by Jolanta Maria Nitoslawska-Romer, M.Ed.
International Director of Academic Affairs, BE+Live
Yes, we are all finding it hard to figure out if our students understand our online lessons. As teachers, we all miss being with our students. The keyword is “being”. “Physical presence provides chemical, relational, psychological, and physiological effects that virtual relationships cannot. Our brains change in the presence of another person and their behavior. “ (Henry Cloud). As teachers, we know this to be true. We can often gauge how well our students are getting it just by the looks on their faces, the furtive glances they give one another, the shoves, or the whole class blank stares. And of course, we have a sense of what is really happening by the relationships we have built up in our classrooms, in the learning communities that we have fostered. We miss it all and are not quite sure what our students are understanding, are learning, or aren’t… and it’s not always about the concepts or the content. In a virtual set up, it’s not easy to figure things out. Is Andres confused about the use of the future perfect? Does he understand my examples, or is it that he’s not sure how best to share the poster he has created so carefully? Or is it simply that he can’t figure out how to unmute himself?
I can see my students online, but are they really watching and listening, or are they playing some video games on their smartphones? Am I sure that my students can really hear me, and if not, what is the issue? Do I need to speak up, or do my student need to adjust their speakers?
And then there are additional issues: a student may be experiencing network or video lag and may not want to interrupt the class to solve these issues. Another student may have brothers or sisters running about as they try to listen to you, or there may be distracting noise in the background.
So in designing your class or course, it’s important not only to focus on the content but also on how well your students can access the resources and the materials they need to understand and work with the content. A 2019 study* interviewed eight award-winning instructors of online courses and concluded:
“An important element in the development of an award-winning course was the way in which instructors had collected data on the course or engaged with existing evaluation data, reflected on how to improve the course, and made improvements,”
Teachers are used to formative assessments: gathering student feedback to figure out how much students are understanding, but this typically focused on the content and not on how well students could access the material. Ongoing feedback is now ever more important in virtual setups, and this means using data very often for immediate and remedial action. It also means not waiting till an end-of-unit or end-of-term formal assessment, but promoting an environment of ongoing feedback and clear communication with and among your students. In other words, it means ensuring that your class is a learning community!
NOTE: In part 2 of this blog, we shall explore some ways to gather this data and build an effective learning community,
CLICK here to send your comments, questions or concerns.
*https://olj.onlinelearningconsortium.org/index.php/olj/article/view/2077
Adapted from Youki Terada’s article
Reading the Virtual Classroom Is Hard, but It Can Be Done
https://www.edutopia.org/article/reading-virtual-classroom-hard-it-can-be-done
accessed Aug 6, 2020
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