From Face-to-Face to Online Classes with Open Tools

“Now more than ever, students progress at their own pace because they have to participate in extra work at home that they did not do before.”

The COVID-19 pandemic has confronted professors with the challenge of designing and adopting an emergency remote teaching model to ensure the academic continuity of their students. Many teachers have suffered the anguish and stress of facing this challenge without any type of prior training or even in extreme circumstances trying to perform their job as best as possible.

In our June webinar, Professor Ken Bauer shared with us various open technological tools that teachers can use to teach their course in a virtual format in two-class modes, synchronous and asynchronous, as well as their pedagogical applications. Some of the tools and their uses that Ken explained were Zoom, Google Classroom, YouTube, WordPress, OBS Studio, YouCanBookMe, among many others. He also shared techniques to help us work or study better from home and to be more organized, productive, and motivated, considering that each person has a different home environment and unique challenges during this health contingency.

“It is better to have shorter and more frequent virtual classes during the week.”

If you did not have the opportunity to follow the live stream, view it here anytime. The first 30 minutes show Ken’s presentation, and the remaining 45 minutes is the audience’s Q&A session. I assure you that the questions Professor Ken received from the audience were super interesting, and his responses will help you in your teaching practice.

“Instead of having a couple of completed assignments with a lot of course grade weight, assign more deliverables with smaller weights that help you assess the progress that the students are making. This allows the students to take advantage of your feedback, and they will be able to apply their learning in the following installments.”

Below is a summary of the information that Professor Ken Bauer shared in the webinar.

• Be empathetic. Start the class by asking your students how they are. It is essential to show empathy toward them because they are living in the contingency just like us.

• Avoid prolonged synchronous time online. It is better to have more frequent and shorter virtual classes during the week. Now more than ever, students progress at their own pace because they have to participate in extra work at home that they did not do before. Therefore, it is also crucial to integrate more asynchronous activities.

• Do not oblige students to use their video cameras. Everyone lives a unique family dynamic at home. In this contingency time, everyone in the house is sharing the same space, and for reasons of privacy, some will not necessarily want to share their environment publicly.

• Use inverted learning. Send the session information to students before class so they can review it and prepare questions. This will help you have a more active virtual session. Start the class with questions and answers on the topic, and then organize teams to do an activity. You can use break-up rooms in Zoom or any other tool, but if you do not have this functionality, do not worry. You can tell them to work in teams and come back in 20 minutes promptly to discuss the results of the activity. Students like this a lot because interacting with their classmates is something they miss doing.

• Apply positive reinforcement for inverted learning. If your students do not see the materials before class, they should understand the benefits they have in reviewing the content to apply what they learned in class. The important thing here is to gain their trust. It is important to remember that the students do not necessarily work this way in other courses, so they may be unaccustomed to doing it.

• Plan the class by segments. Start with an activity and then give information, then afterward, another activity and more information, and continue this way. This will make the class more dynamic than just watching the teacher give a lecture. It is very tiring to have to listen to the teacher speaking through a screen for a long time.

• Design more holistic types of assessment. We need to think of new ways to evaluate. For example, instead of having a couple of completed assignments with a lot of course grade weight, assign more deliverables with smaller loads that help you assess the progress that the students are making. This allows the students to take advantage of your feedback, and they will be able to apply their learning in the following installments.

• Use the technologies you have at hand. You can use fundamental tools like email or electronic messaging systems and still give students excellent online learning experience. In this webinar, you will know the bases and proposals of experts in this regard.

• It does not matter which video conferencing system that you use. They all have advantages and disadvantages. All have free options with some limitations. If your institution provides a particular one, use it, so as not to add more difficulties to students if they are using the institutional tool in other classes.

Without a doubt, we are living through complex and challenging situations for which no one was prepared, but, together, we will be able to face this new reality and go forward!

Ken Bauer has been an associate professor at Tecnológico de Monterrey for 25 years. He teaches classes in software engineering and security. He is currently the Chairman of the executive board of the Flipped Learning Network (FLN), a non-profit organization that has a mission to report on inverted learning and promote its use in the international community.

Rubí Román – (rubi.roman@tec.mx) Editor of Edu bits articles and Webinars "Learnings that inspire"

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This article from Observatory of the Institute for the Future of Education may be shared under the terms of the license CC BY-NC-SA 4.0