Lesson 9 - Quality Teaching in a Digital Age

There is now a wide variety of media by which instructors can communicate with students, or students can communicate with each other. Basically, though, they fall into four categories:

• Face-to-face, such as set office hours, scheduled classes or serendipity (bumping into each other in the corridor).
• Synchronous communication media, including voice phone calls, text and audio conferencing over the web (for example, Blackboard Collaborate), or even video-conferencing (for example, ZOOM).
• Synchronous communication media, including e-mail, podcasts or recorded video clips, and online discussion forums within an LMS.
• Social media, such as blogs, wikis, text or voice messages on mobile phones, Facebook and Twitter.

In general, I much prefer asynchronous communication for two reasons. Students are often working and have busy lives; asynchronous discussion, questions and answers are more convenient for them. Asynchronous communications can be accessed at any time. Also, they are much more convenient for me as an instructor. For instance I can go to a conference even in another country yet still log on to my course when I have some free time. I also have a record of what I have said to students. If using an LMS, it is password protected and communications can be kept within the class group.

However, asynchronous communication can be frustrating for students when complex decisions need to be made within a tight timescale, such as deciding the roles and responsibilities for group work, the final draft of a group assignment, or a student’s lack of understanding that is blocking any further progress on the topic. Then face-to-face or technology-based synchronous communication is better, depending on whether it is a blended or fully online course.

In a fully online course, I also sometimes use a conferencing system such as Blackboard Collaborate or ZOOM to bring all the students together once or twice during a semester, to get a feeling of community at the start of a course, to establish my ‘presence’ as a real person with a face or voice at the start of a course, or to wrap up a course at the end, and I try to provide plenty of opportunity for questions and discussion by the students themselves. However, these synchronous ‘lectures’ are always optional as there will always be some students who cannot be present (although they can be made available in recorded format).

For a blended course, though, I would organise a series of relatively small face-to-face group sessions in the first or second week of a course, so students can get to know each other as well as me, then keep them in the same groups for any group work or discussions.

Blogs or e-portfolios can be used by students to record their learning or to reflect on what they have learned, and blogs can be a useful way for the instructor to comment on news or events relevant to a course, but care is needed to keep a clear separation between students’ private lives and conversations, and the more formal in-class communications.