I have reflected partly on teaching during this course. So far the world of teaching is completely new to me, I only started in early February, and have thus not the privilege to be able to compare methods – because of COVID-19 everything happens online, at a distance. I have, however, some experience from lectures – those of my own time as a students and also of holding a lecture – to a face-to-face audience, and can because of that compare in part the different methods.

My teaching is not really blended in the way that I do not meet the students “in real life” (as we used to say, meaning offline) at all. Then again, I am not really a teacher. I do hold lectures, but only sporadically, while the library is my main region of work. Not being used to teaching and being the kind of person not feeling too comfortable in front of an audience, I do think it is way easier to talk in front of a computer than talking in front of a crowd of people. I do understand the frustration of more traditional teachers, who would like to see the faces of their students, but I am not one of them.

As far as interaction goes, there are a lot of tools that can be used to make the communication going in both directions and engaging students. In the work Interact and Engage, Laborie and Stone (2015) gives a lot of examples on how to do this, mostly using the simple in-built functions of most video conference platforms, like Zoom or Teams. These functions include feedback functions (or often called reactions, like green/red, yes/no, raising hand, clapping hands), chats, polling, sharing the screen, breakout rooms etc. They explain in the book, how it is good to start a webinar with a warm-up activity, how to tie participant closer together, and how to wrap things up in the end. Some of the activies might not work in a normal school environment, where there are several lectures a day – you cannot expect to have grand warm up and close-up every time – since they are more designed for one-time webinars. Still, many of the tools are usable and they also have a chapter on how to design your own tools.

There are also external tools on can use, like Mentimeter, which is one that I often use myself. If not otherwise always that useful, it is a good way to “wake up” the students. I also believe sternly in the use of visual imagery. In a Ted talk Mattias Ribbing, who has gotten the title “grandmaster of memory”, explains how visualizing something in connection to reading new material – no matter what the picture you visualize is – helps you remember the material afterwards (Ribbing 2016).

The brain is better at visuals than words. Good tools for learning are “photos, illustrations, icons, symbols, sketches, figures, and concept maps”, as PhD Haig Kouyoumdjian mentions in his article “Learning through visuals. Visual imagery in the classroom” (2012). Thus it is good to use visual imagery also in blended learning; remember to make your webinars more interesting with pictures, and students will remember more of what you say!

Kouyoumdjian, Haig, 2012, “Learning through visuals. Visual imagery in the classroom”. https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/get-psyched/201207/learning-through-visuals (available 2021/05/03)

Laborie, K. & Stone, T., 2015, Interact and Engage! 50+ activies for virtual training, meetings, and webinars. Association for Talent Development (ATD).

Ribbing, Mattias, 2016, Learning from a grandmaster of memory . https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_CFtPOUx7Hk (available 2021/05/03)