Introduction

One of the things I’ve been doing is working on an article about my own experience of transitioning a course from a classroom environment to an online one, highlighting my rationale for certain decisions, what worked well, and what didn’t work as well as I’d anticipated. In the meantime, however, William Lau has written a useful article summarising the research in this area.

Help is at hand

In Remote teaching during a pandemic, Lau draws on both recent research and his own experience to suggest what is best practice when it comes to teaching online. He also includes a summary table.

At this juncture I should like to say to anyone reading this whose view is “it’s online learning that matters”, I agree. But in my view not much learning, or not as much learning, is likely to take place if the environment, materials and teaching approach are wrong. I regard good online teaching as necessary for good online learning to take place.

Teaching presence

Back to Lau’s article. The first requirement he says is “teaching presence”:

I agree, although this is no different from good practice in face-to-face teaching. I’ve enrolled on courses in which the teacher took such a “stay-in-the-background” approach that they might as well have not been there. I actually asked for my money back from one course where I couldn’t attract the teacher’s attention for some help with a tricky programming problem I’d set myself because he was busy watching the tennis on the classroom television. In another course, the tutor gave so much time to students working on their own that we spent three hours in utter silence while she read the newspaper.

Perhaps these are extreme examples, but they do illustrate, I think, the need for balance. Indeed, even in breakout rooms I believe students appreciate having the tutor drop in to “eavesdrop” for a moment or two, perhaps making a comment or raising an eyebrow. This is, after all, exactly what a teacher would do in the classroom when the students are working in small groups.

Teacher workload

I like the focus in Lau’s article on keeping teacher workload as low as possible. For example, one of the things he suggests if you have a class of 30 students is to take a sample of work and give feedback to the whole class. I think there are other approaches which could be used as well.

For example, in my experience, students tend to make the same kind of mistakes. In my classroom teaching I saved myself a great deal of time by producing a comments key that I distributed to the class, which necessitated only my writing on their work the appropriate letter or letters.

For example:

Another option, though it’s not ideal, is to use automatically-marked quizzes (as Lau suggests), using the short answer option, as this gives scope for rather more ambitious questions. (I wrote an article in praise of automated assessment on the ICT & Computing website.)

Don’t forget paper

Lau also mentions the efficacy of using paper-based resources even when online. I agree. If nothing else, it provides a welcome rest for the eyes.

The summary table

Lau’s table of recommendations, with examples, is useful — but only up to a point. The first element is “cognitive load”. I’m afraid I’ve never been convinced by research which says that students have limited working memory. Or, more precisely, I’m sure it’s true, but in different ways in different topics for different people.

I, for example, am incapable of remembering a telephone number for more than about 5 seconds. On the other hand, when I’m writing an article I can keep in mind ten other articles I need to either write or link to in order to supplement it. As the old saying goes, different strokes for different folk — a situation that is of zero use to the classroom teacher. As I said in my review of a book called “The Complete Learner’s Toolkit”:

The solution according to Lau’s table is to “Use signalling to highlight important information.” Erm, isn’t this what a good teacher will do anyway? Even a humble scribe such as myself will do it in a longer-than-usual article like this one, using devices such as subheadings, quotes and white space.

Some of the suggestions are, in my opinion, more useful. For example, I agree with the idea of short videos, and indeed made a couple myself for my recent course. Also, removing complex backgrounds is a good idea, and showing videos without music (if you can find any).

The idea of guiding questions is useful too, though again rather obvious I should have thought.

Concluding remarks

I realise that I have, perhaps, been rather too dismissive of some of the ideas discussed in Lau’s paper. I am reminded of the response of a 14 year-old girl to my comment that I’d just read some research saying that girls have a greater part of their brain devoted to language processing than do boys.

“I think we all knew that”, she said.

So, in fairness, Lau provides a useful article that contains much information, based on research, that not everyone will have been aware of. Moreover, even the “obvious” ideas will be welcomed as a practical way forward by any teacher currently experiencing “rabbit in headlights” syndrome.

Here’s the article again: Remote teaching during a pandemic.