Tag: teaching

Guidance for Educators: Mix it up!

 

Transcript:

Welcome all. Please feel free to share this video with colleagues, if you think they would find it of interest.

I want to talk today about engaging students about the need to mix it up a little bit in terms of the way that we deliver our learning, the way that we engage our students. It is important to be consistent from a quality perspective but to avoid repetition. And it’s very easy to make an excuse and say, well, “this is the room that I’ve been allocated, to teach in”, or “this is the confines of the webinar space that I’m being expected to operate in”. And that becomes a defense mechanism on the part of educators. So this is the way this is the way it’s always been done. “This is the way the lectures work. This is the way it’s done.”

And I think we need to avoid that.

It’s important that we focus on the notion of engagement of the learning we need to think about, what’s going to provoke the learner, provoke the student, to engage with the concepts and the knowledge that’s being shared or imparted.

And that doesn’t necessarily making every session a very different form of active learning, but it does mean you have to focus in on the concepts and think about how best to illustrate those concepts. Visually, ideally. So the best way to do that is to review the concepts within an individual session and put it in the context of a broader course, and then identify whether or not you think this particular concept is best experienced through some lecture form,

or through some seminar form or through some active learning form you might throw in a moot or a discussion you might throw in a question, answer session. You might throw in a way of giving students to do peer learn from each other, even within a lecture theater, anything is possible. It’s really important that you break out of the mold of doing repetitive forms of delivery. It’s really important that we mix it up to maintain the engagement of our students. So look at the whole series of sessions, identify individual concepts, take a course wide view, and then map out what best form of engagement you think is going to work that ensures some variation in the learning experience.

And that’s much more likely to engage, maintain, engagement of your learners. 

Guidance for Educators: Speak freely

Transcript

Welcome all. Please feel free to share this with your colleagues. If you think they’ll find this. Interesting. So let’s talk today about how you deliver your notes. I’m going to assume that if you’re delivering any kind of lecture, you will have notes and it’s absolutely critical that you don’t stand and read.

It’s also important that you don’t substitute your notes with PowerPoint slides that have bullet-pointed versions of your notes, and you end up just reading out the bullet points. There’s good practice and bad practice in that. There’ll be other resources available around that shortly. So, I think it’s really important that you think about how you convey the message of the learning using your notes.

It’s ‘notes’, not a script. Don’t illustrate with bullet points, use as much eye contact as possible and make sure that you are illustrating key points. If you are going to use PowerPoint as a visual tool, it is a visual tool, not a text-based tool. It’s absolutely critical that you recognize that the most powerful tool you have when you’re teaching is your own voice.

And there are things you can do to train your voice. There are ways that you can encourage your voice to carry more meaning, more conviction, and there’ll be resources about that coming out shortly. So I tend to rehearse at least part of any presentation. I don’t always rehearse the entire one hour lecture or 40-minute lecture or 35-minute lecture, but I will always try and rehearse at least part of it to make sure that the tone is right, that the notes are structured in such a way that they will support what it is I want to teach.

So I would suggest that you try something similar. Let me know how it goes. Be well.

Guiding and Motivating Students Online (6’15”)

 

This brief presentation (6’15”) introduces some themes around guiding and motivating students online. These different facets are mentioned; being clear in instructions, avoid confusion, modelling behaviours, motivating, congratulating, anticipating motivational hurdles. This presentation was the basis for online webinar discussions with educators. It will hopefully prompt you to check your own practices against these fundamental principles.

These resources from 2013-2017 are being shared to support colleagues new to teaching online in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic. Consultancy for International Higher Education from Simon Paul Atkinson

Designing Effective Teaching Materials (6’06”)

This six-minute screencast (6’06”) is a top-level set of guidelines for developing effective teaching materials. For some, it may feel like going over well-worn ground, for others it may provide pause for thought. Rationalising what constitutes learning materials seems superficially straight-forward but when one considers the different institutional interpretations of what represents ‘direct’ learning versus ‘delf-directed’ learning it soon becomes apparent that judgement is needed even here.

These resources from 2013-2017 are being shared to support colleagues new to teaching online in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Basics of Media Choice in Teaching (Vodcast 3’25”)

Short vodcast (3’25”) outlining four dimensions to the choices of media that IDs and academic faculty might consider as they make selections to support student learning. Originally a vodcast to accompany internal development it is long enough to provoke some reflective practice, short enough not to waste your time! It invites educational practitioners to think about how they solicit participation from students through media choice. #edtech #teaching #highered

These resources from 2013-2017 are being shared to support colleagues new to teaching online in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Preparing for Webinar Teaching (6’18”)

This six-minute video (6’18”) is entitled ‘Best Practices in Preparing Online Materials for Webinar facilitation.” It is essential guidance for novice webinar teachers. There are 8 tips for preparing your webinar so you do not end up asking questions into the dark abyss and hear nothing back from your students. This screencast was generated for colleagues using AdobeConnect but it is suitable regardless of whether you are using this, or Blackboards Collaborate, ZOOM or any webinar context. Originally recorded in 2015. #elearning #AdobeConnect #webinar #higher #teaching

These resources from 2013-2017 are being shared to support colleagues new to teaching online in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Learning & Teaching Activities (6/8-SLDF)

Designing Engaging Learning Opportunities

Workshop aligned to UKPSF A1-A2,  K1-K4, V1 

The third element in a constructively aligned course design and stage six of the 8-SLDF is the learning activities that allow students to prepare for the assessment of their learning outcomes. This is not about the content that we share with our students; it is about how we develop an appropriate strategy to do that. Some modules will require a good deal of knowledge to be acquired by novice learners and a set-text and discursive seminars may be the appropriate strategy. Could we use one-minute papers, ‘Pecha Kucha’, lightning talks, and other techniques to secure student engagement? Alternatively, we might be designing a more advanced module in which a discovery learning approach is more appropriate. Could we use enquiry based learning models here instead, asking our students to prepare to take a debate position, run a Moot or team-based discussion? The important thing is that we are developing a strategy and practical approaches that build on our design, not seeking innovation for innovation’s sake. The pages for this stage of the 8 Stage Learning Design Framework are summarised as:

      1. The content to be taught should serve the students ability to evidence the ILO
      2. The skills and attributes that are taught at a topic, week or session level should be designed to rehearse elements of the assessment
      3. Not everything that engages students is directly assessed but everything they are asked to do should be justifiable as informing the assessment and ILOs.

You might want to ask yourself as a course design team

        • How closely mapped are the  ILOs to each topic, week or session outline?
        • How confident are you that you cover the ILOs appropriately in terms of weighting and importance?
        • How much variation is there in the learning approaches taken throughout your module?
        • How are you enabling students to develop skills beyond knowledge acquisition?

    See 8-SLDF pages for a fuller explanation.

Accessibility by WAH
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