Education 2.0 & 3.0

Try the 5P approach. This is a set of five strategies that will help you create a positive and engaging learning environment for your online students.  

Resources, strategies, tactics, tools and tips to support flexible subject delivery

I recently downloaded What Teacher Educators Should Have Learned From 2020. This is an open edited book, freely downloadable from the AACE site, for teachers of teachers whose lives were disrupted …

Offered by UNSW Sydney (The University of New South Wales). Are you an educator? Have you ever wanted to understand more about how to design ... Enroll for free.

"My classes and students started to run together, and I kept looking at the clock. That doesn’t happen to me anymore since I have added projects-based learning to the curriculum."

When hundreds of spring and summer undergraduate courses were abruptly moved from onsite to online delivery in the wake of COVID-19, several faculty and students nationwide reacted with panic and uncertainty. Currently, instructors are busy preparing for the 2020-2021 academic year where several students will continue taking courses online. At my institution, fall academic courses will be primarily virtual (along with several others across the nation), with some in-person and hybrid instruction for performance-based, clinical, and laboratory courses, and some students living on campus.

"Many students look at online learning courses as a respite from the rigors of brick-and-mortar learning, but that’s only true if educators and administrators choose not to maximize the digital learning environment to challenge their student populace.  While digital learning has its limitations and flaws, it can also be used as a powerful tool to stimulate critical thinking in students. In fact, there are plenty of ways to induce such propensities for critical thought without a student even being aware of it!"

10 Simple Tips For Virtual Teaching Beginners

contributed by Pippa Davies, Director Learning Commons at Heritage Christian Online School

In response to the spread of COVID-19 throughout the U.S. and Canada, governors and legislatures in 48 states and every U.S. and Canadian territory/province have called for the closure of over 124,000 public schools (according to the National Conference of State Legislatures).

As a result, many educators have shifted to online classes to support the learning needs of their students. While some teachers have experience with integrating technology into their lesson plans, for many other educators this is completely new territory. 

Amid talk of pandemics and economics, it may seem like a comparatively minor discussion to have: the difference between remote learning and online learning. 

But, with COVID-19 forcing schools around the nation to move their classrooms online and more and more scrutiny leveled at the sustainability of doing so, it’s a conversation that education experts increasingly insist should happen. Making the distinction, some say, could shape the future of online learning for years to come. 

A growing number of colleges and universities are announcing the cancellation of face-to-face teaching for what remains of the academic year, and continuing instead through online teaching. Given the technology available, this need not be especially problematic. But in practice, it is, and in many cases means the 2020 academic year is lost.

Things didn’t have to end like this: Learning online is not impossible, but will be difficult unless we start looking at things differently. Why is it a problem for teaching to continue through the internet? 

The IDEAS (Inclusion, Design, Engagement, Evaluation, Assessment, and Support) Framework for online teaching and learning highlights best practices fo

MCSHE SoTEL Showcase1 best case examples of Technology Enhanced Learning from the University of Melbourne academic community, with invited presenter Gavin Buskes.

“Online teaching is the joy, fun, and magic of bringing teaching and learning into the online environment,” Karen Costa tweeted last Tuesday, Januar

For online learning to be successful and happy, participants need to be supported through a structured developmental process. The five-stage-model provides a framework or scaffold for a structured and paced programme of e-tivities.

​The five-stage-model offers essential support and development to participants at each stage as they build up expertise in learning online.

First year students at UK universities will be imminently beginning some kind of an on-campus experience this year. It will be unlike anything they, or staff working in HEI,s have ever experienced.

Many anticipate that we may have only a month or so to help them bed in before a second wave causes furthers local or national lockdowns, so it’s imperative we get this first engagement right. I propose there are five areas we have to work on immediately to help freshers feel they have become part of our learning communities, before reversion to online learning becomes highly likely. If all of us Cassandras are wrong (and we must hope so!), this is still good practice for welcoming students whose 2020 pre-HE learning experiences are likely to have been grim.

This blog was kindly contributed by Dr David LeFevre, Director of the EdTech Lab at Imperial College and the founder of higher education platform company Insendi, part of Study Group.

Last month a subtle warning shot was shot across the bows of universities still struggling to manage the disruption caused by Covid-19. When the Minister responsible for higher education announced that UK students would be charged full tuition fees for online study, she added a caveat – the assumption of quality. If students ‘feel that the quality isn’t there’ she said, ‘there are processes that they can follow’ to seek redress’.

The Covid-19 pandemic has dramatically upended traditional schooling and made remote learning the “new normal.” Teachers are scrambling to offer some form of continuing education using virtual technologies, with the recognition that traditional approaches to curriculum, instruction, assessment, and grading must be altered. While it might be more expedient to present online lessons, electronic worksheets, and resource packets, we propose that the learn-at-home circumstance offers an opportunity to present students with more engaging and meaningful learning experiences. More specifically, we recommend providing students with assignments and tasks that challenge them to find information from various sources, critically appraise what they find, and use what they learn to address interesting issues and genuine problems.

Dr. Mark Bullen demystifies instructional design by providing a simple and easy to understand explanation of the concept. His key point is that instructional design is all about crafting learning objectives at a level appropriate for the knowledge and skills that are being developed, then

As schools settle into more sustained use of online learning tools, attention needs to be paid to teachers’ development and resource needs as well as their students’, writes Patrick Roach

It now seems like a lifetime ago that the majority of children and young people’s learning took place at school. The speed and scale of the Coronavirus crisis meant that virtually overnight living rooms, kitchens, sheds and bedrooms have been repurposed as places of both learning and teaching.

For the majority of schools this has meant a sudden and abrupt shift to delivering the majority of learning online. For some schools this will have been easier than others.