1.12 Reflective practice
I must admit I was dreading this course as the move to online teaching is not something that I dreamed about. For me teaching is performing and it only works if I have a live audience (I did Bright Club a few times and really enjoy talking to crowds about what I do!) So it’s fair to say that I didn’t start the course with an open mind. BUT I have been very pleasantly surprised so far 🙂
First of all I think it’s really useful to have conversations with people from other disciplines. Specific questions and reflections, particularly from Michael and Markus, have been really helpful. For the MSc in Translation Studies, the main programme I teach on, we are looking into doing blended teaching. Our cohort is usually composed of around 70-80% Chinese students as well as students from the US, China, the Arab world and very few from the UK and Europe.
This course is making me think about how we can make online teaching work for us (staff and students) and I have reflected for instance on asynchronous v. synchronous teaching, grouping students according to timezones, cycling seminars at different times, recording live events and sharing on mediahopper. It also got me thinking about how we can support students from all over the world as their access to the internet might be limited for instance.
In terms of my course, one thing that I thought we could do is have podcasts/interviews. The MSc in Translation Studies is a mixture of translation theories and practice and we could interview translators and post these interviews as supplementary material attached to specific lectures, that way students can make a clearer link between theory and practice.
The take-aways from me so far are that you can diversify assessment (e.g. podcasts), many things can be re-used (e.g. interviews), importance of taking into consideration students’ location (students in China for instance might need more time to access the material), pedagogical value is different from efficiency, keep it simple at first, be present in forums.
Perhaps this blog is much longer that you would expect. How long should a blog be actually?
Thanks for this first week. I look forward to Week 2 🙂
Hello there Charlotte. Wow! Well done. I think you are exactly where you want to be in terms of reflecting on all of this; exactly the right questions to be asking. I think we have some time here to dig into your cohorts and how you might approach teaching them online/blended. I will be cycling through all the blogs hopefully weekly so I hope that provides you some substantial feedback to take back into your school for thinking through teaching the next academic year. I will jump in to your other posts now but in answer to your question: this is a good length for a post. When I use blogs in my teaching, I generally tell them to post as often as you want (they can use it as a notebook to jot down ideas, or collect material) and tell me which ones they want me to feed into (you can make this automated to some degree by having them tag the post as Review or something like that or have them add the post to a Category (Review) which you can focus your efforts on. In terms of length, I tell them being concise is important so try to keep everything below 300 words (if not much less). If you were using the blog as assessment (an essay at the end of the term or a curated list of posts from throughout the term) then these can be longer.
Just some thoughts! I look forward to exchanging with you Claudia!
Thanks Michael! Just one wee thing, I’m Charlotte not Claudia, though I agree that it’s a good name. Claudia Cardinale comes to mind 🙂 I’m learning a lot already, so thanks for your feedback. All the best, Charlotte