The last two weeks of ONL not only provided me with theories of online and blended learning, but also helped to self-reflect on my teaching practices during this ’emergency’ teaching.

During the last year, I have frequently heard that we are not actually teaching online, but it is rather an ’emergency remote teaching’ (ERT) . What a fancy term when you first hear and it arouses some curiosity as well. But it can turn into a nightmare both for you as a teacher and your students if you miss some key points of online teaching even in such an emergency situation. I, for example, tended to copy all my materials to the online platform at the beginning. The first weeks were fine, but a few weeks later, the students started to ghost classes. I was not also happy because I felt like I was talking to the wall. It was worse than giving a lecture online. As I even could not see the students’ faces either, it was like reciting the materials to myself. I knew that there was something missing that caused to lose students’ engagement, motivation and learning.

I learned a lot from this early experiences of teaching online. I have not put into practice yet as I am not teaching for some time. I have been thinking about facilitating student collaboration in my classes, students’ agency in their learning process. The final topic of ONL provided me with a nice theory –Community of Inquiry Framework (CoI)- for designing online and blended learning. It actually shed light on what I missed in my first online teaching practices. I seem to have ignored the social presence dimension of CoI framework mostly.

At the initial stage of teaching online last year, we were told to record our classes and then upload these recordings to a cloud system as not all of the students could have an access to the synchronous class times. Face-to-face class time duration was converted to an approximate online teaching time. We were asked not to exceed these times for a few reasons. That’s why it made me think that I had to provide more information during online classes rather than giving a space for students’ engagement. Even if I had had, the students were not really active during online classes. They even did not put their cameras on, which really blocked engagement between me and the students.

Many things have changed since those days. I feel more confident to try out new things and I am not afraid to fail first as a human and then as a teacher. When I start to teach again, I will have the motivation to implement new things into my teaching. I also feel lucky that I have built a nice PLN with my PBL group that I can ask for their advices on a point where I get stuck.

To provide support, facilitation and scaffolding, I am thinking of benefitting from ‘peer support’ in my classes. Giving more responsibilities to a few students such as facilitators, assigning group work so that they can build a positive interdependence seem to be nice options to implement in my future classes. Considering that I did not use breakout rooms in my classes (I am not sure it was possible at that time in Microsoft Teams, I thought it was only possible to use in Zoom), now I have more tools to season my teaching to increase student engagement.

Thanks for reading,

Cheers,

The last two weeks of ONL not only provided me with theories of online and blended learning, but also helped to self-reflect on my teaching practices during this ’emergency’ teaching.

During the last year, I have frequently heard that we are not actually teaching online, but it is rather an ’emergency remote teaching’ (ERT) . What a fancy term when you first hear and it arouses some curiosity as well. But it can turn into a nightmare both for you as a teacher and your students if you miss some key points of online teaching even in such an emergency situation. I, for example, tended to copy all my materials to the online platform at the beginning. The first weeks were fine, but a few weeks later, the students started to ghost classes. I was not also happy because I felt like I was talking to the wall. It was worse than giving a lecture online. As I even could not see the students’ faces either, it was like reciting the materials to myself. I knew that there was something missing that caused to lose students’ engagement, motivation and learning.

I learned a lot from this early experiences of teaching online. I have not put into practice yet as I am not teaching for some time. I have been thinking about facilitating student collaboration in my classes, students’ agency in their learning process. The final topic of ONL provided me with a nice theory –Community of Inquiry Framework (CoI)- for designing online and blended learning. It actually shed light on what I missed in my first online teaching practices. I seem to have ignored the social presence dimension of CoI framework mostly.

At the initial stage of teaching online last year, we were told to record our classes and then upload these recordings to a cloud system as not all of the students could have an access to the synchronous class times. Face-to-face class time duration was converted to an approximate online teaching time. We were asked not to exceed these times for a few reasons. That’s why it made me think that I had to provide more information during online classes rather than giving a space for students’ engagement. Even if I had had, the students were not really active during online classes. They even did not put their cameras on, which really blocked engagement between me and the students.

Many things have changed since those days. I feel more confident to try out new things and I am not afraid to fail first as a human and then as a teacher. When I start to teach again, I will have the motivation to implement new things into my teaching. I also feel lucky that I have built a nice PLN with my PBL group that I can ask for their advices on a point where I get stuck.

To provide support, facilitation and scaffolding, I am thinking of benefitting from ‘peer support’ in my classes. Giving more responsibilities to a few students such as facilitators, assigning group work so that they can build a positive interdependence seem to be nice options to implement in my future classes. Considering that I did not use breakout rooms in my classes (I am not sure it was possible at that time in Microsoft Teams, I thought it was only possible to use in Zoom), now I have more tools to season my teaching to increase student engagement.

Thanks for reading,

Cheers,