Once you understand your students’ needs and circumstances, what does that mean for your course design/delivery? Can you Be Flexible?
While it is certainly the case that in extraordinary circumstances, it may be all you can do to simply attempt to duplicate your face to face teaching, activities, assessments. It is completely understandable to just try to get to the end of the day, week, term, doing the best you can, using whatever tools/approaches you have, can get, or feel most comfortable with.
You (and your students) may find yourselves in unfamiliar digital environments where you have little/no experiences, and where survival is paramount. That is the nature of an emergency. It is not by choice - the situation is is not optimal, ideal, or well planned.
However, you may not be able to duplicate certain face to face events, exposure, content, instructional approaches, activities, experiences. What will you do? If you are able/willing, and your circumstances permit, you may want to, or be forced to consider alternatives and options. For example, how will you teach the soldering/bezel-setting unit in your jewelry design course, when your students are not with you in the studio?
Additionally, once you understand your students’ circumstances, you will have more information, and may be better able to consider how flexible you can be/need to be in your approaches to instruction to accommodate student circumstances. For example, are your deadlines flexible? Are lectures/zoom sessions recorded for viewing by students that can’t make it? Can you provide options/alternatives for students?
Start with the End in Mind
If it makes sense for you and your situation, a little backwards design thinking can provide a framework to help you consider the options and alternatives for reconceptualizing aspects of your your course design and instruction for a remote teaching and leaning experience, rather than attempting to duplicate your face to face activities. Quite a bit is known in traditional online instructional design about how to best Design Effective & Accessible Online Activities, Interaction & Assessments.
Example: Course Information Documents
Things to consider:
1. How will you assess learning and provide feedback and grades?
2. How will you facilitate interaction with and between students?
Create an ice-breaking activity to establish a sense of class community OSCQR 5.40 | OSCQR 5.41
3. How will you best present course content?
© 2022 Created by Alexandra M. Pickett.
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