Suggestions for moving your teaching online

The following suggestions aim to support the move from face-to-face to online and distance learning:

Keep it simple
Focus on engaging your students in just one or two activities each week per module
Use the many asynchronous tools available in Canvas
Use resource-based strategies
Consider using synchronous activities to promote peer engagement
Be clear about what you expect your students to do
Ensure you are inclusive

Keep things simple

It is likely that moving to online teaching will involve you using new technological approaches. Becoming familiar with technologies can be challenging for any of us. It is recommended that you choose just one or two tools for engaging students and be consistent from week to week.

Anglia Learning and Teaching is providing regular webinars on learning technologies (including Teams Meeting, Canvas New Quizzes, Office 365 in Canvas, Poll Everywhere) for you to book onto. View here (external link).

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Focus on engaging your students in just one or two activities each week per module

In common with face-to-face learning, online learning activities should be designed as far as is possible to challenge your students to engage in ways that support them to meet their intended learning outcomes. However, online activities are likely to take longer than face-to-face activities, so allow them more time.

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Use the many asynchronous tools available in Canvas

Canvas’ asynchronous tools include online discussions, quizzes and student editable Pages. In Canvas group spaces, students can also share and edit documents (shared under Files).

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Use resource-based strategies

You can engage your students with the resources you already have, or to which you can provide access (e.g. through the Library). Resources, such as journal articles, can be used as the basis of a challenge intended to help students evaluate the knowledge they contain as they use them. Formative quizzes can be devised, and then discussed, to support this. Discussions, Pages or online conferencing using webinar technology (MS Teams) can then be scheduled for tutor and peer interaction.

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Use real-time activities to promote peer engagement

Consider using synchronous or 'real-time' online activities like webinars (see the section in Ways of Teaching Online on Interactive Webinars). You will need to decide how important it is for all your students to be online together at the same time and how else they can engage if this is not possible. One way is to record your MS Teams meetings so they can be shared via Streams, ARU's MyPlayer and linked to/embedded in Canvas for access later.

The main tools used for synchronous learning are:

Text chat in Canvas
Text, audio and video conferencing features in webinar tools such as MS Teams.
Microsoft (MS) Office 365 applications including Word, Excel and Powerpoint also allow for real-time collaborative editing. Canvas Collaboration now enables students to co-edit a MS document in real-time or asynchronously. They can also collaborate on a MS document in their module Teams space. The advantage of the latter is that the document in Teams can be templated with instructions and guidance by the tutor.

Students can learn by using familiar Office 365 applications by editing files together in response to a challenge. For example, you could involve them in researching information or applying what they already know to a problem you set. They will need to set up and share their working file with each other. Your Faculty Learning Technologist can advise further on doing this.

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Be very clear about what you expect your students to do

Because students are remote, instructions and guidance have to be very clear - students will not have the same opportunity to clarify what you mean as in a face-to-face context and you are less likely to spot any confusion.

Also, provide opportunities for your students to check what your instructions and guidance mean when necessary. Consider sharing any answers you give with all students, including those who may not want to admit they don’t understand something. You can do this by encouraging students to ask questions in a Discussion and/or creating an FAQ area.

Generally, online activities tend to require more structured explanations than when face-to-face. For example, be clear about the purpose of the tasks you set your students and how it supports them to achieve the learning outcomes. Explain what the task involves step by step and, if the activity produces data, how you expect students to record and share those data or findings. Be clear about expected timings of each phase of an activity – this will give your students confidence that they are doing the right thing.

Ask someone else to proofread any guidance and instructions you produce if possible – what is clear to you, may not be clear to others.

Use Announcements in Canvas to signpost activities. Communicate what happens when and where e.g. the next webinar takes place on Monday, 30 March 2020, 12-12:50 in Teams Meeting. Please access Teams using this link 10 minutes before the webinar starts. The instructions on how to access and use a Teams meeting can be found here.

Agree a communication approach across your course team so students are clear about where announcements are being made and to avoid scheduling synchronous sessions in the same timeslot and overloading students.

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Ensure you are inclusive

Please ensure all your resources and activities are accessible. For further information see Anglia Learning & Teaching’s Inclusive Learning and Teaching guidance.

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