We were given three case studies of students who were disengaging from an online course for different reasons, and asked for suggestions about how to respond. These were the three disengaging students: difficult work life balance, with a demanding job and caring responsibilities. Asked early on what the minimum was and seems to be only […]

Teachers who are moving from on-campus to online teaching will have a lot of questions. Here are some examples: Questions about Teaching Online How often is it necessary to be online? Should they have synchronous teaching sessions or rely more on asynchronous discussion boards? Would they need to work unsocial hours? How would they know […]

What is Teacherbot? Teacherbot is an artificial intelligence project to automate some aspects of teaching, thereby improving efficiency and allowing for the more ‘teacher-light’ tuition required for providing courses on the scale of MOOCs. I had been interested in hearing more about Teacherbot ever since I first heard of it at the IT Futures conference […]

Image: Not very engaged online teaching Why teach online? The University of Edinburgh’s (2016) Strategic Plan endorses “a digital culture that will culminate in a university where: every core service is fully digital; every educator is a digital educator; every student is a digital student”. Who are our distance learners? Online students tend to be […]

Accessibility Experiment When I looked up the article about Teacherbot, I decided to try out something else new, and take advantage of an accessibility feature of the online journal it was in: I noticed they had an audio option available and I thought that was great, so I had the article read out to me! […]

Group Work: Video Reflections Students will find a way to do group work, even online across time zones. They will be designing their own digital creations, organising via email, Skype, and similar applications, screen sharing and sharing films. Assessments should be designed as much as possible so that they can align with what all the […]

I’m quite enjoying these word cloud generators they use on the course. Here’s the word cloud my cohort in ‘The Edinburgh Model for Online Education’ course came up with for Community:

Well this is ironic. No one else from my group is anywhere to be seen, and the task is this: In this activity you are going to be working in groups to discuss some of the challenges and opportunities around the size and scale of learning communities, particularly online. In your group discussion area, share […]

Image: Professional Learning Communities in Second Life Thoughts on Online Community – Reflections on the Video below Which of these approaches are appropriate to my discipline? Which would force a redesign of my current teaching practices? Whatever my thoughts on this, we are all about to find out the answers!

Good memories of my own learning community: Photo of my CodeClan cohort on graduation day! Community is about human interaction and participation. The overall design of any module or programme should relate to the three key interlinking areas of community, campus and cohort. There are lots of overlapping, interrelated issues in teaching and learning, as […]