Working as a group is: 1) frustrating, when you like things going at a particular pace. I therefore find myself organising people, because I want to take time off and would need the ball to get rolling now! 2) Do you just ignore those who don’t engage and get on with it with the people […]

You are part of a new course team developing a course to be delivered online at the start of the next academic year. Due to student feedback and high online attrition at other universities, your Programme Board are particularly keen to support online courses that students becoming active participants of the University of Edinburgh community. […]

Week 0:  activities for students to get to know each other, open space for students to ‘play and establish their own identities’ (MG). Even before week 0. Online only events, e.g.: Interviews of staff, could interview translators and do items around new articles published. We could have that instead of seminars? Hybridity: Interaction at Programme […]

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 […]

Beyond the time zone differences, what are the challenges in what the instructor is proposing? How would you be able to frame the synchronous event with pre and post event activity? How would you approach this for your own course? My first reaction is: this is a nightmare! -8h, +8h, arghhhh 1. The students who […]

Clear guidelines, expectations and boundaries I think it is important to make it clear to students what is contact time and when I/we are available. So I would tell them when my office hours are (real time, synchronous), I might cycle them every week if there are different time zones. I would also emphasise that […]

Contact time: defining for online purpose. ‘Contact time generally refers to the tutor-mediated time allocated to teaching or providing guidance and feedback to students. Online contact time can be synchronous using real-time environments (such as Collaborate, Teams) or asynchronous (using tools such as moderated discussion forums, blogs, Padlet, and more). Online contact time is characterised by personalised tutor presence […]

I work in the field of Translation Studies and when we think of creativity in this context it is always in relation to original writings as translation is generally thought of as a derivative activity. We even have a course called Translation and creativity in which we teach students how to conceived of translation as a creative activity. – […]

I like the ideas of introducing myself in a recording as part of staff introduction or ‘a warm bio with a picture’ but I think I prefer the video format. Then for all the courses I teach, I would be happy to do a short video to introduce the course and what it means to […]