Week 1: Teaching online is different

Introduction

Figure 1 Same teacher, different tools

Long description

Welcome to Take your teaching online! In this first week of the course, we will introduce some of the key differences between teaching online and teaching in a face-to-face environment. These differences mean that teaching online is a substantially different experience to teaching face to face, with a substantially different skillset needed for the teacher. The good news is that most teachers can adapt not only their skills, but also many of their existing teaching materials, to suit an online environment. There are a lot of possibilities, but as a minimum, if you and your students have computers and access to the internet, then you can start to teach and learn online.

In this week, you will also meet Rita, our animated colleague who is working her way through this course alongside you. Please allow Rita to introduce herself and to outline what she hopes to get from this course.

Download this video clip.Video player: tto_1_week1_rita_start.mp4

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Transcript

RITA

Hi, I’m Rita. I have been a teacher for some years now. I spend a lot of time thinking about how I teach, but I have never really explored how to use technology to help me teach in different ways. Recently, this has become more important to my work.

I would like to be able to introduce some online elements into my teaching. I have heard about some of the key concepts like ‘flipped learning’ and ‘Open Educational Resources’, but I would like to learn a lot more about them and be able to consider how I might apply them to my own practice.

I am fairly confident in terms of using basic online resources in the classroom. For example, I incorporate graphics or images from the web into my slideshows, and I stay in touch with colleagues I have met at events. I do have a Facebook page, but it is only for catching up with friends and I don’t use my real name in case my learners discover me on there. I have had a dip into some other tools like Twitter, but I could not really get to grips with how to get anything useful out of it, and I love YouTube but I have not really come up with useful ways of getting YouTube videos into my lessons.

It is a long-term objective of mine to maybe do some online teaching at some point, and free myself from the restrictions of the classroom. I am hoping this course will help me get started on that path, give me some concrete ideas for how I can use online teaching techniques in my regular work, as well as sparking some ideas for what I might do in the future.

So, here goes – I will be returning every week to see how you are getting on. Best of luck to everyone. Let's get started!

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By the end of this week, you should be able to:

• discuss the main characteristics of online education activities and how these differ from face-to-face teaching
• begin to determine the kinds of face-to-face teaching activities that might, or might not, transfer successfully to an online environment
• summarise the elements of online teaching that need a different skillset to face-to-face teaching.

The Open University would really appreciate a few minutes of your time to tell us about yourself and your expectations for the course before you begin, in our optional start-of-course survey [Tip: hold Ctrl and click a link to open it in a new tab. (Hide tip)] . Participation will be completely confidential and we will not pass on your details to others.