Lesson 9 - Quality Teaching in a Digital Age

Another place to start would be by thinking about what you don’t like about the current course(s) you are teaching. Is there too much content to be covered? Could you deal with this in another way, perhaps by getting students to find, analyse and apply content to solve problems or do research? Could you focus more on skills in this context? If so, how could you provide appropriate activities to enable students to practice these skills? How much of this could they do on their own, so you can manage your workload better?

Are the students too diverse, in that some students really struggle while others are impatient to move ahead? How could I make the teaching more personalised, so that students at all levels of ability could succeed in this course? Could I organise my teaching so that students who struggle can spend more time on task, or those that are racing ahead have more advanced work to do?

Or perhaps you are not getting enough discussion or critical thinking because the class is too large. Could you use technology and re-organise the class differently to get students studying in small groups, but in such a way you can monitor and guide the discussions? Can you break the work up into chunks that the students should be able to do on their own, such as mastering the content, so you can focus on discussion and critical thinking with students when they come to class?

For instance, by moving a great deal of the content online, maybe you can free up more time for interaction with students, in large or smaller groups, either in class or online, and at the same time reduce the number of lectures to large classes. Some instructors have redesigned large lecture classes of 200 students, by breaking down the class into 10 groups, moving much of the lecture material online, and then the instructor spends at least one week with each of the 10 groups in online discussion, interaction and group activities, thus getting more interaction with all the students.

In another context, do you feel restricted by the limitations of what can be done in labs or workshops, because of the time it takes to set up experiments or equipment, or because students don’t really have enough hands-on time? Could I re-organise the teaching so that students do a lot of preparation online, so they can concentrate in the lab or workshop on what they have to do by hand. Could they report on their lab or workshop experiences afterwards, online, through an e-portfolio, for instance? Can I find good open educational resources, such as video or simulations, that would reduce the need for lab time? Or could I create good quality demonstration videos, so I can spend more time talking with students about the implications?

Finally, are you just overloaded with work on this course, because there are too many student questions to be answered, or too many assignments to mark? How could you re-organise the course to manage your workload more easily? Could students do more by working together and helping each other? if so, how would you create groups that might meet this goal? Could you change the nature of the assignments so that students do more project work, and slowly build e-portfolios of their work during the course so you can more easily monitor their progress, while at the same time building up an assessment of their learning?