Summary

This week has introduced some of the core concepts in online education. Whether activities are synchronous or asynchronous is a key distinction in facilitating learning online, and deciding which activities or resources should be used synchronously and which asynchronously is an important skill. Blended learning and flipped classroom techniques could become a fundamental part of lesson planning for online education providers as they include both face-to-face and online elements.

Next week, you will look at what makes effective online learning and how education theories can inform online education. Before moving on, however, take some time to reflect on this week in the following activity.

Activity 6 Reflecting on progress

Timing: Allow about 30 minutes

Watch the video, or read the transcript. In it, Rita reflects on Week 2 from her perspective as an educator. Take some time to make notes on the following questions:

1. How does what you have learned this week relate to your own role?
2. What changes, if any, could you make to your practice or to the wider practice at your workplace as a result of what you have learned?

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Transcript

RITA:

I think that I have now identified what it is that I want to do as a result of studying this course. I would like to try to move a whole course online, that I currently teach in a classroom. I teach this course to one cohort, three times a week, for one hour each time, for 12 weeks.

All of my learners have internet access at home. I know that on Fridays many of them travel only to attend my class and then travel home again, so moving online should help them.

What I would like to do is reorganise my teaching materials for this course, so that I can try to use a ‘flipped learning’ approach. I can see that I will need to have a mixture of synchronous and asynchronous activities.

In this particular case, I don’t really want to try a ‘blended learning’ approach – I want to move the whole course online. It might be a big undertaking, but I can see some really great benefits to doing this that might not be realised if the course was only partially online.

I have talked about this a little bit with my colleagues and line manager. They agree that this is a good idea, and there will be some support, but really it is up to me to figure out how to make it work well.

My learners are quite motivated already, because this is a course that they need to pass in order to take a step towards qualifying for the career they want, so hopefully they will support me and will be kind if something does not work first time the way I want it to.

But at the moment all I have is an idea!

End transcript

 

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