Summary

This week you’ve been introduced to some of the core concepts in online teaching. Synchronous and asynchronous activities are a key distinction in teaching online, and deciding which activities or resources should be used synchronously and which asynchronously is one of the fundamental skills any online teacher must develop. Blended learning and flipped classroom techniques could become a fundamental part of thinking for teachers whose classes are divided between a face-to-face element and an online element. We will move on next week to looking at what makes effective online teaching and how education theories can inform how we approach online teaching. Before we move on, however, let’s have a few moments with Rita, to see how she’s getting on.

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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. I need more information to be confident about what I am planning to do. I have some ideas, but I don’t really know what tools I could use to make it happen. So… I’ll see you in Week 2!

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