Online Teaching and Learning

There are many ways to incorporate technology into a classroom and it is important to find the right balance. If a teacher tries to use technology too much students often become bored with it. Use it too little and students become engrossed with just the technology and often miss the content.

I had the pleasure of "teaching" an e2020 class this past year. My job was simply that of a facilitator - sit in a computer lab with 30+ kids for 70 minutes after school each day to make sure they were working on their online e2020 classes. This program was implemented in our building simply for credit recovery and it had is pluses and minuses, which I don't have time to get into here. Students initially found this method unique and they tended to dive into it. As the weeks passed, student interest dwindled and their progress lagged. While I liked the structure of e2020 (online vocabulary, lectures, activities, quizzes, tests and finals) it didn't work for all students all the time. What we have discussed for utilizing e2020 this year, is to take smaller chunks of a larger online course for students to use as reinforcement to a class they are currently taking. For example, in a Biology course we could take the section on Natural Selection and assign students only the activities we wanted them to complete.

The nice thing about this type of Distance Learning/Online Learning is that it can be used to cover many different types of content. From Art History to Foreign Language to Geometry - all classes can be covered by this type of online learning.

Some of the pedagogical strategies that are seen in this online course include defining in the vocabulary section. This section comes first and reinforces the spelling of the work, the meaning of the work, the pronunciation of the word and the use of word in a sentence. The online activities often require the students to collect data and interpret the data in order to make a conclusion. These activities are often modeled after labs or demos we would do in class and give the students a chance to see the experiment done in a different way, yet still collect their own data. There are lab quizzes built into the program that then tests the student's knowledge of the activity by using short answer questions and multiple choice questions - all answers are visible to the teacher when they log in.

I think this type of online learning is good for review or as scaffolding for a small portion of a class, but many students struggle to complete an entire course simply for credit recovery. Using this type of technology for students who are often behind in multiple classes doesn't seem to improve their study skills, motivation or progress without direct teacher involvement. This seems to negate the whole purpose of "distance" learning. I've seen over the past year that there are two groups who seem to do best with an entire online distance course - the very top students (often self-motivated to begin with) and the very bottom (students who benefit from the UDL principles built into the course). I think the hardest part of using sections from a true distance learning course is keeping students motivated in using e2020 and not burning out and becoming bored with the material. To find that fine balance between too much and too little is my mission for this up coming school year.