Tag: Online Learning

Bookmarked A Behind The Scenes Look At How I Create A Technical Video Course (benlcollins.com)

Last week I launched a new Google Sheets course — The QUERY Function In Google Sheets — so I thought it would be interesting and helpful to share how such a course comes about.

It’s my 14th online course and my 19th launch. Along the way, I’ve made just about every mistake in the book, but I’ve now settled on a reliable framework for online course creation, the outline of which I share below.

Ben Collins methodically breaks down his process for creating a technical video course. He breaks I think about technical video course creation in six distinct phases:

  • Ideation
  • Research
  • Planning
  • Course Creation
  • Launch
  • Post-launch

What I actually enjoyed the most in Collins’ reflection was the way in which he uses Sheets throughout to help manage everything.

I have long been inspired by Collins’ work. I feel like I get as much out of how he addresses technical problems as I do about what he discusses. It was therefore great to get an insight into the thinking associated with his work.

Bookmarked Online Learning Can Be Engaging and Effective – Howard Rheingold – Medium by Howard Rheingold (Medium)

I taught blended learning courses for ten years at UC Berkeley and Stanford — three hour face-to-face meetings each week, with forum, blog, and wiki learning activities spread over the week between classroom sessions. I came to learn that, combined with a co-learner-centric pedagogy, the use of synchronous (videoconference) and asynchronous (forums, blogs, collaborative documents, collaborative highlighting) media between classroom meetings can amplify and vivify the traditional college course. For eight years, I also taught my own online courses at what I called “Rheingold U.” In March, 2020, when Covid-29 led to the sudden, massive, unplanned advent of online classes, I published some advice about teaching and learning online. Now, a year and a half later, after hearing so many less-than-encouraging reports of online failures, I have more to say about how to make the learning experience more engaging and fulfilling — with more successful learning outcomes. I have included some of my 2020 piece in this present essay — and expanded upon it.

In light of necessity to move to online learning, Howard Rheingold reflects upon his own experiences of online learning in higher education across the last two decades. He unpacks both the pedagogy he employed and the various tools he used to make this more doable, such as forums, blogs, video and social bookmarking. He also ends his piece with a useful list of other resources to dive into.
Bookmarked Pedagogy, Presence and Placemaking: a learning-as-becoming model of education. (David White)

The emphasis in the model is on a pedagogic approach which first-and-foremost facilitates connections and forms of interaction, creating social, intellectual and creative presence. Through this, the locations of our institutions, especially the digital spaces, become places within which our students have agency. This then increases belonging and supports learning-as-becoming. This is pedagogy as placemaking through the medium of presence.

David White talks about the issues simply moving face-to-face learning online and the need to foster presence to help make online spaces places that foster learning. As an idea, this seems to be a missing gap in regards to teaching groups online.

In the book Teaching Crowds, Dron and Anderson unpack the different ways that people gather within online spaces. To do so, they focus on three key modes of learning:

  • Groups: Distinct entities independent of membership, groups are structured around formal lines of authority. An example are the various learning management systems. Organised hierarchically, they do not allow for cross-system dissemination.
  • Networks: Based on individual connections, networks evolve through interactions. Examples of such spaces are social network platforms, such as Facebook and LinkedIn. These spaces create the means easily sharing and connecting with others.
  • Sets: Bound together by a commonality, with sets there are no expectations of personal engagement. Some examples of sets are social interest sites, such as Pinterest. Both of which provide means of easily finding similar ideas.

It also has me rethinking my explorations of learning hubs a few years ago.

Liked Online Teaching with the most basic of tools – email by admin admin (Explorations in the ed tech world)

A lot of online teaching is really about communicating clearly and well (even if it feels like you are stating the obvious) and establishing and managing expectations. The good news is that you can do most of that by email. Early online teaching was focussed on good organization and structure, because there simply weren’t a lot of tech options to distract us.

At its most basic, online teaching is about 3 things:

Student – content: How will you get content to students in the easiest and most accessible way? How will students engage with that content?

Instructor-student interaction: How will you as an instructor feasibly communicate with your students? And how will they communicate with you?

Student-student interaction: How will students communicate with each other and work together?

Liked Reflections on Teaching through the Screen by Sean Michael MorrisSean Michael Morris (Sean Michael Morris)

How is that responding and revising done? Well, if I have any “expert” advice to offer, it would be this:

  1. Change the way you teach. Ask what do you want to know about learners from the very start of your relationship? What should they know about you? What barriers might exist that will inhibit your connection to students and from student to student?
  2. Develop a digital literacy that’s an interpersonal one. Always ask: “Who is not in the room who could be?” Allow time in synchronous meetings and collaborations for connecting and relationship-building. Find back-channel and ungraded spaces for communication, like virtual office or “coffee” hours. Perhaps most importantly, develop empathy for one another in virtual or digitally-inflected spaces. But at the same time, don’t assume you understand the challenges students face. Empathy is best developed by listening.
  3. Imagine your own digital pedagogy. Ask yourself: What counts as digital? What is your overall pedagogical approach, and how does that translate or not translate to digital environments? What is the most important part of your pedagogy that you don’t want to lose when you teach online?

The truth is that education didn’t need COVID-19 to make it necessary to ask these kinds of questions. As educators, we are all always already called to develop a critical consciousness about our work. But the pandemic has brought into greater focus that our assumptions—about what’s been happening in classrooms and behind the scenes and online in education—are less informed than we would like to believe. We don’t get to watch the screen and act like normal, because at every turn there’s a drag queen superstar waiting to remind us that things are not normal, and in order for any normal to return, we will have to invent it ourselves.

Bookmarked Teaching in the Time of COVID by Sign in – Google Accounts (W. Ian O'Byrne)

As we are disrupted and try to adapt to the changes wrought by the coronavirus we need to use this as an opportunity to examine the inequalities that existed before. This is a time to re-examine most aspects of our lives and think about how we could or should do things differently.

Ian O’Byrne reflects on teaching in higher education during the time of COVID. He suggests

  • Focusing on what one needs to know
  • Focus on knowledge, skills, dispositions
  • Chunk course content.
  • Treat it Like a Morning Show
  • Don’t rely on lecture
  • Block Classes
  • Use Breaks
  • Take time together
  • Provide just in time supports
Bookmarked The Future of Professional Learning Part 2 – Ideas and Thoughts (ideasandthoughts.org)

In general, I think professional offerings will be expanded and diversified moving forward. More than ever, teachers are more comfortable with webinars, chats and courses. Since there is currently little to no face-to-face opportunities, it seems participants are more accepting and less critical of offerings because there is no alternative. That said, I believe there is an opportunity for districts to be more intentional and focused on their online offerings as well as rethinking what face to face learning should be.

Across two posts (one and two), Dean Shareski reflects upon the future of professional development. Two of the points that have stood out are, the flexibility offered by online learning that will not go away.

I believe my own work with feature more virtual options both because it’s been experienced by a greater number of educators in the past 9 months but also because when done correctly, provides great benefits.

Learning in-person will become more about connections and relationships, rather than content.

People will naturally be excited to be together and it should be honoured as such. That means providing people with an opportunity to be with each other beyond the breaks should take priority. I would also suggest that we emphasize the social side of this as much as any professional side. In the past, this would have been seen as frivolous or time-wasting, that mindset has to change. If you’re just worried about delivering content, then it may be better served online. I think this shift will be a challenge for many and like the return to school, it’s going to be easy to revert to previous models.

This all reminds me of something Shareski wrote a few years ago about connections over content:

I’ve been saying for a long time that the old adage, “If you leave a conference with one or two ideas you can use in your classroom right away you’ve done well” is not nearly as good as “if you leave here with one or two people you can continue to learn with you’ve done well.”

Responding to this, David Truss suggests that the future needs to be more interactive.

To expand on this idea, I don’t see things like pre-presentations or assignments and tasks being given before a conference (read as ‘not homework’), but I do see opportunities for conversation, interaction with the presenter, and with other conference attendees. I see icebreakers and teasers.  I see feedback to the presenter about what the attendees want. I see presenters providing clear learning intentions and a framework for their talk. I see presenters providing a personal introduction so that instead of the first 5-10 minutes of a 1 hour presentation slot being “This is who I am”, the presentation starts with an activity, engaging people with other people who have already connected online. I see interactive presentations that rely on participants being involved and engaged with the material.

Bookmarked Four Learning Models That Are Working in Remote (and Concurrent) Classrooms Right Now by By AJ Juliani (A.J. JULIANI)

One of the most amazing things to come out of the past year of remote and concurrent/hybrid learning has been the sharing of various learning models that work in our current situation. Many of these

AJ Juliani discusses four models for structuring learning offsite:

  • Station Rotation
  • Choice Boards
  • Playlists
  • E5 ( Engage, Explore, Explain, Elaborate, and Evaluate)

As Juliani highlights, the challenge is identifying the right model for your context:

For Hybrid A/B learning I would have all of the students at home be in one group (Group 1) while breaking up the students in-class into two separate groups (Group 2 and Group 3). However, if your situation is such that you have at home hybrid students and full-time virtual students that group may have to be split in two.

These are discussed further in Catlin Tucker’s new Advancing with Blended and Online Learning Course.

Liked 2020 Zoomed By(e) (CogDogBlog)

After all the time people are spending in these environments, are there other modalities, what others ways of collaborating we can use besides this one? I find that the first reach colleagues go for is webinar, webinar, webinar. And webinar. And that is my Zoom Fatigue, is that it seems to be the limit of our imagination.

Liked More help needed for vulnerable learners in the age of COVID-19 school closures (EduResearch Matters)

Moving forward and learning to live with further disruptions, requires future generations to become adaptable to possible changing learning environments, building capacity and resilience for future crises becomes an imperative. Proactive and multifaceted responses and planning for any future crises will best meet the educational needs of our diverse student populations to ensure vulnerable children are not left behind in their learning.

Governments should re-examine resource allocations to schools to ensure all students have equality of access to up-to-date resources, especially technology. The pandemic has shown us that learning online is possible, but if we are to avoid widening existing educational disparities, we must ensure that learning is equitable for all students.

Bookmarked Lessons Learned | EdCan Network (EdCan Network)

We consider the narratives and lessons that emerge from both the content of these articles and our own experiences.

Canadian academics, Alec Couros and Katia Hildebrandt consider the various discussions and evidence associated education during the current pandemic to identify five narratives:

  1. Educators can, and do, leverage technologies in powerful and creative ways, but inequitable access to devices and connectivity remains a major barrier to student success.
  2. As home-school relationships become increasingly important, parents’ abilities to support their children’s learning can have a major impact.
  3. School climate has a significant effect on how teachers, learners, and parents experience school, but care must be taken to ensure inclusivity for all members of the school community.
  4. The move to remote learning has laid bare the degree to which teachers’ (and schools’) roles extend beyond academic instruction.
  5. The challenges of the COVID-19 pandemic offer a tremendous opportunity for transformational change in our education systems, should we choose to take it up.

It is interesting to compare this with Jal Mehta’s lessons:

  1. There are limits to one-size-fits-all schooling
  2. Schools need to be more human
  3. We cannot set the needs of students against the needs of adults
  4. It is not clear how we catch students up on what they have missed during the pandemic

Mehta touches on the challenges of equality in regards to how different states respond to the situation.

Although these lessons seem pretty universal, I wonder if building back better actually starts locally. It will be interesting to see how different systems around the world provide long term support in response to the situation and the mechanisms they will use to measure the return on investment.

Bookmarked Does Virtual Learning Work for Every Student? (JSTOR Daily)

Given Covid-19, schools have limited options for teaching kids. What’s working and not working in the era of online learning?

Amanda Woytus reflects upon who has and has not benefited from learning online. For some, the flipped model of asynchronous videos has provided them access to learning and the opportunity to be more flexible with their time. However, Woytus also explains that not everyone is able to engage with video content and learning in the same way. As she highlights:

Last semester’s physics class, for example, required students to watch videos of lectures, similar to the flipped classroom model. “I personally could not do that at all,” he remembers. “I can’t focus on a YouTube video that I want to watch, so how does anybody expect me to focus on a YouTube video that’s boring?” He recognizes that physics can be interesting, but if his diagnosis makes it difficult for him to pay attention to a video that was designed to be pure entertainment, a YouTube video of a professor talking at him stands little chance.

I think this highlights that one model alone, such as flipped learning, does not necessarily fit everyone’s needs. This has me thinking again about Steve Collis’ discussion of learning narratives and learning choice.

Often the argument is made against ‘direct instruction’ and specific information, however the issue is not the instruction, but the fact that such instruction is not at the point of need. Collis spoke about the use of flipped instruction and providing students more choice and autonomy as to when they accessed this information. Therefore, such shared learning narratives often involved a number of choices or spaces.

Bookmarked Remote Teaching Tip: Assessments in an Online Environment by Bill Ferriter (blog.williamferriter.com)

if the questions on your assessment can be Googled AND you are worried about cheating, then you have written a bad assessment.

Bill Ferriter suggests that before you worry about how you are going to assess learning online, you need to address the question of what you are assessing for.

  • We need to know the level of rigor of the essential standard that we are assessing before we can write a question that will generate reliable information on student mastery.
  • We need to decide on the kinds of things that students should know and be able to do if they have mastered the essential standard that we are assessing.
  • We need to write and then deliver a small handful (3-5) of questions for each essential standard that we are assessing.
  • We need to think through the common misconceptions that we are likely to see in student responses to our questions.
  • For any constructed response questions or performance assessments, we need to decide together what “mastery” will look like in student responses.
  • That might include developing exemplars of different levels of student performance or creating shared scoring rubrics.

If the focus is multiple choice questions, Ferriter uses MasteryConnect, while if it is about deomonstrations, he uses Flipgrid. Although there are many other options out there, these work within his context. As he explains:

Your goal is to find tools that:

  • Have little to no learning curve for you or your students.
  • Aren’t blocked by your district’s firewall.
  • Fit into your budget — or the budget of your school.

Ferriter closes with a reflection on how he deals with the threat of students cheating. FIrstly, he makes a concerted effort to lower the stakes on my classroom assessments by making them smaller and providing students the opportunity to repeat where needed. In addition to this, he suggests that if the answer is in fact Google-able then maybe it is actually just poor assessment.

Your piece about cheating reminds me about an experience I had in Year 10 Science when we had an open-book test. I remember Ms. HĂ© not paying too much attention to our chatter during tests. We would turn and talk with colleagues to get the answer. The funny thing was that it did not really make a difference. I cannot remember what grade I got, but I know it was not great. I think it clearly highlighted the lack of care I had for the subject. Cheating made little difference. In hindsight, I wonder if that was in fact her strategy, not sure. It was a useful lesson to learn.

Replied to
ï»żI remember watching Simon Breakspeare’s presentation about building back better. That seems like an eternity ago.

It is interesting to look back at my three points of reflection from last time:

  • Structure of online learning
  • Communication between school and home
  • Play and social spaces

At home, the resilience prevalent first time around quickly dwindled. Second time around what became paramount was anything social and creative. At the end of term, the class had a party. This sparked a round of cooking and requesting things from the shops. Sadly, such opportunities were few and far between. What is interesting is that I do not really think this is any different to how things are normally, instead it is just more visible I guess.

I really liked your closing point:

It’s awful but an adventure at the same time

Like how the rings of a tree cut open can show the impact of drought, it will be interesting to see what impact of all this will be on students and on the profession. It certainly is an adventure, but maybe it always was.

Bookmarked The art of inquiry teaching…from a distance: Part #1 (kathmurdoch.com.au)

Someone described it to me as the ‘moment when the clouds parted and the sun shone through’. That is what it felt like way back in June (remember June?) when, for a few precious weeks, I was able to go into schools and work with kids and teachers face to face. It was definitely NOT the same expe…

Kath Murdoch shares two posts (one and two) unpacking strategies for incorporating inquiry into the remote context:

  • Cultivate curiosity by provoking, modelling and valuing it
  • Ask more questions than tell
  • Release control and let learners do the heavy lifting
  • Notice, reflect and respond
  • Be personal by helping students find and pursue their passion
  • Harness real contexts, such as virtual field trips
  • Allow for humour and play
  • Encourage collaboration
  • Focus on concepts over busy work
  • Celebrate the skills within the learning

Emily Fintelman provides her own take on incorporating inquiry into the online classroom, as well as an excellent reflection in the DLTV Journal.

Bookmarked The New Normal: Teaching Amidst Coronavirus by Emily Fintelman (DLTV Journal)
Emily Fintelman reflects on the move to remote learning. For her school the focus has been on guiding learners, rather than delivering lessons. This has included the creation of a ‘learning menu’ with a balance of open-ended tasks, problems worth solving, investigations, personal inquiries, games and tasks. Student contact therefore is centred around well-being, and the maintaining a emotional, social and psychological safe space.

So much of the talk is about what students won’t have access to… a carefully scheduled timetable, a teacher on hand at every second of their 6-hour school day, materials, internet and so on. But a compelling thought is that so many factors that are important for learning have not disappeared… agency, curiosity, goal setting, interesting questions, learning about things that are personally meaningful, feedback from teachers, peers and relatives, a genuine audience. They just look a little different.

Replied to Humans Have Bodies by Ian O’Byrne (wiobyrne.com)

As I watch my children regularly tune in to virtually connect with others, I wonder what they are missing. I wonder about this lost year of their lives when they’ll have missed connections as they can choose to tune in or out as they see fit. Already I can see my children’s eyes glaze over when they are connected into the video conference and need to pay attention.


I wonder about the connections that are normally made in the classroom outside of the content that my children will miss. How the teacher noticed that one day when our daughter stood up to the class bully. Or when my son decided to risk it all and tried out for the lead in the holiday musical. Those times that are show us (the parents) that we’re hopefully doing the right things necessary to raise a good human being.


But that is no longer what my children have become. They’ve become a stat. They are two of the 65% of students attending school virtually this fall. They are a link and a secret invite code to a Google Meet call. They are a white board full of intersecting and conflicting schedules. They are a series of pending assignments waiting on a Chromebook.


I wonder what happens when humans no longer have bodies. What happens when they can turn on and off connections with others. What happens when they can choose to turn on or off their video camera. What happens when it is expected that they show up on time, look like they’re taking school seriously. What happens when they’re expected to mute their mics, and skillfully
only when needed
.un-mute to respond at the appropriate moments.

Thank you Ian for openly sharing your story.

Kinder has definitely been interesting, especially as both my wife and I are still lucky enough to be working.