ELearning is new for so many of us, and it won’t be easy navigating this new way of facilitating our student’s education. Many classrooms have been forced to go digital, and while there are many elements of this that may be familiar or exciting, there are also many unknowns.
If you’re like many of us educators, you’re just getting started with eLearning and forced to quickly adapt to the circumstances as part of our response to the coronavirus. Over 100,000 schools across America have closed, keeping millions of students of all age levels out of the classroom.
Let’s be clear on one thing: eLearning cannot replace the incredible job our educators do on a daily basis in their classrooms, live and in-person with their students. There are a thousand tiny components in our interactions with students that make their education experience what it is. ELearning can never perfectly replicate these elements.
But it is now our job to make the most of the circumstances and do our part to continue facilitating our students’ education in the best possible way. So how do we make this work?
Here are 20 tips for the many of us who are just getting acquainted with eLearning. (If you have more advice, or if you have any resources that could be linked in this post, please share!)
Communicate clearly and consistently.
There are many factors to our in-person communication that we’ve refined, from our tone to our facial expressions to our reading of students’ responses. These elements are difficult to replicate online, and it is critical that you put a great deal of thought and detail into your communications with your students.
Be direct with your instructions and expectations. Have a single, consistent way of sharing information with them (it will get frustrating if they have to check their email one day, read the discussion board the next, and watch your video the day after).
Students will be looking for their assignments and expectations. Help them out by making what you’re sharing easy to find and easy to understand.
Now is not the time to learn new tricks…
Stick with the tools and methods you and your students know. This is especially important as we start out. The priority is to get our bearings and establish a new norm; it’s not time to blow the lid off the school and come at students with apps, tools, and activities they’ve never seen before.
Also, don’t feel like you have to put the pressure on yourself to become a teacher you’re not. You do not suddenly have to master all the bells and whistles the abundance of tech applications offer. With so many changes taking place around us, it’s okay to start eLearning from a place of comfort and familiarity.
…But if you want to, you have time to experiment.
Many of us may find some time on our hands to begin learning more about tools or methods. While you still focus on keeping eLearning simple, especially at first, it is definitely okay to take advantage of the circumstances right now and dabble with something new. Just make sure it is true to who you are, fits your course’s curriculum and standards, and is accessible for your students.
Think about the long term, too. Are there new apps, tools, or methods you could develop now that could serve your students well in the bigger picture of your pedagogy? How can you take any new skills you develop back to school with you to impact the day-to-day classroom experience students will have?
Make tasks accessible and reasonable.
When we’re side-by-side with students in the classroom it is far easier to troubleshoot, explain, clarify, and demonstrate. These aren’t impossible with distance learning, but it does take extra caution to make sure our tasks and students’ abilities are aligned. Error on the conservative side when it comes to expectations; be reasonable with what you’re requiring of your students in terms of time and challenge.
Not everyone’s understanding, support, and home circumstance is identical, so it isn’t wise to expect a huge amount of time devoted to your academics tasks, live student attendance through online class meetings, or success with tasks designed to be especially challenging. Be mindful of the context we’re living in.
Start off with a familiar task.
I recommend starting you and your students off with a “win.” What I mean by that is don’t begin by expecting your students to engage with new tasks and material; start off with something they already know how to do. Sound like you’re going easy on them? Maybe, but the important thing when beginning with eLearning is to offer students a chance to get familiar with the new format for learning, not to blow their minds with unfamiliar – possibly frustrating – new content and tools.
Remember that learning can come in many forms.
It’s a good thing the teacher isn’t the sole expert on the topic students are learning. If that were so, then students would be out of luck now that they’re separated from their teacher! While teachers can still deliver their expertise to students through instruction and feedback, eLearning gives us a great opportunity to identity other sources and experts students can learn from.
Access videos, media resources, podcasts, webinars, social media, and more. Find the expert tools and resources out there that will share quality content, and get your students connected to them. Don’t put the pressure on yourself each and every day to be the sole deliverer of information to students when there are so many rich resources available. You can even go one steps further and ask students themselves to explore and discover where they can best learn from.
And don’t just send content to students. Tell them what to do with it. What are they suppose to think about, produce, or interact with? As students learn new material, make sure you provide them with direction on how to respond to and apply that information in meaningful ways.
It’s okay to make lessons that are timely and relevant.
It’s always okay to connect your course’s content to timely and relevant topics happening int eh world around us. Right now, students are personally living through a very unique time, and it is appropriate to leverage their real-time experience to connect with their learning goals.
This will be an era that our students talk about to their kids a generation from now. How might it connect to your course’s content? How are we giving them a chance to understand, process, and contextualize world events through an educational lens?
Take advantage of the digital world.
Students often engage with one another on SnapChat, Instagram, YouTube, and so on. They text GIFs and pictures; they video chat; they play video games together virtually. Their digital world is a visual world, and there are so many quality resources available to bring to students that help to utilize the visual and audio breadth today’s media.
Make your content more than just “read this, take these notes, discuss that” – consider what digital elements you can include in your eLearning that take advantage of today’s tools and the digital world students are familiar with.
Solicit feedback from your students.
It’s okay to ask a simple “How is it going?” and listen to what students have to say. You are working your butt of trying to find meaningful ways to engage your students through eLearning, but is it working? What are students connecting to, struggling with, or enjoying? What are they learning and how confident do they feel with it? What support do they need? What adjustments should you make?
The best way to find out just might be to ask students about their experience, and respond to the feedback they give.
Make a calendar.
One of the best ways to make sure you, your students, and your colleagues are on the same page is to make a calendar. You might not be entirely certain how long you’ll be facilitating eLearning, but plan things out a week at a time. What do you want students to accomplish by the end of this week? How can you break that up into reasonable day-by-day tasks?
Modify your curriculum.
What works best in the classroom probably won’t be the same thing that works best via eLearning. That’s okay. Make appropriate modifications to your curriculum to leverage the most out of the eLearning environment; don’t try to replicate the experience students would have had in your classroom.
Maybe a unit you had planned for later on the school year works best now. Maybe something entirely different that never would have fit into the classroom experience is ideal for today’s circumstance via eLearning. Be flexible and do what’s best fo your students. Make sure you’re being faithful to the core standards of your class, but give yourself the freedom to make modification to what specific content you expect students to learn right now.
Work with the parents.
Many parents find themselves in a “new norm,” right now as well. We are all in this experience together, and as parents may experience adjustments to their work and parenting roles right now, it’s essential we provide as much communication and support for schooling as possible.
What can you do to be supportive of and helpful to parents? What materials, guidance, and communication is necessary to assist parents who are now partially facilitating their children’s educational experience from home?
If you directly provide parents with your contact information, the materials their child is expected to work with, and guidance on how to best facilitate learning, it will help everyone continue to engage in the learning process. If you are using any tools or systems that parents can log into as well, make sure you remind parents of this resource and provide them with their login information if needed.
Don’t be afraid to make it personal.
Students love when they see their teacher as a real human being. Now that so much of our communication and content is originating at home, don’t be afraid to add some personal bits of info that allow students to see your life beyond the classroom.
This might mean you talk about – or even include pictures of – some of the things you’re doing at home to keep busy while school is closed. Maybe it means having conversations through your classroom mediums about how you and your students are doing outside of their academics. In a time when there is so much physical separation and disconnect, it’s nice to find ways to see and enjoy the humanity in each of us.
Reconsider your assessments.
When we give assessments, there’s often a specific “testing environment” we facilitate. We cannot replicate that environment via eLearning. You can pretty much count on students collaborating, utilizing notes and tools, even copying and sharing portions of the test. There is no test security if you’re giving tests remotely, so do not expect your standard assessments to have the same validity as they would were you to give them in the classroom.
But that’s okay. Take advantage! It’s time to rethink what we want students to know and how we expect them to demonstrate their ability. Video explanations, original projects, online research, and fun apps that formatively gauge a student’s learning carry a lot more weight when our traditional in-class single-sitting assessment is not an option!
Leverage your analytics.
If you’re using a learning management system that offers analytics, you’ve got data at your fingertips offering insight to what your students are up to. Depending on your LMS, you can often see when students have logged in and for how long, what pages or resources they’ve accessed, and where they’re spending their time.
This may be useful since you cannot physically see your students work, like you would int eh classroom. If students are not signing in at all, spending only moments on certain tasks, or spending way too long, you have some information that can fuel how you follow up with students and facilitate learning from there.
Teach your students how to be an eLearner.
Just like it’s important to teach out students how to be learners, it’s also useful to teach students how to be eLearners.
While students are still students, the way they’re receiving and expected to engage with content is different than in the classroom. Try to answer some of these questions for students in advance:
- What is expected of students?
- How much time should they put towards their school work?
- What should they do if they don’t understand the instructions, or don’t understand the material?
- How do they navigate new tasks or tools?
- How do they contact their teacher?
- To what extent should they rely on their parents to help?
Before you start throwing learning material and expectations at them, help students recognize their role and responsibility as a remote learner. It will help you all navigate eLearning and make sure students come back to the classroom on pace with their learning.
Don’t change your values.
Our circumstances may change, but our values do not. As teachers we still value the exceptional learning experience we bring to our students. Sure, the way we deliver that experience and interact with our students changes when we shift to eLearning. But the professionalism, standards, culture, and principles we base our everyday decisions on hold firm. Remind yourself and your students of what you stand for, and continue to deliver these values through what you do.
Lean on Your Team.
You are not alone. You colleagues within your school and district are going through the same shift to eLearning right now. You have peers, resources, ideas, and leaders with whom you should maintain connections to. You do not have to reinvent the wheel or go it alone. Maintain communication and community with your colleagues, and develop your PLN to connect to the thousands of teachers across the country who are sharing ideas, experiences, and resources. We’re in this together!
Still build relationships.
There are a thousand little interactions we have with out students that contribute to the culture of learning in our classrooms. While our physical proximity is taken away, it’s still essential that we find ways to build and maintain relationships with our students. Share personal stories, ask students how their weekend was, start a conversation through your school-assigned email account with individual students, have a discussion thread on your LMS for informal chats and updates, or play a game together via an app.
Check in on student’s needs.
This is a unique time for us all, and there are needs and concerns that go beyond academics. Ask your students how they are doing. Many family’s have been impacted by the coronavirus and school closures in ways that go far beyond a shift to eLearning. It’s okay to check in on how students and their families are doing.
So there you have it – 20 tips to help you get started with eLearning. This obviously isn’t a list of eLearning tools or resources, or how-tos for facilitating a great eLearning experience. We’ll get to those. What’s important is making sure that as we shift to eLearning, we must maintain the right mindset and keep students at the center of what we do.
There’s lots to learn, and we can’t expect ourselves or our students to become experts on the fly. But we should continue to engage with the core aspects of what it means to be an effective virtual teacher. We should continue to learn and adapt, to share and reflect.
What else would you add to this list? What steps, resources, and attitudes should teachers make sure they have as they shift into facilitating an effective eLearning experience for their students?