3.10

How are you structuring in teacher presence, how are you developing contact and care, how are you structuring time? You can make this post very utilitarian if you want: perhaps a quick sketch on how you might structure all of this for your own courses.

We are currently not offering anything online so it will be a first.

Teacher presence:

video/audio recordings to introduce myself. Short introduction videos for each course

Contact times: office hours (2h weekly, different time slots, one in the morning, one in the afternoon, same or different day). Also offer the possibility to meet out with those times.

Teaching: Synchronous lectures recorded in Collaborate (breakout rooms for group work, and then drag everybody back – check online training). Google hangouts once a month or every other month, prompts in lectures for forums, followed by email prompts if no action. Interventions in forums light touch as these forums ‘should’ be their space. Perhaps have tutors keep an eye on those as part of tutorial times? Portfolio of translations (1h weekly) synchronous tutorials with a prompt at the end for a forum, asking questions to reflect about a couple of notions.

Portfolio workshops?: Give them a task to do in groups before the workshops? Teams?

TTW: check with Karin.

Weekly announcements including summary of activities. I teach on three main courses, and CO for one.

So cycling lectures/classes/Google hangouts and making recording available feels like the fairest option. Discussion threads can be asynchronous with a timeframe attached to them of a few days, if teaching sessions weekly (so every week has a different topic).

There is the real time teaching and then the follow up, etc. so I’ll need to block off time on my calendar for course engagement, for engaging with discussion boards, summarising the week’s events, or even for a synchronous session.

Be clear about expectations: tell students exactly what to expect in terms of my presence, email response (3 working days, no weekends, time zones). Make it clear what we expect them to do: what does presence mean for them? Participation not mandatory in forums? Give them a minimum of what they should be doing? Encourage them to tell us what’s going wrong (personally, technology etc.)

Define clearly what is meaningful participation for us.

Learn analytics? To check participation. Retention dashboard: traffic system to check engagement (push notifications as opposed to running report).

We also need to have on the course page all the info about help/pastoral case so students have it all there.

Hybridity: what do we do if we have students present in Edinburgh? I can’t really see how we can do both because if we do then we cannot cycle the classes. Should we go online only, will we be allowed?

Also need to check if for instance everybody can use Google Hangouts and what is the alternative?