How to Switch to Online Teaching?

Sukurta: 07 April 2020

Here you will find information about how you can adapt your course to for online teaching. In this short guide we try to go through the most important questions that should be considered when transitioning to online teaching. Also, here you will find instructions that will help you to use the most essential online teaching tools.

But before we turn to tools, let’s do some essential planning.

Basic Student Needs

First, your students will need to access readings and course materials. Second, they will have to submit assignments and receive feedback on their work. They also will need a way to send you questions, and they will need to know when and how you will respond to them.

Basic Instructor Needs

You need to deliver your content, for the lack of a better term, to your students, and to communicate with them. There are many types of necessary communication in this situation. Students need to know what to do, how you want them to do it, how to submit it to you and how to get your feedback on their work.

Student Work Load

While planning the course don‘t forget that when transitioning to online teaching and learning, workload increases for both instructors and students. Therefore, it is important to keep that in mind in mind when planning duration of classes and amount of individual work for students. We recommend to coordinate the workload with other instructors of your students to ensure the balance.

Meeting Those Needs

Although there are many publicaly available tools, all these above needs can be met using two platforms that are offered by Vilnius University (VU): course management system (VMA) and MS Teams. VU gives technical and pedagogical support for teachers that choose to use these tools, therefore, we recommend them.

We recommend using VMA to distribute your course material as well as to give assignments and tests to your students. It is also a great platform for students to submit assignments, post questions to you and access course readings.

To create a course in VMA please, follow these steps:

Login to VMA - https://emokymai.vu.lt/
VMA should have already generated accounts for your courses automatically. If you don’t see them, or if you have any problems managing them, please see more information here.
Make sure that all your students are assigned to their courses (tutorial).
Upload any readings (or links to readings) that students will need (tutorial).
Upload any assignments you want students to complete (tutorial).

When learning online, students require very clear instructions and prompt feedback, so make sure you provide your students with clear instructions on what to submit, to submit it and how to access all handouts that are necessary for the successful completion of an assignment. In VMA, you can set deadlines, attach files and write a description for assignments to provide your students with as much guidance as possible.

Create a discussion forum or an MS Teams channel dedicated to student questions that you will check and answer periodically (tutorial).
Create a class communication plan so that students know where to get necessary information and what to expect; address questions such as:
- Where to send questions
- How quickly will you respond to emails; how quickly will you respond to discussion posts
- What sort of regular communications you will send out to the class (e.g. weekly reviews and/or updates)
- Other plans you have for how you will be available to students and how you will send out regular information and updates

Synchronous and asynchronous activities

Think about which activities need direct student participation and which do not. Remember that you can give lectures to students in several different ways:

Directly (synchronously) at the scheduled time. You can communicate with students directly using MS Teams software. Online lectures or seminars should not exceed the time that was previously scheduled for face-to-face activities. Actually, because of increased workload during online learning, the duration of synchronous activities may be reduced (tutorial).
Uploading previously recorded lectures. If you are recording a lecture attended by students, warn them beforehand that the lecture is being recorded and let them know where the video will be uploaded and used (tutorial). If you use MS Teams to record a lecture, the recording is automatically uploaded to the MS Stream platform. If you use other software to record the lecture, you can upload the recording to the MS Stream platform (tutorial).
Using a combination of these methods, where, after reviewing the material on their own, students gather from time to time for a virtual meeting/seminar during which they can discuss the material and ask questions. We recommend that you record your online classes so that students who did not attend them can also have the opportunity to review them.

Communication between students

During their face-to-face classes, students can turn to each other and say, "I didn't understand that, did you?". Such informal mutual support during or after the classes is very important for the learning process. Think about how you can facilitate such student communication. Here are some simple options:

Create a separate forum for student peer support in VMA (tutorial).
Create a separate channel of your course in MS Teams (tutorial).

Providing information to students

After completing the above steps, communicate all course changes to the students:

Write a course summary in one easy-to-reach place for students with a list of assignments, deadlines, recorded lectures, a schedule of live lectures, reading material, etc. and provide links to all of these items. If possible, indicate what students need to do each week.
If possible, in an online meeting or a recorded video explain to your students how the course structure, assignments and evaluation strategy are changed during the transition to online learning.
If necessary, contact the Online Learning Coordinator in your faculty and discuss opportunities for online learning activities (contacts of faculties coordinators). You can also get help with your online teaching here.

Keep in mind that this whole online learning process can be new not only to you but also to your students. It is helpful to make sure that the students have access to your information and that they know how to complete the assignments. Weekly summaries of previous assignments and guidance for the coming week via email, VMA or MS Teams can bring more clarity to students and facilitate the learning process.

Other opportunities

We provided the basic information on teaching and its technology. By the way, online teaching tools have a wide range of possibilities and their well-thought-out use allows you to make learning more effective. We will discuss some of them below.

Interactive learning

MS Teams allows distance learning to be made interactive:

Additional channels can be created for your course in MS Teams where students can work and communicate in small groups on their group assignments;
During an online class or a meeting, students can share a view of their desktop, which is very useful when you want them to give presentations.

Collaboration

In the MS Teams environment, multiple students can work on the same document at the same time (working on a group assignment) while working on separate computers (tutorial).

Flexibility

Flexibility is key to ensure a smooth transition to online learning. When thinking about deadlines and student workload, keep in mind that your students may have difficulties in adapting to these changes at this time.

Recorded lectures instead of (or alongside) live ones provide flexibility in the study process.

Also, keep in mind that some students will attend classes and complete assignments with their smart phones and tablets. It may be more difficult for them to perform some actions with these tools.

Be available to students and make sure they have sufficient technical equipment to complete the tasks.

Additional resources

Make sure that students have access to all the additional materials (books, databases, software, etc.) that are necessary to carry out the course activities during the quarantine period. Provide students with links to this material.

Preparing your workplace

Finally, online teaching requires some equipment that we usually already have at home:

Computer.
Headphones - the biggest threat to effective online communication is poor sound quality. Headphones not only help to hear other people better, but also reduce echo and other distractions.
Microphone - usually already built into laptops, cameras, headphones, but you may need it as a separate device.
Camera - most of the time it is already built into computers, but you may need it as a separate device.
Internet - LAN is more stable, but wireless is often sufficient.
Background - think about what students will see behind you on camera. If you select "Blur my background" function on MS Teams, the background behind you will not distract your students.

We would like to thank you for taking care of the continuity and quality of learning and teaching processes during this extraordinary situation. If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to contact the contacts listed in this section.