Considering the online context

Online, remote and face-to-face teaching: What's the difference?

You have probably heard the terms online, remote and face to face teaching, but what do these terms mean?

The University of Saskatchewan has been working remotely for over a year now. The COVID-19 Pandemic necessitated the rapid transition of classes from face-to-face to remote. It is easy to confuse remote learning with online learning since both require students to work on and from devices. The differences between the two lie in intent, planning and development and activities/assessments. Both also have their benefits and drawbacks.

Remote and online teaching readiness

Even though remote and online teaching differ in intent and planning, the following guidelines are useful for both and ensures a positive learning experience for both you and your students.

• Be Flexible: Develop a plan for how you can be flexible around assignments, assessments, and deadlines. Allow flexibility for learners to access content and participate in learning opportunities at their own pace. Consider recording any synchronous activities for learners who may be unable to participate.
• Provide Choice: Choice in learning will help mitigate some of the equity issues (e.g. some choice in frequency and mode of participation, provision of assignment options).
• Be Compassionate: Approach your learners with compassion and understanding regarding their circumstances. Communicating caring and flexibility whenever you can will reduce student anxiety and increase learning.
• Be Remote Ready: Ensure you are familiar with your computer and the technology you are using. Practice beforehand if possible and if you are experiencing any difficulty, contact ICT for support.

Get ready for teaching online in three easy steps

• Take inventory: Gather and reflect on your teaching practices, learning & lecture materials, and the learning activities you used in your face-to-face course. Also consider your assessment plan and how you provided feedback and connected with learners.

• Confirm your course outcomes: Review the learning outcomes in your existing course. Ensure these clearly articulate the things you want students to be able to do at the end of your remote course.

• Outline a clear and consistent structure: A typical structure includes weekly segmented sections of content broken into chunks called learning modules.

For each learning module: A. Identify desired outcomes B. Create active learning experiences & engage learners C. Plan for assessment and provision of feedback

• Activate prior knowledge: Think about how you can help learners connect the ideas you will present and discuss to their previous experiences and/or learning. Positioning your course in relation to what learners already know helps with engagement, knowledge retention, and deeper learning. (e.g. create visuals showing connections between ideas, build in questions that ask learners to think about or share what they know about the subject, begin a course/learning module with prompts like ‘have you ever wondered why…’ that connect the subject matter to familiar experiences).

• Plan and integrate structured activities where learners engage, think, create and do: Learners should be able to practice skills or complete tasks that will help them become better at what you want them to learn. When planning learner activities think about the time they would put into a face-to-face course and check your expectations in the remote context.

• Create opportunities for connection and interaction: Build opportunities for connection and interaction into your course design (e.g. have learners create profiles within the course, send a pre-course email survey on interests and goals for the course, have a course lounge, create smaller student groups for discussions, assignments).

• Check student understanding regularly: This can be done at the start of a course and throughout using brief assessments or through the active learning where learners practice activities or skills you wish them to learn (these could be for marks but do not need to be). These can be used to adapt your learning activities where there appears to be a broad lack of understanding or a consistent knowledge gap amongst student in the course. This approach also allows you to point groups of learners having more difficulty toward additional resources or learning opportunities focused on the topic of issue.

• Provide quality, timely, and early feedback: This helps establish your presence and build trust. Providing opportunities for peer feedback helps establish richer learning communities, engages learners in understanding assessment criteria and expectations, and reduces the time needed for instructor feedback.

• Create accessible summative assessments: Guidelines are forthcoming that will consider efficiency, academic integrity, accessibility and evidence-informed assessment practice, including the technological tools needed to facilitate it. These are being drafted based on input and reflections from Winter 2020.

• Consider what student learning you want to facilitate through your presence: Plan how you wish to use your time (e.g. answer questions, discuss a topic, work through a problem/case, provide feedback). It is important that you connect with learners through your activity in the virtual space. In considering how much time you dedicate to each course, think about the time you would be present for a face-to-face class (office hours, responding to queries, providing feedback, etc.) as a minimum.

• Provide frequent, clear and consistent communication: Provide clear directions to learners about your course and expectations for engagement. Prior to the first class, introduce yourself and clarify the first steps (e.g. click through the course, review the syllabus, calendarize assignments and assessments). Start each week with a post listing the outcomes for the week, specific instructions related to learning activities, and reminders about tasks/assignments that need to be completed. Explanations of why you are asking them to do certain activities will increase engagement (e.g. I am asking you to watch this video because…). Remember - clearly communicated expectations for learners will limit time spent clarifying and allow you to dedicate your time to supporting learning.

• Ask for feedback: An online environment does not always allow you to pick up the cues from learners (e.g. body language) that would be present in a F2F environment. Teaching and learning remotely is new for everyone - asking learners for feedback about what is going well and what you could change allows you to adjust your course. This could be done via a short, anonymous survey, within Blackboard or Canvas, through mid-course SLEQ feedback, or via an open class discussion.

• Check student participation: Use Canvas analytics to determine if learners are logging in regularly. If someone is not, a quick email inviting them to re-engage can make a big difference to the likelihood of completion. These analytics can also show you where learners are spending their time and help you understand patterns of activity.

Considerations for teaching online

When you consider "How is online teaching different from face-to-face teaching?", the first thing you may have thought of was that face-to-face teaching involves real time interaction between students and instructors (synchronous) whereas online teaching happens through a computer, with students typically working through course content like lectures and other materials in their own time (asynchronous) . In an online environment students and instructors access the course at different times in different places and as such it is difficult for instructors to get to know their students, develop a rapport with them, and guide them through the course so that they are successful.

There are a number of strategies that are effective in online courses that can help you foster a sense of community, build good relationships, establish positive, inclusive, and co-operative norms, that help students achieve the course outcomes and learning objectives.

As you plan your online course it is helpful to consider the following;

• Learners
• Technology
• Teaching Methods
• Organization and content delivery
• Engagement
• Assessments
• Feedback
• Communication

This document lists the considerations for online teaching. It offers suggestions on what you can do and explains why strategies are effective. Please download and read this document before moving onto the ungraded survey.

To download the document double click on the link.

Resources

Workload calculator - This tool will help you calculate how many hours all your course content and activities will take students to complete. It is easy to add too much content to an online course, and underestimate how long an activity will take to complete.