Learning From Remote Learning
What the Shift to Remote Learning Can Teach Us About Teaching
Who could have predicted this end to the Spring 2020 semester? If your future-self had shown up on February 1 to warn you, would you have believed them?
Note: we shifted our residential classes to remote learning, not to online learning. Online classes are designed to be online with all of the supporting materials for the students and (hopefully) thoughtfully planned digital assignments. Remote learning this semester — I think we just made it up on the fly! Look around online and you can see all sorts of teachers discussing and struggling with the transition.
My background: I have been teaching residential classes for over 10 years, but I also have taught online and been the Subject Matter Expert (SME) designing online courses so I am familiar with both types of teaching.
Online and residential teaching have strong positives, but of course each has some negatives. Ideally, we can use the goods from each of them to improve the bads in each of them. Last Fall, I used some of the lessons from teaching online to enhance my residential classes. Even so, this unexpected mid-semester transition further clarified the good and the bad of both online and residential teaching. And it showed me how I can do both better in the…
