Online teaching

At the start of the Covid 19 pandemic, I started to read research related to teaching online. I started with some ideas about this topic, but it is not my “normal area of research”.

This was in response to a couple of reasons. Firstly, I taught an undergraduate module and quickly needed to convert my module online, and I was not sure if the approach that I had taken to teach online before was “backed up by research”. Secondly, people were asking me about pedagogy and research related to the topic. Thirdly and probably most importantly, I felt rather helpless and thought maybe this was a way I could help.

What also, struck me was a plethora of terms, the growing number of lists of online resources and emails from suppliers saying that subscriptions for websites were now free.

I, therefore,

  1. Wrote a quick read for the NCCE.
  2. Wrote my top hints and tips for online teaching (based on my own experience of this – with a hope of starting a dialogue about the techniques we can use).
  3. Started a Computing At School resource of a list of lists, with the idea that we could crowdsource this. I’m not convinced it has “taken off” but I keep adding things I find.
  4. Started a Computing At School resource on the research related to distance learning that I was reading. Again with the idea that people would add to it.
  5. Added some of this research to the #csedresearchbookclub that is run once a month (first Thursday of each month at 8:15pm GMT – after the clap for NHS
  6. I have started to investigate with a group of primary and secondary teachers the opportunities for adapting UCL’s popular higher education ABC process for designing online learning modules. We are looking at how it can be used review and improve emergency remote teaching. This is a small group of teachers, we started with @20 educators, now there are around 5 teachers still interested in this. We have now published several ABC cards which have been “localised” to specific subjects (computing),  age groups (primary/secondary) and schools. We are meeting weekly, if you would like to be involved – please contact me.  Here are our published cards – so far.
  7. I am working with my own university, QMUL, of adapting ABC for our department EECS (particularly for teaching programming) as part of our Teaching Interest Group (TIGr).
  8. Presented on #CovidEduStories on the 14th May on some of this. Here is the presentation.
  9. We presented at the CAS Showcase on Adapting ABC for schools in lockdown, over 40 teachers attended,  and the links will be here when available.
  10. As part of my work with the CAS Assessment Working Group I ran a set of activities on formative assessement in lockdown. We ran a set of facebook and twitter polls (over 200 teachers took part). I ran a collaborative session with a dozen teachers on formative assessment in ERT (emergency remote teaching). We are writing up the results as a set of top tips, a CAS report, a more academic report and as a Hello World Article. The presentation about our session (pre-analysis of findings) was recorded and will be linked here.
  11. I ran a 90 minute ABC in schools workshop for educators.  This was very well received and we are going to run ongoing support sessions to help teachers apply the method.
  12. For CAS, I am created a CAS in Box set of activities explaining how to use ABC in schools. This will be shared with CAS communities across the country.
  13. For the Hampshire conference, I presented a research themed session on lockdown looking at parent, teacher  and learning roles. This included learning types for learning roles.

Some particularly useful papers/blogs/ books on this topic are here

The difference between Emergency Remote Teaching and Online Learning (Hodges, Moore, Lockee, Trust & Bond, 2020). Great blog post putting the current situation into context.

A Conceptual Framework Highlighting E-Learning Implementation Barriers  (Ali, Uppal & Gulliver, 2018). 68 barriers to e-learning identified by a Reading University literature review. Synthesised into their TIPEC (Technology,Individual, Pedagogy, Enabling Condictions) framework. For older learners, but a good reminder of the issues.

Fostering Student Success and Engagement in a K-12 Online School(Curtis & Werth, 2015) Small study of 8 parents who have 11 pupils in online high schools in the US. Very interesting set of parental roles, requirements and factors for success. But these were parents who choose to home school (therefore implying time, facilities etc) and even they said technology was a barrier.

Learning On Line What the research tells us(Means, Bakia, Murphy, 2014). Great synthesis of literature on online learning, very balanced and cuts through the hype. Very useful framework for comparing online learning activities and very interesting chapter on online learning for less prepared students.