 Hi, this is Russell Stunner from teachertrainingvideos.com. This is going to be a talk about the bigger picture to really understand when you deliver online how you organise a course. So I've been working on online courses for 20 years now and basically there are always two parts to what I do. And because of my work and because I do consultancy with some universities here in London, one in Switzerland and also some language schools in Spain and in Portugal, I get lots of chance to see what's going on at the moment with online delivery and the focus is definitely on the live session using Zoom or Adobe Connect or ClickMeeting. Really there's a much bigger picture because when I organise an online course, I'm thinking in terms of the live part, but I'm also thinking in terms of the platform. There's normally a platform where you organise your students, where you put the content and where you give them activities to do. And I just want you to listen to a couple of very experienced teachers, teachers that I really admire a lot, talking about when they deliver online which part is the most important. Let's start with Elena, who works at university in Romania, in Cluj and I've been out there and worked with her, fantastic teacher. Listen to what she's got to say about teaching online. Yeah, it's the foundation of the course, clearly. And it's where we usually come back to, what we come back to. So even after the Zoom class, what we do with the sort of reflection of how the Zoom went. Sometimes not always, sometimes I forget to do it, but sometimes I give them exit tickets after the Zoom session so that they complete. What did I learn that was new today? How would I use this information in the future already in my future job? And then I post the results or their answers back on it model so that they can see what they started with, what they completed afterwards on Zoom might have a certain relevance in the future and they can see it written there and it stays on it model. So everything is quite circular. And I also think that about 60 to 70% of the work is still done asynchronously, so on the platform and then the rest, which would normally be conversation, debate, speaking, etc., is done live. So that would be the percent. 60, 70, sometimes to 40, 30. So you've probably heard Alena say this. 60 to 70% of the learning is taking place on the platform. The Zoom part is a smaller part of an online course. And I totally agree, whether it's at model or mood or it's learning or Blackboard, you need some kind of platform. A lot of people are using Google Classroom here in the UK, for example. And what you can do is you can link the platform to the Zoom lesson. So you might ask the students to do an activity in preparation for the Zoom lesson. And that means that when you start the Zoom lesson, you're not starting from the beginning. You can be kind of moving straight into the higher order thinking skills types activities. So you might get the students to watch a video or read an article at home. And then in the class, you might then put them into groups and get them to discuss that article or give them a series of activities to do around the video that you've asked them to watch. So immediately, it's not a teacher-centered lesson. It's much more centered on the students. Yeah, I agree. That's exactly what I see. That's exactly what I see. And that's exactly my experience of all the years that I've been teaching online. That really the platform is still, and see it's kind of interesting because most people have jumped on the bandwagon of Zoom and oh, I've got to do a virtual class without having that bigger picture. I'm getting lots of emails of teachers saying, well, I don't know how to organize my students. I get in these emails. They're uploading there, sending me their homework. You really do need that kind of central location, don't you, to organize people? Yes, a repository of all your materials and all their activities. And then you have the grading possibility or tracking their grading and their results. So it's good that you have a place where you can see all the data that will be relevant for your formative assessment, for your summative assessment, depending on how you organize your materials. Now, we're going to listen to another teacher, Keith, who's actually a school owner, another great teacher. And it's interesting that Keith's got a slightly different opinion about the importance of the platform. And that's partly because he's dealing with young students. And young students, obviously, the face to face becomes more important. And in some cases, it's very difficult actually to even get the students to access a platform after the lesson because of their mouse controls, etc. But listen what Keith's got to say about how important the platform is in terms of organizing his teaching and learning. At the moment, I would say that that platform is 50% of what we're doing. Zoom is only half the story. Yeah. Zoom is the face to face contact, but there's, you know, in teaching, you've got to be able to deal with all of the things that you normally do in class, which is to do with paperwork, sending out documentation, receiving documentation, playing recordings, receiving recordings. I can tell you, even when Zoom did have to document share, recordings were a no-go. It was just too slow. It was too slow. It would not work. Even PDF copies were really slow on downloads. So in order to overcome that, I swapped immediately over to Edmodo because Edmodo is a much more robust system in terms of sharing documentation, recordings, and videos. It also means that most of the students who have, you know, already on Edmodo, because we've been using it for some years, are able to access this information. And there is no learning curve for them. They just go and do what they did before. Yeah. And also Edmodo is quite similar to Facebook. So it's quite intuitive, isn't it, as a platform to use? Yeah. Students, for the first time, find it familiar. Yeah. And that familiarity is a huge benefit in terms of, firstly, it's an easy sign-up. Yeah. You know, the sign-up is pretty, pretty easy. And also what's beneficial, and I didn't realize this at all in the beginning, is that students sign up with their names. Yeah. They don't sign up with user names. Yeah. There is a user name for them to get into it. Yeah. But they actually sign up with their names, which helps the teacher when it comes to messaging. Yeah. You know, it's user names. User names are normally nonsensical. So now both being great teachers, both actually talked about the link between the live session and the platform. And for example, Keith uses the platform to have all the documentation ready for the live session. So he doesn't have to worry about, for example, the fact that you can't even add up files at the moment in Zoom. I think they're going to change that back again, but at the moment it's been turned off. Because basically all the content that he wants to work with during the Zoom session is also on the platform. So he's using the platform in the Zoom session as well. And Alena's doing exactly the same. And this is something that I think that as teachers evolve and get more confident, they'll begin to realize that it's not only, yes, you need a live session, yes, you need a platform, but actually you can combine the two together. Yeah. I mean, they get, often they get directed after the classroom to, obviously, that's where, historically, that's where we put all of the homework anyway. Yeah. We never handed out paperwork in the classroom. We just stuck all the homework on there. So that is the, after the class activities, pre-class yet. We're already with things that I need to use through, for example, through various classes, but at the same level. So if I have, during the week, let's say three classes, three different classes that are studying at level B1, I might want to cover the same video with all three classes to keep them all up to date at the same time. So I'll put the video onto that model. And it's there, and it's very quick to get to while you're actually sharing screen through Zoom online. So if you need to use materials that you can be using multiple times during the week, Edmodo is a good place to store that stuff, where it's just, I've always seen Edmodo as a one-stop shop. Yeah. So when we're teaching online, we're normally talking about two parts, the live part and the platform. And if I look at most of my courses, you'd be quite surprised how few live sessions I do in comparison to the amount of work that would be on the platform. For example, I run a class in the flip classroom. And in the three weeks that I do that course, there's only two live sessions. There's a lot of content on the platform. There's various activities for the students to do. Sometimes there's a forum for them to discuss things together in collaboration with other students. But basically, I try to link the two together. But the majority of the learning, in my case, is done on the platform. Now, when we're working with younger learners, it's probably going to change. But definitely the platform can play a role once the student gets to a certain age. Probably about 11, 12 years old, you can begin to put more and more content onto the platform to get the students to be organized and working with the platform. Now, one final thing I want to say, and this is really interesting for me, especially if you're working in languages, and I know this because that's where most of my work is, many of the publishing companies have a platform that's linked to the books that they use. And those platforms can often do the same job as Edmodel or Schoolology or Moodle. In other words, they have places that have three important things because there's basically three things that we need to think about when we're working on a platform. First of all, we need a place to organize the students. Secondly, we need content. And third, we need activities. Now, the publishers' platforms have masses of content. In fact, they've already got the content there. The teacher doesn't even have to upload it. So if you're using one of the publishers' books where there's a platform, the students can go home and do the activities online that the teacher's suggested to them. The teacher can actually see how many of the students have done the homework, what scores they got, et cetera. So there's loads of content. And there's loads of activities all pre-prepared. When you use a technology like Edmodel or Moodle, you would have to make the content. But when you use the publishers' platforms, then the content and the activities are already in place. Now, they're not so good at communicating and used for discussion purposes. They don't do that process so well as a platform like Moodle or Edmodel. But it's definitely an alternative. And they do normally allow you to message the students. So you could be doing a Zoom lesson. And then for homework, you can send in the students to the platform to do activities connected with what you've done in class. Or switch it around and do it the other way. Students access video, access content online at home for the homework. And then bring that into the Zoom or into the live session. So I was just trying to make this point. I hope this video has been useful. It was brilliant having Elena and Keith to help me there. And it was great that they kind of said similar things. Slightly different stories because of the fact that Keith works in the language school. Elena works in the university. But as a point, I run these online courses, training teachers. I'm always saying two parts, two fundamental parts. There's other bits around it. But fundamentally, it's two things. A technology that you need to use for the live session and a platform. And my feeling, if you're working in language teaching or in any other area where these publishers have platforms that have got content and activities already on them, that might be the way to go. Hope that video was useful. If you want more free videos, please come to teachertrainingvideos.com. Loads and loads of different technologies along the top there. Just click on them. You might be interested in doing our free online course. About 3,500 teachers have done it so far. It's a combination of or a collaboration between Nile and teachertrainingvideos.com. And it really does take you through the fundamentals of organizing an online course. And it will talk about this relationship between the platform and the live session. If you want to follow my work, then please sign up to my newsletter. That way you keep up with all the blogs, with all the online courses, with the webinars, and of course with the latest videos. 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