Challenges and Tips
CPD: The Teaching Online Handbook (by Courtney Ostaff), topic 1.2.3
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.
Test yourself on Challenges and Tips
Why is true about online teachng compared to teaching face-to-face?
What is the best way to ensure students are paying attention during online teaching?
Which of these should you do when teaching online?