The dos and don'ts of cyber-teaching
COVID compelled lecturers and students to embrace blended learning in ways previously unimaginable. Dr Steven Buckingham, Senior Lecturer, Biomedical Science, and Director of Innovation and Good Practice, sees the opportunities it offers and presents his top tips for making it work.
- DO get comfortable with the technology so you can make the most of it. In a ‘Pulse’ survey across all the students in our faculty, nearly half mentioned that lecturers seem inhibited by lack of familiarity with the tech. They feel lecturers are teaching well but that they are stymied by the technology, which diminishes the learning experience. For instance, you're in the middle of a webinar and suddenly you realise you don't have the chat function turned on and you’re wondering why there’s so little response from the students.
- DO use webinars to be interactive with students. Identify the key threshold or resistant concepts and spend that synchronous teaching time (when you are online with them) probing and challenging students’ cognitive models. Here’s where you can take them from superficial learning – where they’re determined to fit what they know to their current understanding – to open-ended thinking where they have their ‘aha!’ moments. Active learning allows a lecturer to precipitate these ‘crises’ and enable each student to navigate their way to the next level.
- DO have fun! Discover your inner entertainer. There are many layers to blended learning and the key to it is being able to flex how you deliver information. In student feedback, ensuring content is varied is a must. We know that interactive quizzes and instant feedback opportunities get the most engagement. Keep as many channels of communication open as possible making use of platforms like Padlet, Mentimeter or WhatsApp.
- DO get the balance right. Students tell us they want roughly 20% of their teaching to be in an asynchronous format. I suggest a videoed lecture to tell them what the week’s work is all about, what they should concentrate on and why, with a pointer to the textbook that covers the topic at the right depth. Synchronous time should be a bit of lecturing followed by student interaction and open-ended challenges. It’s harder work combining the two but it’s more effective. Another balance to get right is to understand your students are all looking for different things from their degree. Some want to progress academically, others want a degree to get a job – try as far as possible to accommodate their aspirations.
- DO get invested in active learning because it is the future of tertiary education. There's overwhelming evidence to show it leads not only to students getting better results in exams but, crucially, they experience learning through ‘satisfying challenge’. As lecturers, we need to shift away from testing students on whether they think the same way we do, towards showing them there are big challenges to overcome and enabling them to build their confidence and competence to take them on. In the army, they show you a river, and say, ‘cross it.’ You say, ‘I can't.’ They say, ‘You're going to’. And you do it – and you realise you can. I like to think of learning as an intellectual river. Here you’re going to learn how to do complex differential equations, produce a play, criticise modern philosophy. You think you can’t, but you can.
- DON’T view this new university landscape as an issue of how we teach. It’s about how we enable students to learn. It’s what universities were all about in the first place: when students were expected to study through their own motivation, then to gain something extra from their interaction with experienced academics. I call it active rather than blended learning. It’s not a novel concept, nor is it a retrograde step. It’s a rediscovery of how to facilitate the development of the individual to become a confident member of an academic community.
- DON’T simply map your existing lectures onto a new technology. Start afresh with your objectives and work backwards. Realise the environment you’re in has changed and that the affordances of online tools are very different, too. Use them to do things you couldn't do within a standard lecture. By refactoring what you’re trying to achieve, you can get the most out of what’s now available. For instance, personalise teaching by using audience response system (when students respond to a question during a webinar) to initiate a virtual discussion where students put forward arguments, compare their world models and discover faulty thinking.
- DON’T admit complete defeat about not being able to do practicals, frustrating though it is. We already know recreating tasks in the virtual lab can be successful in building familiarity with the environment and the protocols. Extract your learning objectives and try to find a non-bench equivalent. Recently we wanted first-year students to make some measurements, which required them to grasp that they needed to use statistics to come to their conclusion. This would normally be done by counting cells on slides under a microscope. Instead, the lecturer thought out of the box and asked the students to buy packets of M&Ms and to count the number of blue ones. They had to figure out answers to questions about proportions and by talking to each other virtually, the learning objective – to appreciate the need for rigorous statistical tests – was achieved.
- DON’T allow dead time while you’re online. Create a space where you've got every student doing something. I may say, ‘there might be parts of today's session where we’re covering something you already know. If that happens to you, here are four questions to answer in the chat forum.’ So as I’m talking, there’s an additional track of activity going on, which is fantastic for the students, and for me to see how they’re thinking… although it is a little like being an organist with both hands and feet going at same time.
- DON’T be afraid to experiment and get your students involved in the process. It might go pear-shaped but equally it might reveal something valuable. In February, a student emailed to say several of them felt there were too many tasks in the asynchronous modules (when students are working on their own), which didn’t give them the depth they wanted. I took it on board as professional feedback from students who are there because they want to do well.
/filters:format(webp)/prod01/channel_333/queen-mary-online/media/learning-accelerator/images/Steven-Buckingham-800-x-800.jpg)