Why online learning is a smart move — even in a non-COVID world
In the School of Health Sciences at the University of Manchester we are very fortunate, we have a strong team of colleagues collectively with many years of experience of designing, developing and delivering fully online postgraduate programmes. When the original panic of dealing with the rapid transition to online learning for the remainder of 2019–20 teaching subsided we were faced with the planning of a new year of teaching for which the future was somewhat uncertain. Would students be allowed on campus? Even if they were, would they want to join teaching?; if they could not what would our blended and online provision look like?; and how would we support and prepare our colleagues to transition their teaching into a blended format for the next academic year. In early June 2020 we rapidly established a task and finish group to support colleagues within the School to make this transition, below are some key points of reflection of what we’ve learnt and also shared with our colleagues during this time.
Defining what you want to achieve
Many colleagues have been fearful of the association of online learning with a huge burden of needing to become an instant expert in learning technologies — more to be said on this later. However the most pragmatic approach to designing and developing any online learning, during such a rapid period of transition, is to first define exactly what you want to achieve and then you can decide on the best way to achieve it. Many of us have spent many not so fun hours trying to use more complex recording and editing software but on reflection now wonder whether we could have achieved the same end result using the voiceover feature in Powerpoint. Once you’ve decided what you want to achieve and if you decide you want to take a more technologically involved approach to creating content that’s fine — but one idea coined by a colleague is the idea of creating a “product with legacy”. What we mean by this is that this is not just a learning materials that you will temporarily use for your 2020–21 teaching, but one that will be integrated into your teaching longer term, hence why it’s worth investing in. There are then ways of creating further efficiencies, without too much unit specific reference it can then be re-used in other courses or even re-purposed for different audiences such as continuing professional development, if pitched correctly.
Try thinking about this transition to online teaching as a project rather than an extension of business as usual. By viewing it with specific goals, scope and a series of short tasks to complete you can start to set your own expectations which can help give some clarity of thought. Planning is difficult in such short timescales but there are some real benefits. This point was reinforced in a FutureLearn course How to Teach Online that we both facilitated on. The course asked “What can you do in 20 minutes?” and gave some examples:
- Create a task / study plan with key dates and times
- Set up a central sharing place for students or colleagues working on your programme
- Create community and collegiality
By approaching it in small steps will mean you’ll get a sense of achievement and feel encouraged instead of trying to imagine an entire curriculum of learning that needs to move online. Other useful questions to ask yourself in this planning phase might include:
- Think about your students — what do they really need to learn?
- Be practical — what can you achieve in the circumstances? Can you curate some resources instead of creating them?
- Think about your own teaching style. Maybe you like to stop and check with students at the end of class. How can you transfer your usual approach online?
Social Learning & Communities of Practice
Many colleagues have been concerned with potential under-engagement by their students in online learning. One way we have combated this which seems to have worked surprisingly well is to embed social learning into our units assessment strategy, contributing to up to 20% of the total unit mark, with this level of contribution students seem more inclined to get involved and contribute to the collective learning journey. The programmes that we lead have a clinical focus, so typically we split the students into groups, each centred on a particular clinical case study. Over the duration of a large portion of a unit (between 5–6 weeks of a 10 week unit), they will work as a group on the same case study, with pre-set problems with guided questions to discuss. Often in the case of our course this involved going away doing something offline and then sharing and reporting back to the group on how they’ve got in. We do facilitate these discussion boards, and as numbers grow on a course unit the resource to do so also needs to be factored in. We’ve found this approach fairly successful in helping to create a community of practice amongst our students and also engender a model of peer-peer support — also helpful when trying to manage particularly large numbers in online learning and reduce the burden on teaching staff.
If you would like to find out more about our experience of designing and delivering online learning in our Clinical Bioinformatics programmes you can find out more in the Youtube video (10 mins).
For some more ideas on building engagement, take a look at these lessons learned post on one of the units on a distance learning course. However, a general rule of thumb is to try and make the learning feel live. You could:
- Use top answers from a poll in week one and build on it later in the course.
- Use a map (such as this Padlet board https://padlet.com/support/maps) to show where people are studying from as an ice-breaker and to build a sense of community
- Have virtual office hours, communicate them, and try to keep to them.
- Find a way to get feedback from the students on the activities as they go. You can repeat this to build consistency throughout the course. If something works, keep it!
Technology, software, hardware and recording studios!
We’ve fielded many questions around what’s the best video editing software, which tools support transcription, what’s the best tool to support synchronous online learning and many more. There are a plethora of tools that will address many of the things that you will wish to create, however, there are a few simple considerations to aid you. Firstly what does your institution have a license for, paying for your own license is a costly approach and may not get reimbursed, it also could lead to issues further down the line if you are trying to share or modify content and other colleagues don’t have the same software access. In general keep to what your institution will support — your local E-learning support will be stretched and dealing with a host of enquiries, especially as the start of the new semester draws closer. If you can keep to software that they are familiar with and already support it will make answering queries and providing any ad-hoc support much easier for them.
Also find a friendly expert-user aside from your E-learning technologists who may be willing to provide some mentorship in the early days as you are beginning to get to grips with the new software, and may also be willing to act as a guinea pig for practicing on.
As far as hardware we have recommended that all colleagues have a decent camera (either on their laptop or via an external camera), a decent headset with built-in mic for using during synchronous teaching and also a USB microphone for higher sound quality for recorded materials. Access to campus and any official podcasting may be very limited in the coming weeks, but there are some simple steps to producing better quality recordings. Preparing your script, having another colleague look over it, and completing sound and audio checks before doing any lengthy recordings will reduce any wasted efforts and limit the amount of editing you will need to do down the line. When recording in your home environment noise disturbance from dogs, errant children and bin lorries can be difficult to avoid, but sometimes counter-intuitively recording in a smaller space can reduce an echo or reverb effect and improve overall sound quality. To make yourself look more professional you may also choose to use a background of your institution if recording video content.
Over the first few weeks of talking to and supporting colleagues, we were met often with fear and a sense of feeling overwhelmed with the task ahead of them. However we have introduced some simple tools such as storyboarding, creating unit and lesson plans and breaking down how each session will be delivered, eg either synchronously or asynchronously, and breaking down the task into smaller more manageable sections also seems to have been helpful and has helped colleagues to take ownership of the process. We’ve used a tool called Trello for helping with this when developing and updating units, you can see an example of the tasks associated with unit development below:
For more information on tools to help you plan and develop your unit see the post below from our colleague John Owen.
Another point from a student perspective is to be as consistent as you can with your choice of delivery tools — they like you will become rapidly frustrated if they also have to master a wealth of different tools and platforms.
Preparing for the Unknown
One of the more contentious points we’ve had many discussions over was how we prepare for a somewhat unknown entity, ie a second wave of COVID, or even students that are shielding for a multitude of other reasons and are unable to attend the University. Also we need to ensure that no student is disadvantaged by inability to attend on-campus teaching. Therefore a more pragmatic solution is to ensure that any face to face opportunities are curriculum enhancing and that core content is made available either as recorded synchronous or asynchronous content for all to access. We also need to ease our students into this new world of online learning and think carefully before establishing the ground rules. Allowing flexibility with relation to cameras during any synchronous teaching or tutorials is worth considering, and certainly the chat function in Zoom of Blackboard Collaborate has been a good way to ensure inclusivity, though with much larger groups this may need more teaching assistants to monitor. If you are worried about participation and engagement there are other ways to increase this including, quick polls and surveys, questions or setting a follow up exercise that relies on what you have covered. Keep anything like this as simple as possible and try to avoid a scenario that might involve more than one screen, as this is unlikely to be supported by the technology that the students will have access to in their home learning environment. Do be aware that many students might not want to switch their cameras on for a multitude of reasons, including lack of broad-band width, multi-tasking with children or sharing learning space with other family members who may also be at home if we get a second wave. Also be prepared to do an introduction session to any unit that you’ll be leading outlining the approaches that you’ll be taking and how you will support the students, a short video such as this will likely save you a lot of time in the long run.
And finally
So, despite this somewhat daunting task of preparing for teaching next year, there are many opportunities to learn new skills, learn from and work with new colleagues and to be creative and try things that you haven’t done before, with the permission that not all of them will be successful. Importantly if you have involved your students in that creation and development process too, at least you can be assured that the students are at the heart of what you have tried to achieve, and therefore they are more willing to accept it as a journey to online rather than a fully-fledged online experience. To finish with three key take-home messages that were well-covered in the FutureLearn course:
- Be kind on yourself! We are in an emergency remote teaching situation and the output shouldn’t be measured against the high-quality online learning experiences which take months to design and develop.
- Build and use your network to support your online transition.
- You are a learner too. Be human and share your journey with your students!
and finally good luck!
Ang Davies and Fran Hooley
Ang Davies is a Senior Lecturer at the University of Manchester and has led fully online education at there since 2016, pioneering and leading the University’s first Massive Online Open course (MOOC) with FutureLearn: Clinical Bioinformatics: Unlocking Genomics in Healthcare. The course design embraced Laurillard’s conversational framework, and has attracted over 18,000 participants to date. Between 2018–2019, Ang led the partnership with University of Manchester Worldwide to pioneer and develop a new fully online course in Clinical Bioinformatics, the first such course from our Faculty. Since 2019 Ang has acted as Programme Director for the newly created PG Certificate in Clinical Bioinformatics, and to our knowledge the first course of its type in the world. In 2020 Ang was also involved in the development of a new Futurelearn MOOC: Artificial Intelligence for Healthcare: Equipping the Workforce for Digital Transformation.
Fran Hooley is a Lecturer in Technology Enhanced Learning at the University of Manchester. Fran is Deputy Director for the PG Cert in Clinical Bioinformatics and has over 15 years’ experience of technology enhanced learning roles in Higher Education and the private sector. Fran led the development of the new Futurelearn MOOC: Artificial Intelligence for Healthcare: Equipping the Workforce for Digital Transformation
