For May, June and July, I was/am both taking online courses/workshops on teaching using technology (4 in total) and facilitating 2 online workshops.

I took an online MOOC on Indigenous Perspectives that was quite old-fashioned in its approach. It had recorded video lectures with limited inclusion of pictures or text, so it made a great podcast listening experience. At the end of each of the sections was a downloadable reading on the topic (and the closed caption was also copying) as well as a short quiz for checking your understanding. Not my favourite format, but the material was interesting and even thought-provoking at times. I wished it had a little more variety than one person lecturing or a guest speaker being interviewed.

My second course was a workshop facilitated by two leaders from the International Baccalaureate. It was on facilitating IB’s online workshops, which are already set up with an informational slideshow presentation and required learning engagements. As a facilitator, you are allowed to customize somewhat within the Moodle platform, but they want evidence of learning basically through forums. They are encouraging the use of Padlet, FlipGrid, Bubble, MindMeister, VoiceThread and Google Docs. Our workshop also encouraged us to branch out to other apps as we saw fit, but it was interesting to note that the experienced online educators, when we shadowed them, were mostly only making use of the old-fashioned forums. The use of Big Blue Button (a video meeting tool, BBB) was just being released as part of the platform, so June/July participants have access to it but since their workshops started earlier in May, our workshops appeared to be the first ones with access to BBB.

My two university courses are run by an extremely experienced online educator and a less experienced online educator. They are using Slack (communication tool), WordPress (website tool), Zoom (video conferencing), Google Docs, Calendly (appointment tool) and we also have access to BlueJeans to meet in pairs or pods. They are having online drop-in office hours and offering to meet one-on-one. Both are being amazingly available even though they are balancing other university duties as well as working from the midst of their families (and the issues all that entails). This really pointed out the lack of instructor availability in my other two courses, so there was limited ability to clarify difficulties.

I have been working on my Google Trainer certification so I provided a workshop for an elementary school on the use of Google Classroom. Some of the participants had never heard of the program although they were in a Google for Education school and some had used it for a couple of years, so I set up a classroom with a little over 20 assignments that went from very basic to how to teach yourself new things. Teachers had two hours to interact with the materials while I sat in a Google Meet. Some needed some help just starting up their classroom and in most cases, my instructions were clear enough that teachers could start using their room. I was busy clarifying during the two hours and spent another few hours in the evening responding to all my assignments.

My other online offering is an IB Mathematics workshop for teachers just starting to teach in the programme. I gave them all my email and my phone number although they can also contact me through the moodle platform (which has a 15 minute delay in sending emails). I provided an email with some tech tutorials before they started and those tutorials are also linked in the platform. All the forums they are to contribute to have been started and some useful tech options have been included. I have had participants email me, text me, phone me, WhatsApp me and contact me through the platform, with some of these contacts trying to arrange a face-to-face in the BBB room. I had hoped to have some teaching time in the BBB, but trying to organize a meeting with 24 people 2, 3, 8, 9, 14 and 15 hours ahead of you is extremely difficult. Instead I have tried daily office hours, spread out at different times each day according to what looked good based on a Doodle poll. I reach out to the group weekly, every couple of days to individuals who are posting, and weekly to individuals who are not actively completing learning engagements. Between the office hours and private meetings, I have met half of the participants in the video room and the course is 3/4 done.

What do I see while experiencing online learning as a student and a teacher simultaneously.

  • instructors are struggling with the new technologies even in courses that have always been online as those courses are integrating even more interactive tools.
  • students/teachers are struggling to learn all the new interactive tools and often just want to have an old-fashioned talk through of what they need to learn and/or how to use the technology.
  • students want to have variety without being overwhelmed and everyone’s level of overwhelmed is different, so options are important.
  • students want community, but they want it immediate, so if the instructor does not reach out and try build that community, it won’t happen.

Photo by Marci Angeles on Unsplash

SO, what does burning the candle at both ends show me? KEYs for success are:

  • Instructor availability for some face-to-face instruction
  • Clear written instructions
  • A reasonable amount of tech with tutorials available
  • Consistent reaching out to individual students personally will make it easier for them to reach out to you when they need it, even if they are not reaching out to each other. The instructor has to be the starter.

Looking at these requirements, I am worried about instructor burnout as our teachers go online this fall without proper support in many cases.