Online teaching suggestions (2)

I am a tutor at the University of Melbourne and am currently doing all classes online.Here are some things that I think work well in the online classroom.

  1. For any texts that you require the students to read, use Perusall. It is an app that can be accessed through Canvas and allows students to annotate and ask questions about a text where all students can see other students annotations. We asked students to ask two questions and make four responses to questions given for each text. This can be marked or not as you wish.
  2. Zoom is good for breakout rooms. During the breakout room session, instead of just getting the students to talk on a particular topic, I set up some questions on a site called Crowdpurr so they have some structure to their conversation. Students will be broken into groups of about three students and one of them will open the Crowdpurr questions and share their screen so that everyone in the breakout room can see them. These questions are times and their answers can all be seen on my computer (Here is an example of what it looks like: https://crowd.live/YHTMZ) After about 10 minutes we will come back together as a class and discuss the questions and their answers.
  3. Zoom hack. If you want more interaction between students during breakout sessions, make all students ‘co-hosts’ and they will be able to move freely between Zoom breakout rooms. Good for parties and get to know you events.
  4. Use Padlet if you want them to do some in-class exercises. This way you can see in real-time whether they have taken on board what you have taught and where you will need to focus your attention on issues that arise. This is like a very short formative assessment. Check out an example here: https://padlet.com/michael_broughton/c3ag0dimymtu
  5. You probably already know, but you can share videos and music from your screen by clicking the ‘optimise for sharing video button’ on your Zoom sharescreen box.
  6. Be creative and aim for more interaction and collaboration. For the new students this semester, I took them on a virtual tour of the campus using Google maps and sharing my screen with them.
  7. Group work is better than individual work. Creating a sense of community is really important.
  8. Having another platform outside Canvas/LMS for the students to have fun and share ideas is really good. As most of our students are in China, we use WeChat, (maybe not such a good idea in the US right now). Perhaps Slack or something similar that lets them share ideas, videos, discuss, give vent to frustrations etc. This is the ‘Dionysian’ element of interaction that is often overlooked when focusing on creating online learning.

If you have any questions feel free to get in touch. Hope your classes go well.

Regards,

Michael Broughton <michael-c-broughton@hotmail.com>

P.S. I am always looking for good ideas. If you get lots of good suggestions maybe you could arrange them in a Padlet like this: https://unimelb.padlet.org/eLearning/OnlineHub so that everyone can see them and use them in their teaching.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *