
- The smaller, shorter interactions help overcome many of the disadvantages described above.
- The session is oriented around discussions rather than lectures.
- The smaller group means you can see everyone at once on the same screen and you can raise your hand for attention rather than trying to use a chat channel.
- With the smaller number of participants, the quality of your voice and video streams is likely to be better.
- It opens up the possibility to integrate support of manipulatives such as document cameras to capture handwritten interactions or to demonstrate concepts.
One of the things that you see that this kind of teaching requires is not a mass single textbook kind of learning but one with individually collated learning materials, organized and presented and interacted with by both student and teacher in a manner that is intensely personal.
Learning sessions result in setting goals and objectives for explorations for the student to carry out before the next tutorial. Thus, an ability to support this with some simple tracking and feedback support would be a useful tool.
Most importantly, it calls for a re-thinking about organizing learning in this environment. What is needed is not a re-written curriculum but a framework that enables learning and teaching to have optimal impact. Teaching needs to be simplified. Learning needs to occur as a connected, integrated ecosystem. It would be ideal if there were an organized framework that would allow us to create such learning ecosystems. It turns out that there is. The Common Ground Collaborative is addressing this need with a framework tested with schools across the world. [1]. The framework uses four framing questions:
- Define: What is learning — and how do we do it ?
- Design: What’s worth learning — and how do the pieces fit ?
- Deliver: How do we teach for learning — and build a shared learning culture
- Demonstrate: How do we know what we’ve learned — and share it with other learning stakeholders ?
These four questions result in the identification of core areas of study, a definition of what learning means for these areas, a matrix of learning modules organized through grade level, and to learning content organized within a module by question, illustrative content, framing questions and the demonstration of what has been learnt.
This framework provides the necessary guidebook to build content that is admirably structured for remote learning needs.
To summarize, at ContentReady, we believe the way forward has:
1. A new engagement model that is different from online education today, more akin to the tutorial model, where students & teachers work in small groups with periodic meetings rather than lectures.
2. Tools to easily create, organize, publish and distribute content based on everyday tools that teachers and pupils use
3. Simple learning support systems based on tools familiar to educators that work with the engagement model — not heavy learning management systems
4. A new approach to organizing learning for optimal impact.
Want to learn more or to see some of the tools we have built to help you have impact?
Contact us at hello@contentready.co
