UIC Instructors Talk Online Pedagogy (Tips)
Following an unprecedented response to a novel pandemic, our community of students, faculty and staff had to immediately adjust to learning, teaching and working from a distance earlier this year. Today, we are all more experienced in remote environments, but there is always room for improvement.
UIC Instructors Talk Online Pedagogy Tips for Teaching Remotely Heading link
Following an unprecedented response to a novel pandemic, our community of students, faculty and staff had to immediately adjust to learning, teaching and working from a distance earlier this year. Today, we are all more experienced in remote environments, but there is always room for improvement.
In July, Technology Solutions (formerly ACCC) released a report highlighting the data we collected about remote teaching during the early pandemic days in Spring 2020. Despite being very busy readjusting courses and instructional material from in-person to online pedagogy, a total of 322 UIC instructors including faculty and teaching assistants, took the time to share their experience teaching remotely during COVID-19.
Some instructors’ survey and post-survey interview comments seem to be tips for other instructors in their quest to more efficiently and effectively teach remotely. Read what some instructors had to say:
quote 1 Heading link
It seems that remote learning needs smaller groups. I taught 120 students and coordinated 5 sections in total (so 550 students). Next time I would suggest a flipped model, and smaller groups meeting (perhaps just 1 hour per week with 30 students per meeting) and a lot of office hours.
q0 Heading link
What was nice was being able to say ‘if you have a question that you don’t want everyone to see, feel free to send it to us in a private chat’, and that way they didn’t feel like they were asking a ‘stupid question.’
q2 Heading link
Somewhere in the middle of that 3-hour day, I would have 2 or 3 students introduce themselves online. I think having the opportunity to become part of the class like that is an important thing for the students.
q3 Heading link
Keeping lectures shorter than you would do in-person, but then also having a good amount of things that they could do in class. I think if you have activities that are engaging, that apply the concepts we may have just talked about, and that they have to be relatively easy to figure out and adapt using the online platform, then I think that’s really helpful. Otherwise, it’ll just be a lot of frustration for students.
q4 Heading link
I think that it will be very important to connect students to both the faculty member and other students in the class early in the semester so that they feel like they are a member of a clear group. I think that social psychology tells us how best to get individuals to feel committed to a group and be invested in working together throughout a semester.