3 Things I’ve Learned Teaching Online in the Pandemic

What a year it’s been in higher education

Classrooms have been pretty empty since the spring, but what have we learned? (© Craig Harper)

The spring and summer of 2020 saw professors and lecturers spend time adapting their materials for online delivery after campuses closed their doors. After delivering courses like this for the past nine months, here are the three things that have really stuck out for me as an academic on the ground.

Photo by Omar Flores on Unsplash

First off, lecturing is a poor use of class time.

Before the pandemic, I used to turn up for a two-hour teaching session and deliver information for half of that time, using the rest of the session for discussions and applications. These sessions let me present information in a dynamic way while assessing whether students were really getting it, but the activities always felt a bit flat.

This is because my students were responding to discussion points in-the-moment. They hadn’t had time to digest the information, let alone form an opinion about it. In hindsight, asking students to debate controversial research findings or formulate case assessments straight after hearing about the content was a nice way to fill classroom time, but it didn’t add…