In 2008, just after the birth of my first son, I left the traditional classroom to teach English and Writing at an online university. In 2010, I added another online university to my teaching schedule and began designing online courses for the schools.
Initially, family and friends questioned why I had made the move from “real teaching”. While I realized online learning was different from the face-to-face classroom, I never quite understood why so many thought of online instruction as phony. On the contrary, I found was online learning was versatile, effective, and flexible in ways that bridged gaps of access and equity. I was impressed with how online learning allowed an incredibly diverse group of teachers and learners to engage.
I taught stay-at-home moms in Iowa who learned in between school pick-ups and truck drivers who roamed the country’s highways posting from a new city every night. I even had a student who was embedded in Afghanistan and would check-in to class when he was off of the battle field.
As soon as I started teaching online, I realized traditional classroom learning and online learning were very different mediums. There was no way I could plan lessons the way I used to. First off, neither my adult learners nor their schedules would allow it. But more importantly, I understood that learning online begged for a different delivery.
Online instruction was different, no question, but I never had a doubt it was real and would play an increasingly important role in education.
And here we are.
I was lucky…I had time to adapt to the online space with lots of room for experimentation and resources to support my new instructional setting. School leaders and teachers dealing with the sudden shift to remote learning due to Coronavirus closures do not have this luxury.
After over a decade in the field of online learning, here are some of my biggest takeaways for designing and delivering online instruction. Maybe some of these tips can help school leaders and teachers who are diving headfirst into this new realm:
1. Choose a Good Learning Management System (LMS)-
The LMS is the way you organize, host, and deliver your content and it may be the single most important decision an online environment. I’ve taught on several different LMSs and they can make a huge difference in student engagement and content delivery.
In the wake of the Coronavirus, many schools are trying to do online learning on the fly without a Learning Management System. This is a mistake — it’s like trying to hold a kindergarten in a new classroom every day. Quality learning will not occur if you do not have a safe learning space that is consistent. A good LMS will help you create an organized, consistent, and dependable space for learning. It’s a space you grow to understand, depend on, and work within. Teachers can decorate the walls, so-to-speak, and students grow comfortable engaging and participating.
Take a look at Software World’s Top 40 list of LMS solutions. Some of the top rated ones are Canvas, Blackboard, Schoology, Moodle, Edmodo, Brightspace, and so many others. Instructure, the creator of the LMS Canvas is offering free classrooms right now for teachers. Many schools are using Google Classroom as their blended learning homebase, but Google Classroom doesn’t have many of the features that an LMS has to keep learning streamlined and consistent.
Learning Management System Platform Options(from left): Canvas, Schoology, & Blackboard
2. Use Backward Design-
Teachers new to remote learning need to rethink their approach to instructional design. Unless you are planning totally synchronous online learning environments (which is not only unlikely, but unreasonable), you need to account for the fact that your learner will not be in your sightline or under your control, so you can’t guide them forward through the curriculum like you are used to.
Online learning demands that you think about where your learners should be at the end of instruction first and then guide them to that goal. This is called Backward Design and is one of the main tenants of online instruction design.
First you create learning objectives, then you design assessments, curate resources, cultivate activities, and only then do you plan the learning that will guide students toward goals. This guarantees that ALL learning is goal driven.
https://www.concordia.ca/offices/ctl/digital-learning/blended-learning/Developing-blended-learning-course.html
Here is a great resource from Vanderbilt University’s Center for Teaching on Understanding by Design (UbL) and the benefits of Backward Design featuring a video with Dr. Grant Wiggins talking about UbL and below is a short, helpful video on how to create alignment through Backward Design.
(Video Credit: MaryAnne Nestor and Carl E. Nestor, Former Instructional Designer at Kent State University)
3. Rethink Content Delivery Methods-
When teaching in face-to-face classrooms, consistency in delivery is key to keep students engaged. But in remote learning you are not present in front of your students to physically pull them through content, so online learning calls for use varied methods to keep the learner. engaged. Think about all the methods for delivery (text-based, audio, video, multi-media) and try to use several to deliver your content.
Consider what this may look like. Create a learning space that includes as much varied content as possible and organize the learning space so that it guides students thought the content virtually.
4. Consider an Alternate Learning Delivery Schedule-
With most experts agreeing that we should limit screen time for students, asking students to spend 8 hours a day in front of a Chromebook is not only inconsistent with online instruction best-practices, it’s also detrimental to students’ health.
I realize that asking teachers to teach less each day this feels impossible given standards and common core…but hear me out. It’s not that you have to scale back on the content you deliver, you need to re-envision HOW you deliver the content. As a team, consider whether it may make sense to move to a different content delivery schedule. Perhaps instead of teaching all core content each day, you can chose a content area to focus on each day. For example, Monday — Math/Science, Tuesday — Literacy/Social Studies/ELA and so on. You may see that you don’t need to tackle all subjects each day to meet your learning objectives.
4. Don’t Reinvent the Wheel-
This may be new to you, but there is a wealth of information on how to teach online successfully. And thousands of teachers have been doing it successfully for decades. Dive into this great meta-analysis from the US Department of Education on research-based online instruction best-practices published in 2010.
https://www2.ed.gov/rschstat/eval/tech/evidence-based-practices/finalreport.pdf
As we enter this new realm of wide-spread online learning, schools will learn, iterate, and improve on their ability to deliver remote education.
Just know that, while this is new for many teachers in the k-12 sphere, this isn’t totally uncharted territory. Many researchers, educators, and school leaders have been perfecting the craft of online education for decades…and we’ve been waiting for the moment to share what we know.
Also published on Medium.