Cookbooks to classrooms
I started my career in 1974, with just a piece of chalk in my hand. There were no computers, and to duplicate worksheets we used a Banda Machine – you had to be careful not to breathe in the alcohol fumes! Cookery books like Mrs Beaton had large passages of only text and you had to know how to cook to understand the recipes.
My career has taken me from blackboards to overhead projectors to computers. VLEs arrived and became the norm for putting up your lecture notes. However, none of this changed the one-hour lecture; teaching materials were merely smartened up and presented in a clearer fashion.
After Mrs Beaton came the modern cook books of Mary Berry, with their colour photographs, and whole pages demonstrating how to follow a recipe. Then there was the TV shows, followed by videos, readily available on the internet.
Then came the Pandemic and Zoom, and we quickly learnt that the one-hour lecture didn’t work. “Lectures” were divided into chunks, enhanced with video, and the use of quizzes such as Kahoot.
What can we take from online teaching into the classroom? Let’s bring active learning/enhanced learning and use the chunks/animations/quizzes. Do we really need the one-hour lecture now, when we
can use the time to really engage the students in learning?
Take a lesson from Mary Berry for hands-on practical classes. Enhance the protocols visually and support them with prelab videos, and short videos of the activities necessary for a successful lab session. Afterall, if you don’t know how to do something nowadays, you go to YouTube, and someone somewhere has made a useful instructional video!
Sadly, the pandemic has been hard on young people. We need to ensure our course curricula cover all the necessary technological and IT skills so students are fully equipped for the changing world and life beyond the pandemic.
I’m mastering flexible learning, blended learning, dual learning, active learning, Teams, Moodle, and thought I’d reached the end of the educational alphabet with Zoom! Then along came the online conference “Bringing Minds Together” on Remo, and with its ‘table hopping’ and Speaker Platform, the future looks even more exciting for the educational world.
Dr Hazel Wilkins from ICRGU compares the progression of cook books to the move to online learning.