Going live
Once you have your written material written, at least in the main, you’ll need to turn your attention to your synchronous sessions. These sessions will largely be determined by your institution; the length and what you are expected to do in them for example.
There are three main types of synchronous sessions: one to one sessions, question and answer sessions, and full teaching sessions. I use the term ‘synchronous’ because these sessions might be in the same physical space or they might take place online. Again, you will know your students, and your subject best, so these are more general guidelines than subject specific but there are also aspects that will make your sessions more accessible.
Your timetable, the expectations of your institution, and the expectations you have with yourself will set will determine what happens first but I’m going to start with full teaching sessions as the most intimidating to tackle online.
Creating accessible, inclusive teaching session, solves many of the issues you might face in running one to one or question and answer sessions.
Break the sessions up. Seriously.
What would be a lecture in pre-covid times, should not be necessary now. You will lose people if these sessions are an hour of you talking and why would you? My last few posts have been about getting the written material right, use it. You’ve done the work and got the core material written and accessible to your students. The synchronous sessions are the added value, the extra oomph that takes a good course to a great course. So trust your students and have some fun.
Get creative with what you want to show your students, what you want your students to do but don’t rely on students reaching a certain point in the asynchronous material before your session, will fall flat if students haven’t got to that point, so you’ll end up teaching the information so your session can go ahead and the students learn that you’ll teach them anyway so they can ignore the written materials you’ve prepared. Again trust your students to do the work.
Your synchronous sessions are a time to stretch your students, I particularly like thought experiment type activities based on the news of the day, a book, a film, etc. The inspiration isn’t necessarily important as long as you give enough details for the experiment to work but they can be a great way to introduce a new perspective, from a different contry or culture. The students in the know will get a kick out of it and the ones that don’t won’t be left behind but everyone will need to see the problem from a perspective other than their own.
Thought experiments can also grow more complicated as students progress so a logistic though experiment based around the delivery of corona virus distribution and delivery works at the beginning of a logistics course, with problem solving requiring only a surface level knowledge, as well as at the end, with a much more thorough, more realistic group of problems to solve which all impact on each other.
Escape rooms are another possibility with the ‘problems’ to solve based on the knowledge students have/should have and are another great way to introduce new perspectives. I’d work a week or so behind where I think the students should be but these rooms would be a good way to get students interacting in groups.
My focus with these two example activities is on problem solving as these kinds of activities will help embed knowledge within your students as well as engage their higher order thinking skills. Presumably, your students actually want to work in the field you are teaching, so there is the added incentive for students that this builds skills that will employers are looking or that they can use in their workplaces. There is the bonus for your session in that I’ve found problem solving to be generally more enticing to students than other activities.
Whatever you choose to do in these sessions, I would aim to make them as engaging as possible by rooting them in some way to something that is relatable right now or something that students can relate to their future employment with a focus on higher order thinking skills.
There are three things, in addition to the ‘what’ of your session, that you will also be thinking about or need to think about.
Cameras
There is some debate about whether cameras should be on or off and the difficulty of getting different age groups to turn on their cameras. Honestly, I haven’t been persuaded either way. I don’t think that privacy is so much an issue with different virtual backgrounds available but nor do I think that students with cameras on are more engaged (or whether engagement is an accurate measure of learning but that is a different discussion). Lack of cameras may reduce the tempation to rely soely on visual information too.
If getting students on camera is important to you or your institution there are a variety of ways to do it, mostly through games to develop habits. You could ask students to hide things in their backgrounds and give over a few minutes at the end for students to catalog them. You could ask students to change their background every time a certain word is mentioned, though be careful of the word you choose.
If you are not bothered by cameras, you’ll want different ways of ensuring students are engaged in the session and the accessibility of the app you choose will have a big impact on whether your students can engage.
Accessibility
You want to make it as easy as possible to engage with and access the session but the apps available may be set by your institution — usually MS Teams or Zoom — but thinking the accessibility of the app through and becoming familiar with the different functions, can head off a mad scramble when a request comes in. I say when, because it will happen.
So the main issue, after connections issues and actually affected by connection issues, is sound. If your student can’t hear you, whether that is because they are deaf or hard of hearing or because there is noisy construction work going on outside today, how are you going to communicate?
One possibly is a chat function. Most apps have a chat function along with the conferencing function, but that brings up another issue — does the chat function in the app work with a screen reader. So, ideally, to make engaging as easy as possible and to prevent stress and additional work further down the line, your app should have both automated captions and screen reader functionality.
Looking at the two most common conferencing tools that institutions and governments across the world have turned to, there are some differences.
Zoom, at this time, requires set up each time and a third party app or a very kind individual to create captions so I would go with MS Teams. The Teams app has automated live captions which are as good as any automated captions plus it integrates with screen readers without any additional input from the meeting organiser, presumably you, so there is no burden on anyone to declare that they need captions or on you to activate them. Skype actually has similar functionality to MS Teams if that is a more realistic choice for you and your students.
There are likely other applications in use so investigating the captions and chat functionality as well as the integration with screen readers is the first step in deciding which application you are going to use when matched up against the way you want to use it. If you have no choice in the app you use, and the one you have been given is poor in terms of captions, chat, and screen reader functionality, you will need to plan a way around it so when, inevitably, someone needs one or more of those functions, you have a plan.
Sending the activity you want to cover, and getting replies, may set the foundation to an email exchange, whiteboard exchange, pallet exchange, etc rather than a synchronous session. You should also highlight the issue with your institution, you will not be the only one who will need this functionality and it is in your institution’s best interests to provide it.
Recordings
Tying together both recordings and accessibility is the need for recordings. To meet the needs of all your students, those that couldn’t make a session for some reason, those who attended but had a poor connection, those who prefer to review new information more than once, etc, you should be recording your synchronous sessions as laid out in the WCAG guidelines mentioned in the 2018 regulations but this runs counter to GDPR requirements.
To my mind (and I am entirely biased), accessibility out-weighs GDPR especially if you do not insist on cameras being on. However, it will be necessary to get consent from everyone in the call for it to be recorded. Your institution is likely to (should) have a policy regarding recordings of sessions.
Once you have consent, you will need to review how to get a transcription out of your app to store alongside the recording. Apps that have automated captions usually have a transcript functionality though you may be able to utilise a third party application depending on what is available to your institution. Going back to Zoom and MS Teams, Zoom does have an automated transcription service if recording to the cloud and transcripts can be turned on for recordings in MS Teams.
Online sessions can be as engaging as sessions in the same physical space and are often more accessible. The key, as always, is planning.
Onto the list:
- Keep sessions moving
- Focus on engaging activities like problem solving
- Ensure apps used have automated captions
- Ensure apps used work with screen readers
- Get permission to record
- Get transcripts for recordings
