Challenges and Tips

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Challenges and Tips

As many people found during the pandemic in the spring of 2020, teaching a synchronous session is arguably more difficult than teaching a face-to-face lesson.

Multi-tasking

Part of the reason is that successful online teaching is intensively cognitively fatiguing because teachers are constantly task switching.
- Reading the chat box
- Drawing on the board
- Monitoring time
- Thinking about the content
- Answering student questions
- Monitoring student engagement
- Gauging needed explanations
- Asking student questions
- Checking student answers

Online vs. face-to-face

All of this together for hours at a time is draining.
But it’s necessary, because students wander far more frequently online than they do in the face-to-face classroom.
At least in a face-to-face classroom, teachers can demand that students pretend to pay attention, but online teachers must insist on frequent participation.
- In addition, face-to-face teachers see students roll their eyes or nap, but online teachers only see text or poll participation.

Tips & tricks!

Don’t let students distract the class. Off-topic chatting is the most disliked part of a synchronous class session.
Don’t ask students to do anything other than listen and participate. Focusing is hard enough for them without distracting them with other tasks.
Expect students to answer frequent (every 3-5 minutes) questions, disrupting their web surfing.

Tips & tricks! (cont.)

Don’t back up and reteach for late students. It’s recorded—they can go back and watch it. Late students should slip quietly in.
If the lesson is interrupted (e.g. the videoconferencing software went down), record the lesson by yourself and send students the link for later viewing.
Limit text on slides to five words per line and no more than five lines per slide. Keep all slides high-contrast, black and white if possible. Make sure illustrations are easy to read and understand.