Blended Learning Webinar

hello and welcome to today's blended learning webinar I'm dr. 10 by Charles director of the Centre for research in digital education here at the British University in the wife and I'll be hosting this afternoon's webinar we're going to begin with a few words about the Centre for research into education then I'll be passing the presentation to my colleague dr. Chris Hill who will be defining what is and what isn't blended learning I'll then be taking us through a six step process for designing our own blended learning courses and finally there will be a roundtable discussion with a group of digital education experts now before we begin there are a few things I'd like to say first of all we perceive this as a form of online professional development training therefore we will be giving you attendance if it's difficult at the end of the week additionally this webinar is going to be recorded and later posted to youtube so you can revisit it there or indeed you can share with your colleagues if you'd like to now I think for many of you this will be the first time you've used blackboard collaborate ultra from online webinar so it's going to take you through a few things here first of all the chat room is managed by a - about colleagues Linda parson and Lisa so they'll be answering any questions that you have during the webinar and what I'd like you to do if you look at the bottom right hand corner of the page you'll see a purple icon if you click on this and then opens a side panel so it's in the side panel where you can actually type your chat comments so if you're free to say hello to everyone additionally you'll notice there's a Settings icon and I think this is important because why default you may notice names popping up on the screen as people are joining the webinar and you may have sounds as people are responding to the chat messages and these can sometimes be quite distracting so if you click on the Settings icon and go down to notifications and then this a will all of the audio notifications so at least not popping up during the webinar distracting you okay I think that's enough time for that if there's any questions about that please feel free to post them in the chat room or one of the team will answer okay so about the Center for Research and digital education we have five main functions here primarily we conduct research on matters pertaining to technology enhanced learning Digital education and education technology we have a number of funded research projects currently underway and if any of you our colleagues here in the MENA region are interested in collaborating on research projects about online teaching or blended learning please feel free to reach out to us and we can discuss potential collaborations in future our Center is based within the Department of Education and through that Department we offer a master's degree and a PhD in education with a focus on technology enhanced learning we also host a number of events related to digital education we've had some excellent events so far this year and many more to come I'm proud to say that we are leaders in the Middle East region of Digital Inclusion and digital accessibility were actually awarded a certificate by blackwood recently for a competition we participated in and we also design and develop and deliver a number of online courses and you can visit our University's website to have a look at those we have also formed several international partnerships and collaborations so we're currently working with Lancaster University on some research we're collaborating with Pearson on webinars and training and professional development in fact we have a member of Pearson joining us today and we're institutional partners with blackboard and specifically blackboard ultra which is their newest learning management system and we're also using Coursera for campus at the moment and discussing ways we can use that in the future for offering blended learning degree courses here at the British University in Dubai now with all of that happening we decided to actually reach out to college within the region and just offer some support during these times since the Coburg nineteen's happened we've noticed that lots of small technology companies pop up offering you know software and tools and training which all very technology focused and not really pedagogically focused or focused towards teaching such so we thought with our expertise of both having do a search experience behind us as well as the technical ability to implement digitally improved lessons we thought we could help our colleagues here in the region so I hope you enjoy today's presentation I'm now going to pass it over to my colleague dr. Christy Hill who's going to define what is and what isn't blended learning over to you Chris thank you very much can everybody see yes well so at the moment is still me if you can just stop my slides and yet there we are yes we see you now everybody thank you to my colleague tender so I'm going to keep this very brief and the idea behind this is not to achieve at all but religious to try some context for what will then be a very interactive and informative panel of discretion well a little bit about what I see we mean by blended learning we thoroughly filmed around a lot blended online in some cases hybrid and we want to talk a little bit about what the they actually mean and for many of us and we've been using some form of online learning pre turbine 19 and obviously entirely during covered 19 and so often blended learning looks at conventional face of faced with learning activities mixed in so there's a blend of Technology a blend of face-to-face we obviously has been impossible during the curve in 1900 campus life or school life and so you'll hear these terms a lot about synchronous and asynchronous and this is the ability to either on something live or run something other the pace that the the participant can log on to and they're all complex parts of listening and we're going to go through a little bit of them in turn now for many of us particulars was working in the Middle East and obviously in the UAE in particular we've had elements of blended learning in the past but the question with this is really for us to have a chance to reflect about the use of technology to support pedagogy rather than technology over from being the answer to fantastic teaching because being able to teach and be able to be teach online are two separate skill sets and may be able to use technologies that a third step and so we want to look at exploring some of the challenges and opportunities and responses that our colleagues have done and we'll talk about it in the panel and so we've used online learning the past people have used the internet obviously in their teaching and we want to talk a little bit about the definitions because the more that we can understand the nature of what we're doing the better we can prepare the better we can prepare the better the student learning experience so with that in mind we've talked with three styles my colleague Linda is going to put a poll up on the page now there are three slides each slide is a single type of learning so the question for you to think about is to read the different examples on this slide and after the poll by stone this is these are all examples of blended learning if none of these your job as in the results of not blended learning or you don't know which is probably valid response okay so the poll will give you the option to pick there we are blended not blended or don't know okay I'll stop talking just to give you a few minutes to read but it's one of those three choices and they are all a single choice for this one page so we've got people okay people are responding that's great um okay we can still see the screen yes so you can still see be the options available good so we've got six examples here ranging from caught up and completely online but the final exam is face to face at specific time to things like conventional face-to-face lecture based class where the PowerPoint slides used for lectures or course nodes output online those are just to two of the examples how many people responded back ah no not quite um okay if people don't know it's an absolutely perfectly valid answer okay there's no no issue sherry today I know how much longer should we give for this one do you think and maybe just another minute maximum okay good Mia fully online course with scheduled technology mediated sync restore indication eg online chat rooms video conferences or web conferences neither of the examples conventional face-to-face lecture based class where all assignments and tests are completed and submitted online another example how many do we have now we've had okay so it wasn't in half an hour okay I've showed that should I click show responses so they can see what the survey says please do yeah okay okay so all my hosts split down split down the three okay that's great that's great now how about this one same principle applies and we will come back and tell you which one was which okay same principle applies these three are all examples of either blended not blended or possibly you don't know too tough to call okay so three three examples of a particular type of teaching first will you read the three examples because some people cannot see the slides big enough because they're doing this on their phone so can you read me oh yeah yes so the examples we got a conventional face-to-face lecture course in which students work collaboratively to find or construct online resources the student work is assessed class time or at least time is allocated to this activity that's one example so it's conventional face-to-face but students work is constructed online second example is a conventional face-to-face course in which online discussions are enabled to skew them and the discussions are assessed and participation is used to integrate and the final example is a course in which all course materials readings and resources are online and students meet face to face at predetermined times so those are the three examples thank you very much for for the notes about reading that's that's very very helpful and a critical point about blended and online learning if people can't access the resources there's kind of an issue issue with everybody's their participation and understanding okay okay I'm going to click share of splinters now we have more than half I think okay wonderful how are we doing with this one we've got okay a greater number think it's blended okay fantastic and then for the final one you have two examples and again these are both examples of a particular type face-to-face leg chair where the lectures are put online students are expected to access the lectures before class and class time is reserved for discussion of cubes and the second example is a face-to-face lecture and base class that has a mandatory online tutorial part of the curriculum and students are expected to access the tutorial and complete an online test worth 5% of their grade no class time is reserved or released to complete the tutorial there's a lot more independence so face to face we're lectures are online and students have to access before class and class time is reserved for discussion of issues and then the second one a face to face seminar class where it has a mandatory online tutorial student expects to complete and as part of their assessed grade okay I'm going to click show responses now because there's more than half of the attendees okay okay wonderful so um we had four for the first one we had a kind of an even split of blended not blended and don't know Tendai the answers to this one are not blended not blended yes so a third of you were absolutely correct and the rest of you were almost correct in the sense that this is a combination approach that includes some sort of face-to-face activities structured and some online activity structured okay so for the second one we had a greater number of people responded where is the poll gone with when they said blended no sir then okay and were they correct yes they were they were because this is a structured approach that has elements of the two face-to-face and online built into the course design and so not blended and tends to be where the bulk of it is although this structure that is that is part of the curriculum that is assessed is done face-to-face and materials are available online so simply saying to students all gone absolutely Internet does not make teaching blended but it has have a coherent structure what about the third one what what is that example so our our poll had a lot of people saying yes no said blended for this yeah and this is one which is a little bit tricky of the call so the first example for example Fix hub for example would be would be considered blended the second one is going to be depending on the nature of the activity and how it says the embedded within the teaching and so there's no strict rule since but as in there's no rulebook that you have to follow the tick's enough boxes it's really about how you structure and how you embed activity that can be assessment activity it can be research activity it can be engagement there are many different aspects of the pedagogical approach that we can embed in the online and that's what makes it blended but it's simply saying oh go and read the articles online or I've created a folder where people can access that doesn't make it blended that simply makes it a different way to access it material information so thank you very much for that we come to this question then about why blending now obviously at the moment we're fully online but as and when teaching goes back to quote-unquote normal they should feel there's opportunity to blend learning not because we have to but because it can add value to the pedagogy and so there are our three generally agreed upon reasons as to why there's a lot of literature to back this up it can improve learning outcomes it can create sort of alternative pedagogical approaches it can cater for diversity of student learning and needs it can increase access over space and time again we know that this has been very difficult under quarantine just because of everybody being home with everybody else but it does allow people to access material at their own convenience and through their own medium and that can be very very helpful and it can review the cost one thing to bear in mind that blended learning and learning through online methods has a relatively starter cost in the terms that the preparation of online teaching the preparation of online material can be much greater than the face-to-face but obviously once it's been created the resources are there and therefore the role that time is considerably lower and so over obviously those of you who are all teachers have been been facing this on a daily basis throughout the last well three or four months with the current teaching practice and so that gives us an opportunity perhaps to now turn to colleague Tendai to talk us through some of the approach about how we actually go about developing and designing material so Tendo Viking if I can turn mine off and hand over to you okay thank you for that this slides okay so when we talk about blended learning I think it's really important that we need to consider what the literature says blended learning is a new online teaching isn't new it's been around for many years and personally I like to read the works of Professor Charles Graham who's published tons of work about blended learning in the United States at both the k-12 center and the higher education sector but there's one definition particular I like to share with you now by horn and Staker when it said that blended learning is the strategic combination of online face-to-face learning with some element of student control over time place path and all pasted and I've highlighted a few keywords here so when we talk about strategic combination this is basically you planning ahead thinking about which lessons during the semester you want to be taught in an online fashion which one do we talk face-to-face and why also in terms of student control we're thinking about allowing the learners to study at their own pace where they want when they want and we'll come to those points again later the presentation now I'm assuming that all of you are experts at in-class teaching so I'm not going to talk about that aspect of blended learning I'm going to focus purely on online teaching for the rest of these slides here in today's presentation and my first comment is that I do not think we should allow technology to lead the way as I said earlier button when covered 19 happened suddenly you found tons of workshops available online tons of webinars available about how to use ooh how to use Microsoft teams how to use Google meets and it was all about technology and people were forgetting about the importance of so yeah so Isabella could you turn off your mic familiy please sorry so could you turn up your mic just because there's a background hiss thank you very much um yes so there was a huge focus on technology and what we can do with apps and people were sending me emails saying that ten by what are the top ten apps I should be using pro teaching online and really the focus shouldn't be so much on the apps but more about what you can do of them when you look at things like zoom and even what we're using here today in terms of blackboards they have similar features they both allow us to teach the students in real time they both have breakout groups where you can divide the lens into groups online so they share similar features what's more important to know is how can we engage the learners in activities that keep them interested in the lesson yeah so I'm going to discuss six research-based approaches towards designing your own blended learning course and it all starts with identifying which lessons you want to be online so let's think now we're in July you know we've got a good couple of months to prepare before September comes in imagine you're teaching a 12-week course in September in week six you've midterm exams in week 12 your final exams and you teach your lessons on Sunday and Wednesday so there are multiple ways you can deliver your blended learning course you can decide that for the first five weeks it's going to be completely 100% online and then after the midterm exams then you go back to traditional face-to-face class room teacher what sound clip you might you may do the opposite of that you may start off the semester completely face-to-face in class and then after midterm exams you may then switch to online classes what I know many people do is split the week so you may have the first class of the week in class and the second lesson is then online personally I like to have the first lesson online and the second class in class and that's because I use a flip classroom boat from I'm combining flipped classroom teaching with blended learning now for some people they may not want to happen fifty to fifty percent slip they may want to have more of the classes at face-to-face and less online so here's an example of a 60/40 split so you have the entire first Rica's in class and then the entire second week is online and then the entire further occurs in class and so on so that's one option or have a chunk so you may have a period of classes spanning a few weeks which are all face to face and then the period where they were on buying and obviously the opposites as possible as well where it's majority online and less face-to-face so these are all different options you can think about I think what's important is you choose an approach which is easy for the students to follow so have some sort of consistency during the semester which is why I personally like to have one lesson online of one lesson face to face and people the students know that's going to be consistent throughout the entire semester but it's entirely up to you the second thing to think about is lesson planning now I know for many of us in academia many bucks professors we don't really plan lessons as such right we know our content we walk into the lecture hall and we deliver you know what we know but when we're teaching an online environment I think it's really important to think about how we can engage the learners in the learning process and so it's less of a lecture and more of an active learning environment and so what I tend to do is use a task-based approach towards teaching so I have several tasks during the the session I think about how much time I want the students to spend on each part of the lesson I then think about the procedures they're going to be doing at each stage of the lesson and this is particularly important when it comes to things like accreditation accreditation agencies want to know okay how are you spending your time in this online environment I then also think about interaction because for me social constructivism is one of the theories I on my teaching founded upon and so I don't want the entire lesson to be me talking at the students I believe students have chances to talk with each other and communicate together and collaborate on activities and tasks so I tried to think about how much time I'm spending talking how much time students are spending studying alone and how much time they're spending working collaboratively in this online environment then I think about the pedagogical approach I'm using each part of the lesson and finally which technology I'm going to use to facilitate that part of the lesson so you see I didn't start off technology that's the last thing I'm thinking about I started thinking about what I'm going to do and what I want the students to do during this period of learning okay the next step is to start preparing your online content now many of you may teach your lessons in real time in a synchronous fashion and that's perfectly fine here we see a screenshot of one of my classes I was teaching last semester and I actually teach blended learning flunked courses on my master's degree here so you can see my students are engaged in the discussion the chats I'd like PowerPoint slides up there and then you can see myself in in the corner I talk to the students and that's perfectly fine however some of our students live in remote parts of the UAE where the Wi-Fi connection isn't particularly good and it's a nightmare to teach those students in real time because they're constantly having connection issues and so what I've found to be more practical is to teach in an asynchronous format so I tend to record videos now okay so I'll record a video a short video about particular topic and then share it with my students in the learning management system and you can really use anything to record with I have my iPhone set up with a tripod on my desk I just talk to it or sometimes I use a more professional camera as well so that's something should consider whether you want to record your own videos at home I mean you can see the background there this is my bedroom curtain I think today you can see behind me my curtains in the living room but that's where you find students are more concerned about you and then what you're teaching and you'll also notice that the screen split 50/50 between me and what would traditionally be slides so I have text there just the students help the students understand what I'm talking about and what's important for them to focus on in the video now another option you have is to actually create animated videos so I've personally been teaching in a blended format since 2014 and when I first began creating videos I wasn't really confident enough to be in front of the camera and so I used to create animated videos using quadrant characters I created this one using a non line software called beyond.com so that's something to consider as well if particularly I know in this region there are some female teachers who may not want to have themselves on camera and so you may want to consider using something like an animated representation of yourself for your instructional videos another option you have is to create screencasting videos and I think that's particularly important for people teaching technical subjects like engineering or mathematics or science etc and there many tools option options available for teaching in the screencast format so something else you to consider and finally something you can do is also embed questions within your videos to make them more interactive one of the challenges we have with this asynchronous approach is you cannot be sure students are actually watching your videos right potentially they can press play they can be switched off maybe they're watching Netflix or something else are not really focusing on your lesson so by embedding questions within the video that forces them to sort pay attention and answer the question before they can move on and complete the video and potentially you can set it up such that they're the answers are then sent to you in the learning management system so here's an example of a software named play posit which you can use for embedded questions whether there's many apps out there available for doing this and what you may also want to consider is combining between these approaches so you may have some lessons which are taught in real time synchronously during the semester some lessons which is taught in an asynchronous fashion some with pre-recorded videos some of the screencasts what all these options there to play with but it's important that you spent some time planning and thinking about how you want the students to be watching these videos okay the next step is to think about designing engaging classroom activities now that's a huge topic and deserves its own presentation itself as I mentioned earlier I believe in social constructivism I also believe heavily and David Kolb's experiential learning cycle and so I believe that students should be hands-on doing tasks whether they're in class or in a virtual context and so here's an example of an activity I gave my students who I said I want you to find out the information about today's lecture and then you're going to presentation and do peer teaching teach to up with the content so it just gets them involved and give them something to do other times they'll get students to create videos this is past semester I had students working groups and they given an hour to do research on a particular topic and then they've had to create a video and they've done that separately each student in their own home they've recorded their own segment of the presentation uploaded it's a cloud and one of them sort combined individual together into one and that was all done within you know 60 to 90 minutes which is great now a key component of teaching online is formative assessment you need to use frequent and constant concept check questions to make sure students are actually following the material the cons in a normal face-to-face context in the classroom if a student has a question they put the hand up Peter I don't understand please help me now when it's an online environment the research shows that students are more likely to drop out if they lose track if they lose focus and there's a number of reasons why this can happen actually when you think about online classroom you may have issues with the audio all right so maybe your microphone isn't particularly R and the students you know can't hear you properly or you may have issues with the visual like maybe your webcam isn't very clear and students lose concentration there or maybe you're teaching at pace which is too fast for some students and they're bit shy and embarrassed to ask you for help so I think using constant unsaid check questions along the way is it could be helpful this is an example here a screenshot of the grade book I use in blackboard ultra and then the final step of this six step process is to think carefully about how you're going to organize your learning management system so you've seen an example of my blackboard page already this is an example of an online course I have who have used to think epic so again thank you to John hench lift or push me I don't think you think of it and that's how I created this course you can see on the left-hand panel it's very clear for students which videos are coming next and what topics are what's being taught and you can embed concept questions into this formative assessment help them understand the content so try to make it easy for students to follow your online learning make it intuitive I know some people send lots of Word documents and PowerPoint slides and students get lost so I think really a virtual learning environment or a learning management system lms can really help your learner's with your blended lethargy so if there's nothing else that you take away from today's webinar I'd say take this away with you in order to teach successfully in the online context need to plan ahead I think for many people when we were forced into teaching online during the Cobra period many people struggled because there was a lack of planning all right they were forced into it and each week they're trying to cope with creating lessons I know many of us academics you know people have children the families and so trying to help the children study online for their classes at the same time it's developing your own classes and teaching them a lot was happening it's been a really difficult time but now we have the entire summer we've got enough time to prepare a plan ahead so I'd recommend following these steps for your blended learning strategy now I know for some people they'll say well this sounds wonderful you know good for you but with my particular group of students it doesn't really work I had a terrible experience teaching online last semester and I don't think this is what I want to do and what I would say is that I think many of us haven't really had the training on how to teach online which is why maybe we're not teaching in the best way that we could do in online environment as we do in the classroom environment if you think about you know after you graduated with a PhD and your first semester of teaching it wasn't really your best practice of teaching right but then over the years you've improved each semester and I find the same thing happens with teaching online as I said earlier my first experience of teaching in a blended format was back in 2014 if I were to show you my approach teaching back then it was awful actually horrendous but each semester I've consistently improved step by step to get to where I am today and so I think if you give it some time give it a year give it two years get the the training that you need to get support from people and I think that you'll really enjoy teaching in a blended learning format now the way we can help you have this we can provide consultation in the sense of online meetings where we can get some guidance about how you can design your digital educator strategy and your approach to blended learning we can actually provide workshops and training we know many universities many schools have a professional development week at the start of the academic year and we're happy to try some training during that period and also for people who really want support throughout the semester and academic year on designing developing implementing evaluating that blended learning strategy we can also help with that as well so please do reach out to us after the webinar okay and I think that's enough talking from me I'm now going to pass it on to the industry experts to share their experience and so we're going to have a virtual roundtable discussion which is I think is a new concept many of the webinars I've seen of the last few have been very one directional the presenter talking to the audience and there's a much interaction and so what we decided to do here is have a roundtable discussion and then after the roundtable discussion that we separate breakout rooms and you can have a Q&A and actually speak to the experts share your experience and get some tips and advice on how you can design your own blended learning courses so I'll now pass it over the chair the roundtable discussion thank you thank you very much and you can hear me okay yes again and we can see the slide of all of our distinguished speakers so thank you very and what I'm going to do is provide a brief introduction for our speakers you'll see seven photos but the top right chris Tufnell and we're going to be joining it to the breakout rooms so I'll be introducing the other six and then they'll each have sort of five or so minutes to to talk through their experiences their ideas and their thoughts about particular themes which I'll introduce and then as Tembo says we'll have an opportunity for for some questions so dr. Sabina Shivani in an affiliation of the University of Cambridge in the UK where she graduated she spent a few years working at the UN University and during that time she's developed blended learning courses for undergraduate students Quist it and she'll be talking dearly about how we design blended learning courses at universities next john history and his affiliation is the franklin coding mid leap he's an award-winning instructional designer from the UK and an internationally recognized leader within the learning and designing community and he's going to be talking about encouraging the topic of resources not courses and the quickly how approaching response reader should function well then we joined by Carl Peters who is the academic director at the Arab international schools at Saudi Arabia he's a vice principal and then now academic director Karl's been leading the adoption of educational technology and savvy schools for many years and he'll share today his birth experience on this looking for Tiki about data driven digital leadership Carl will be followed by Linda Parsons who's an e-learning coordinator of a dear international school and she's delivered a very interesting and present during Tendai my university of preaching person to buy a research seminar in january and she's doing some fascinating developments with educational technology for younger learners and so be sharing the perspective of that aspect of teaching today in terms of digital education within the k-12 sector Lisa Brashear is a lecturer in mathematics at the higher colleges of Technology and we think that she's very well possibly the most experienced member of the panel today she's taught online whilst working in Arizona in the United States and she's currently working with Tendai on a research project about online learning and online teaching and she'll be talking to us today about teaching mathematics and law online and the associated challenges and opportunities following will be Pamela Johnson who's a teacher training specialist with Pearson and ten those already mentioned Pamela's Association and Pamela's background is in English language teaching but she's been providing professional development training to teachers for many years she's a well-known leader of educational technology in the UAE and we'll be talking about the critical topic of professional development and online assessment which is a problem and a challenge for all of us so um I will mute my microphone I've already turned my camera so that we can have the speakers on as it's visible so doctors debate if I could just hand over to you please and we very much look forward to your your thoughts and experiences please good afternoon everyone thank you for having me can you all hear me okay yes we can yes we can um well from my experience of blended learning and especially through working with people from face institutions to help them blend their own courses I would like today three things about blended learning I'd first like to say that any parts can be blended for any City not University course and accredited or non-credit of course in any discipline can potentially be transformed into a blended so there are some people believe that not all courses are suited for online delivery that there may be some subjects in some areas of study that can't be taught in a blended format so for example I've had colleagues approach me and say things like well you can't really teach calculus online or I've had colleagues from the School of Medicine tell me they can't really teach medicine format you're gonna have to be there with the students and show them things face to face but as we know when as the research shows that's not true blending of course is simply identifying the components or the content of a course the materials that is most suited for online delivery and then transforming your course based on that and there are all these aspects of any course regardless of the discipline that can be very well suited for online delivery so how much of your course is delivered online and how much of it is delivered face-to-face can vary radio from course to course and this depends on a number of factors like for example the the type of course whether it's a general education course or if it's a more specialized course also depends on the level of its postgraduate course we close to an underwear do another course or a lower-level course it could depend on discipline it could depend on your students needs and abilities as well as your own abilities and your confidence in teaching in a blintz way so while the percentage of how much of course can presented online versus face-to-face instruction can vary from course to course essentially any course can be blended and blended successfully the second thing I'd like to say not only get any points be blended but anyone can blend the course so anyone can become skilled to create a great a blended course so you don't have to have specific background to you know background in educational technology or have prior experience and creating online content particularly techno-savvy I mean I don't consider myself very high tech there's a lot of Technology out there some of it might be available to you through your institutions there's a lot of resources and tools available and I get from you know people I know who lived through the transformation process of blending their courses that and these are people who are initially intimidated by the technology was that you know they were pleasantly surprised with not easy it was with other skills and to get the hang of the new technology they were working with so if you consider yourself low-tech it's not an issue at all as long as you have a desire to learn the skills can be picked up pretty quickly so the third thing I'd like to say while any course can be blank and anyone can lift of course I do want to highlight the fact that witchdoctor Tendai and dr. Chris already mentioned it does take quite a bit of time to set up in the beginning so it's really hard to start moving it requires thought and on planning you know there's many things to consider many options you can choose from and dr. tendyne individual leading to through the six step process so we need to identify how much of your course you want online you need to think about the lesson plans about the method of delivery or the delivery whether you want to do it real-time screencasting for yourself you want to think about what teaching methodology at a good if you love privilege and all of this will really depend on the factors I mentioned just a little while ago and so although this takes a bit of time but the great thing is if you start when you set things up right early on and in before you actually pilot on and start teaching the course in a blended format it can make your life as an academic much easier later on thank you very much for that and so we can blend anything we can tailor it according to content and but we must be mindful that it doesn't actually take a fair amount of time so that's a very very helpful takeaway message for all of us that are concerned about what level we can actually develop how John we can maybe turn to you then to tell us a little bit more about the resources not courses issues and how that how that links thank you should be I think your own sure thing can you see me okay wonderful thank you very much for having mean clearly within this it's a great pleasure to be among you today now for me I really have a focus from having a look at academia I was part of the team for instructional design at United Arab Emirates but also have a great experience with regard to organizations so globally but the thing that is really uniform across all of these is we are fallible as human beings no matter who we are what we learn we forget it's something that we do and now we are in an age where by we are now talking about such things as zoom fatigue which was not really a word that was discussed a few months ago we now really need to understand how do we transform our learning so we create it as blended in order to really meet the needs of our learners so thinking about such things as fatigue breaking down our learning into more manageable chunks but one thing to really think about is how do we provide information as refreshers to our learners without the need to create a separate course so resources not courses the fact is that we forget like I said but when we're actually doing things as a learning process think about it from learners perspective whilst they are listening they're also comprehending making notes trying to make sense of these but then at the same time they are listening to you maybe they're looking at something on the board comprehending making notes this is a cycle that keeps on happening and things amidst our memory plays tricks on us so what happens if three months down the line they need the information from that that they missed this is whereby technologies really come into its own especially during this point and within an organization you could be using collaborate you can be using blackboard you could be using MS teams in order to really utilize different modalities to provide people with resources now resources are quick pieces of information that give an answer think Google think YouTube you don't go on YouTube to find the Nantz of something and watch for an hour you want something quick something easy think about the accessibility the reason that you choose uber over going for a taxi is because it's here it's now it gives you what you want when you need it so think about where you place your resources think about what resources you can curate but also what can you curate so think about who is going to create these could it be yourself could it be a two-minute video that gives a piece of information that answers an FAQ but also with the resources be open to understanding what your learner's need have forums have surveys give your people what they need but also put it in a place where they are if they utilize an MS teams you can utilize streams on ms teams in order to provide bite-sized chunks of information done via video so that people can go to them when they need them so for resources not courses short short piece of information it's very easy to find thank you fantastic thank you that is really helpful and it puts the learner at the front of where we should be designing material so thank you very much that's incredibly incredibly helpful can I now turn to Carl to talk a little bit about the data driven digital leadership please and Carl thank you very much John thank you so you can you hear me you're glad to see me I look for you to see me no great so yeah I wanted to do I'm just you know make a few points from the perspective of our school because as school leaders we have to make the decisions to certain strategies to use from the first step we have to be honest with ourselves but where we are because we always fought in schools that we were doing English to learn from a long time ago from over half a decade ago and even in my own schools when we're observing our lessons one of the focuses that we're focusing on is the digital learning environment and we learnt you know a few years ago the digital learning isn't just having an interactive whiteboard in there in the room it's more than nights students collaborating I wasn't Wendy Lee it was just icing on the back especially in my opinion for the last decade when we do any form of digital learning it's not a core part of the course plug this icing anything and what that means is when we come to look at new situations you have to be careful of how we can over generalize our learnings from what we've had before so going into phobic for example we discovered that we know more than we thought we did for example before COBIT happens that we were told to shut schools tomorrow and to plan for online learning in two days time before that we thought that we had no experience with online learning but then lo and behold we discovered that actually many of our teachers had been teaching online for for example students who were prepared for a GCSE exams what an oblate sound so there was some experience earlier so the potential that we had in our team but like I say and it's important to to take what we learned there and not only generalize it again wasn't under the nettle ester when small toast we had a day or perhaps two days to come up with a strategy of how we're going to teach our students online and our main choice or at least in my school anyway for my team our main focus when you're selecting for example our online tool know doctor turned down mentioned I'm not focusing on the tool but as a as a leadership team in the church once it has been made which tool do you use it as soon as it teaches mckissick blackboard our focus at that time for this pandemic time it's a crisis was which tool teachers implement immediately students I wasn't too concerned about students will will get to know until you give them especially young learners they'll get to know it but for teachers of different backgrounds different levels of experience it can take time to learn the tool so that was our focus so you know we had a number of assessments for how well that was going observations parental feedback and student feedback to hear observations from the team themselves interrelated ourselves as leaders and of course that gives us some data of how well our approach wants during crisis time and gives us some information to have to plan for the next steps but we have to consider that those next steps that I'm already completely different context and not completely the context there are some parallels had to be careful with how we transfer those parallels to the new context of course like I said before coded we didn't have blended language learning at all as icing on the cake kovat it became the cake it was all online learning so not blended at all now we're going to a new era for schools where the likelihood is that we are going to be going for a blended learning approach and your weed's be surprised you can be surprised of where best practice can come from I recall when we were looking at who was actually implementing a blended learning approach and who was at implementing a flipped learning approach before the coded measures came you will be surprised it was in our PT physical education whereas previously no one expected really physical education to be the ones to drive digital learning but they were actually ones that were taking a flipped learning approach into that in a sense that prior to the lesson students were learning about the particular skill that they were well I seen it fastly on the pitch school American english-speaking colleagues but as you call it in Britain football they'll be learning about dribbling online before they come into the classroom implementing it on the field in the class to keep in a sense and then after following up with some activities online again at the end of the session so alone using that data of course we can borrow some best practices from our new teachers and share it with our English science maths teachers as well another point I wanted to just highlight on with the with that Newton data is that we had a very strong a very strong use of data in terms of monitoring effects of our training programs because the new paradigm of everything being online to inchoate meant that we had to develop approaches very quickly do training in different ways peer observations that are online mental observations that are online workshops that are online and how do you measure the impact of that so we also developed a observation tool for use online and that gives us a nice insight of where we when we did the peer observation what was its impact by looking at the results of observations we all data which can be used to feed how you decide which approach you tactical so if I pretend I make sure those exposures using date data to decide which their approaches work for you or working your context and working the future context is to come thank you that's fantastic and it will be a very very important issue that we need to be reflective because as you said there's a lot of practice that was going on repurposed including we're going to be going on and mentioned and put in places where we can monitor for teacher capability training and development along the way because it's important I mean if we miss this and just go back would have lost the chance to be reflective about pedagogy in teaching learning something it's a thing that's a very vital vital issue thank you very much could we turn now to Linda please to carry on the debate but now perhaps with more of the focus obviously on the younger group of students thank you thank you very much Tom I hope you can hear me okay my name is Linda Parsons and I feel like I'm probably the least qualified person here all ours teacher but my background is science and I'm a science teacher with a special ism in biology however we we also well I also am the digital lead and our school so my school is a k-12 school but I specialized in the secondary area and even before coded we had we had quite a big push on we like current establishing what our digital strategy was and this was all encompassing this was with teacher CPD with hardware with student kind of hardware and what they are expected to bring in as their devices for learning with digital citizenship how they should act online and finally with what you know it's common core ethic so like you know what platform do we want to focus on and you know have why you want to focus on it the reason why I'm gonna start right at the beginning about our year was because we found that of course like every other like school in the world at the moment you know there's there's such a big push for digital educating like online education there's such a big push for like no EdTech visit the classroom but as Carl has all quarters had just because you have a digital whiteboard in your classroom just because your child is holding iPad does not mean then you are teaching online that does not mean that they are learning you know online and we kind of had a big push on the skills like we focused on not so much like you know they are now going to be using Sauk Reserve or they n are going to be using teams it was more they are using teams for this skill of communication and organization so we very much focused our our students learning based on the skills who wanted to teach them the few skills who wanted to teach them in order to prepare them for further education because that is essentially the vision of our whole school would like to to empower the learners in order to learn light in order to take those skills to learn lifelong so halfway through the year I did the talk with 10.10 day on about you know the five skills that we we teach our students being digital organization like cloud based organization how we how we teach our students how we teach our teachers to organize themselves online I'm sure you like me have a Google cloud somewhere or cloud that's full of 30 billion photos which you never look at again and that's what we try to teach our children like it's a skill of like okay well you're taking this photo do you know where to put it do you know where to put it that's most effective to your learning if you're taking a photo of the teachers whiteboard you've just made that physical teaching now online so do you know how to help how to blend that learning yourself the skill of effective collaboration is also something that's so important actually something that is our second skill that we that we teach implicitly in every class you know because we teach it in physical classrooms we always want our children to learn you know with other learners it helped them learn it reinforces skills and so on the art of doing that what the science of doing that I guess online is it's just as important to doing it if not more so than doing it physically because it's the feeling of isolation that the students might get like if they're teaching one if you're teaching the 100 percent online of there is a blender and they might feel isolated and unable to speak out to the teacher they don't want to draw attention to themselves in order to like you know make that skill of collaboration and make it okay and make the make the digital classroom safe space for them to act questions he's the faster that relationship and faster those those kinds of skills into you know whatever on my material that you may give them whether synchronous or asynchronous a good way that we have done this is by making breakout rooms we use teams that I know that you can do that didn't Microsoft their Google classrooms and awesome and blackboard which we're going to be doing later so so things like breakout rooms are so important for the children to have like a space where they don't have to talk and shout out in the whole class but like it's it's somewhere the way they can go also things like live live collaborator documents how do they help how do they write like within a live document without writing over someone else's weren't having that skill of like you know so they can they can collaborate and live document and it can be a a true collaboration project so application of things like future skills in the house communicate laughs sorry hex are enhance communication is all about these crew civitate our laughing now I would like to take this opportunity now to say yeah we have done online learning now like just like everyone else from term three all the sudden all the way up to now the end of our year is tomorrow and we have found that the way that the students communicate now and the things that they found out online is now a lot more formal and that formalization like you know their their ability to to judge themselves now and like I like say okay but if I was talking to a teacher in real life I was lose this kind of formal speak at the beginning of online learning we found it was really important to underline that they had to do that as well online because they slipped back on to colloquialisms onto things because they found that online online talking was done really informally in their own lives so therefore when they talked online in the classrooms it became really more so we had to kind of implicitly teach every single subject what do we all I what kind of standards do we expect of them a fine digital citizenship and it goes into all being as well and this is for the teachers and for the students the amount of time that you spend online doing and tasks is it's huge in this tub and I'm going to be so in the years to come if we do it properly the amount of time we have a line and dislike the whole concept of by keeping yourself well online it could be made more effective for each subject if there were sections or if there are tasks that they can be doing offline and somewhere else and then evidencing their work by taking photos you please our office learns by using Flint grid and wit by using you know just just plain videos and this may then filter into how teachers will then start assessing the students in like a more effective way with that happen out to that is teacher workload and teach about out making on my lessons being online all the time live streaming and especially pre recording videos we found very quick takes up so much of your time I used to say to my my teachers because they were very kind of they don't like to see their faces online I don't I just hear their voices online and stuff and they have various that kind of embarrassment I guess it's showing it because you suddenly become very aware that everyone's looking at every single ass it's not the same as being live just and he say to them like please go online and please do it as soon as possible if you want to do a lecture style them because by doing a pre-recorded message that's four minutes around about editing time per minute of life which can be you yeah that schools need to be thinking about that so that's what I've been doing for the last year that's been helpful to two people movie thank you I mean it raises some some very I suppose a fundamentally should be thinking about which is the ethics and code of conduct of online participation so getting people used to the language that's used the format the means of instruction because it's not simply replacing it's learning a new way of doing things and I mean you you for appointed John animated about where Ukraine Tyrael and how people access it and really making sure that the learner is at the center of all of our material so I think that's very very useful and thank you very indeed can we turn now to Chile step please it's all ready yep so thank you thank you very much all right hi everyone can you hear me and can you see my screen all right so there we go so good afternoon how's everyone doing by the way because we've been here for an hour and I'm assuming your attention span is decreasing right anyway I'm I'm the industry experts in teaching mathematics online so my name is Lisa Brashear and here's some background information on me but today I'm going to focus and share my experiences of teaching mathematics online so I've really done it all from face-to-face to completely online and everything everything in between so yeah I guess that's why dr. Tendai said that I'm here with the most experienced I think to successfully teach online it's all about having the right technology for instance for me it's important to be able to share my screen and to have a touchscreen teaching mathematics without having a touchscreen seems really difficult in the mean time I'm tracking the chats on my second screen right here there we go yeah so I see your activity happening on the screen next to me then I've got the presentation here on the screen that I'm sharing with you and then obviously I'm being able to write on the screen just makes it easy easier excuse me and to help my students understand mathematics better I used mathematics educational technology like geogebra and Texas Instruments like photo math and then games like my hoods and such of course a blackboard learn collaborate see my mylabsplus from Peterson and then Alex and connect from Rahil helps enable to assign work to students and then that goes right into the accountability so when I realize online lessons I always check in with students I checked a work I assign them work while they are online and then I check up on them to see you know are you guys actually doing the work at rate are you finishing questions online I also do breakout sessions and give them aberration or group tasks and then I check in with them in their specific groups but then I also let them present something at the end so that they know it's not just something that they do with a group of four and a know they have to present work at the end and then of course for the offline sessions I use deadlines and I'm strict with the deadlines so there's nothing they can do once they've passed the deadline didn't know there's nothing I am i down the system you know I can't reopen assignments anymore for you sorry you had enough time kind of thing and then of course their grades and their attendance depends to the level of their participation and then educational videos I think is really important in this teaching mathematics online I've been making my own videos since 2004 to help design online curriculum and this is a picture of me and my late grandfather who inspired me with his video productions and bless his soul I added his passion for creating videos so thank you OVA right now there are 16 campuses in the UAE that watch my videos and I use Camtasia mostly to make my videos they are on YouTube as well but I kind of enlist them you know to make them just only for my students and we embed them in bblearn right now that's the system that we're using right now but see the assessments I think a lot of us are struggling with assessments right assessments in blended learning what does that look like we right now are using online facial recognition software through bblearn and it seems to be working really well at first our female students were not so happy with the fact that they had to show their face so then they have to put their abaya on so you know we needed to kind of push them in that direction like sorry but you have to have your camera on and then what I prefer for blended learning what I prefer is obviously after covered 19 hopefully we can have testing centers again at the University of Phoenix and central Arizona College the testing centers were very successful so we give the students a time frame of you know you have one week to complete this assignment or this this time and then they schedule an appointment at the testing center and take it there yeah so the testing that I really enjoyed having a testing center so I didn't have to worry about watching their videos of their tests anyway that's pretty much it for me I hope to see you in the Q&A Ling thank you very much the map that demonstrates that is a very real need to have whatever platform and that it is appropriate to their learning subject at hand and the tourism professor level interactivity so thank you very much and those who will use a lot more questions in the Q&A so a little permanent and finally thanks and I'm going to cut this a little short because I know that we're all really eager to go into our breakout rooms but I'll share with you their two most important lessons I've learned over the past several months and the first is that traditional approaches to professional development have not served us well they have been inadequate and they failed to prepare us for the challenges today and possibly ahead and the second is that in the process of integrating technology into the educational experience most teachers need to improve their assessment skills in both traditional assessments and in more project oriented assessments so let me go back to that professional development point I was going to make so in my work as a consultant I work with teachers in both k12 and in universities and I've seen that teachers at institutions that had robust professional development programs in place fared much better than those that did not so the teachers add institutions with strong PD programs already knew how to use their learning management system they already knew how to create a game or a quiz they already knew how to create an assignment and they already knew at least most of the time how to create a project and assess it and institutions that had a more ad hoc approach to professional development we're in this situation in March where it was like quick what what's going to be our learning management hurry how are we going to use or how are we going to train our teachers how to use the learning management system and so that was there were lots of institutions that were essentially starting from zero and so of course that's that's not really want to be so in terms of what type of learning would a robust professional development program include well I think today teachers need to learn more about instructional design and assessment and so I hope that this view from around the region has been helpful and informative for you and thank you so much for having me thank you very much and I think you've really hit on a critical issue which you know it's a big car was talking about being on it and if I could actually and we look and reflect about our teaching practice our push to assessment approach to constructing material design technology doesn't answer the problems it doesn't solve the problems it often highlights those that were pre-existing I think this is a real opportunity for the education sector at all ages to really think deeply about what's important and put the learner at the center think about learning think about teacher needs well-being development training and really made the educational sector a lot stronger so thank you very much Pamela and thank you to all of us because that was a fantastic session um I'll hand over to Ken by now perhaps just to take us through to her the next steps but thank you very much in detail group thank you very much Chris and thank you to all of the speakers that was incredibly insightful I learned so much during these sessions and I'm sure so the attendees now the webinar isn't completely over we're now going to go to the breakout rooms for a Q&A so we're going to be in small groups please for those who've been dependence the audience please feel free to introduce yourself share your experiences of teaching online and your thoughts and your excitements and what you're thinking about online learning and blended learning moving forward if you have any concerns and challenges and questions for us please pose them and we hope there'll be some lively discussions there let's try to limit the time though to say 25 20 min 25 minutes so we're not going to late to be favorable family and show you I think to this evening so if thank you very much again really enjoyed the webinar thank you so much the speakers thank you dr. Chris help me with this and someone behind the scenes who you may not be aware of Danielle thank you very much Danielle helping making this is - so why for now happened or see you soon

Channel: Centre for Research in Digital Education

Views: 1,861

Rating: 5 out of 5

Keywords: Digital Education, Blended Learning, Centre for Research in Digital Education

Id: sk5cilvWbYQ

Length: 73min 47sec (4427 seconds)

Published: Thu Jul 02 2020