Innovate Issue 2 November 2020 | Page 49

DIGITAL LEARNING
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On reflection : the lessons of online learning

Mark Beverley Director of Institute of Teaching & Learning
The last few months have seen a great deal of what we had formerly taken for granted rendered unusually complicated and challenging . This has led to feelings of anxiety , frustration and in some cases , sadly , even despair , as people have been forced to adapt to unwelcome changes which they were powerless to do anything about . Disruption of norms can , however , also go hand in hand with meaningful reflection and perhaps even creative reimagining of the way we see the world . How much has been discovered , initiated or meaningfully developed precisely because of the environment in which we have all found ourselves ?
The operation and function of schools , and indeed of education in general , has inevitably been through various kinds of critical evaluation . Consensus is , almost certainly , that remote teaching and learning can never replace the value and efficacy of everyday face to face interaction – both in the classroom and around the school campus . However , there are undoubtedly things
we have learned , or been forced to learn , about the nature of teaching and learning , and some of them might potentially inform positively whatever ‘ normal ’ life in school comes to mean from now on .
Teaching content
Inevitably , we have all had to consider ways in which the content of our various subjects is best delivered through unfamiliar means . For quite some time , most , if not all teachers , have been comfortable with uploading course material , setting tasks and providing feedback on assignments submitted online . In addition , we have become used to hosting live classrooms through the use of Teams and finding ways to generate group interaction . But how do we actually teach things when we are not in the classroom ? How do we describe and explain things effectively when the essential ingredient of immediate face to face interaction is removed ? Any class size larger than around ten has proven very difficult to maintain in a live capacity , and without continuous physical feedback from students about whether or to what extent they are learning the material , it is hard to make judgments and to adjust pitch or pace as we go along . Partly for this reason , teachers have resorted to front loading lessons by making written , audio or video material that delivers rigorous content but allows students to work through it at their own pace . Some have then used time during an allocated lesson to invite
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