Just came across this short web article titled '5 easy tricks for successful online teaching', which begins with the attention-grabbing slogan 'Ditch the Zoom Room'. The writer, Eileen Kennedy, who was a Senior Research Associate based at UCL Knowledge Lab, was writing in the context of MOOC courses for teachers. She contends:
"You don’t need to abandon video conferencing completely – but use its power wisely and infrequently. Live video conferencing can be stressful for educators and inconvenient for learners. ..."
These words resonate with me, as my online classes can be as long as 2.5 hours in duration. And sometimes I do sympathise with my students, who have to sit through such long sessions in front of the computer.
One solution may be to cut down the length of each Zoom session, and present the rest of each lecture in the form of mini MOOC-like learning paths, for students to follow on their own. In fact, when I follow an online PD event myself, most of the time I prefer the MOOC format, or at least a self-paced learning path, to attending a live webinar. But of course, for busy course instructors, even designing a self-paced Nearpod lesson takes a lot of time (much more than live lecturing), not to mention MOOC-like learning units.
https://blogs.ucl.ac.uk/ioe/2020/06/17/5-easy-tricks-for-successful-online-teaching/
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