 OTAN, Outreach and Technical Assistance Network. Hello everyone, my name is Anthony Buerk. I'm a project specialist at OTAN. Welcome to today's OTAN Tech Talk. I would like to introduce our presenter today, Yesenia Delgado Lorenzo, Adult Education Counselor at Hacienda La Puente, Adult Education. Yesenia's topic is best practices for teaching online. Let's get started. Take it away, Yesenia. Thank you, Anthony. And I'm going to be sharing my screen with all of you. Here we go. Thank you so much for being here today. So my name is Yesenia Delgado Lorenzo, and I am a counselor at Hacienda La Puente Adult Education. I've been an instructor for the last 10 years. I've taught academic and CTE classes. My focus of research and study has really been online learning. How do we teach online courses and what do students grab from them? Like how do we get them to complete the course? How do we get the most retention out of our online courses? So today I'll be sharing the best practices for teaching online. I'm going to start off with a quote, and this is one of my favorite quotes, which is technology will never replace great teachers, but technology in the hands of a great teacher can be transformational. And I have seen that throughout my classes. It's utilizing the technology that we do have to better our practices and to engage our students. Today our goal is really to review some empirical best practices for online teaching and discuss how we can apply these best practices in our own classrooms. So we'll get started. I have 10 best practices that we'll discuss through this presentation. The first one is, so the first best practice that research has shown us is to be present in our course site. So even if you're teaching a course that's 100% online, time and time again, research has proven that teacher presence is the key to retention and student participation. I've taken a few classes myself where the teacher is completely away from the course and we're just basically interacting with the course material or the learning management system. So one of the key things that we've learned from research is that the teacher, the instructor needs to be present. So according to study surveys, the best online faculty are instructors who show their presence in the course multiple times a week at best daily. So also setting clear expectations as to when you will be present and when you will not be present as many of us are juggling multiple tasks. It is difficult to continue to answer all those messages from our students but providing them with that clear expectation of your messages will be responded to in 24 hours. It's gonna be helpful for the students knowing when is my teacher present? Are you available from nine to 12 in the morning? Are you available from five to nine in the evening? So setting those course policies is gonna be very helpful and it's gonna also reduce you answering those constant messages or those constant emails throughout your entire day. So this is really gonna depend on your particular style, setting your regular times when you can meet with students virtually or in the classroom or answering their emails is gonna be invaluable to your time management as well. So that's our number one best practice. Our number two best practice is creating a supportive online course community. So a good strategy for developing a supportive online course community is to design a course with balanced set of dialogues. So when we're talking about dialogues is how do we communicate with our students, right? How do the students communicate with each other and how do the students communicate with the resources that we have set in the course? This means designing a course that has all three dialogues where students are able to communicate with faculty, where students are able to communicate with other students and where students are also able to communicate with what you've posted in your own course. So in most courses, the dialogue of instructor to student is provided through maybe mini lectures, maybe a text, maybe video or audio podcast. So even if, so even that communication style, if you are teaching a full online course, being creative and maybe doing a screencastify or doing a quick video of yourself explaining what they're expected to do that week and sending that out in the course messages. So then that student has that individual faculty to student dialogue, right? And then having those internal discussions internally where students are able to dialogue with each other within the course. Our practice three is to share expectations for your students and for yourself. So one of the things that we've learned over and over again in research is that this best practice cannot be overemphasized. So include on your course site a set of expectations of how students need to communicate and dialogue online and how they communicate with you. So providing them with examples if we're expecting them to do an online post or a chat, providing them with the first example, especially early on in your course as you start to set up your course, the first couple of group chats or the first couple of dialogues, we should provide assistance and provide an example if we're expecting the student to create a video and uploaded providing an example of that video. Another example would be many faculty tell students that they can expect a response within 24 hours during each week. Online learning is just as intensive as face-to-face learning. And sometimes I feel like online learning is a little bit more intensive because students really need to have their own time management and they really need to be able to be organized enough to complete the assignments on their own. So we need to provide those clear expectations of when they need to turn things in, being able to put in those due dates and provide them with that information and plan things ahead of time. So being clear as how much effort and time will be required on a weekly basis, keep surprises to a minimum to our students, being able to provide them how long should a task take them? If we're expecting them to do a specific activity, how long should it take? And giving that information to the students prior to that week, so they're able to justify the time that they need to complete that assignment. Practice number four is to use a variety of large group, small group and individual work experiences. So a community works well when there's a variety of activities and experiences. Online courses can be more enjoyable and effective when students have an opportunity to brainstorm and work through concepts and assignments with more than other students. At the same time, students work and learn best on their own. So building in options and opportunities for students to work together and individually is highly recommended. So as you break up your objective, being able to look at that specific objective that you want your student to learn and finding activities of, okay, how do I incorporate a large group activity into this objective? And then a small group activity where students are expected to maybe work with one or two other students and then incorporate a different activity where they're doing it individually and they're able to complete that activity on their own. So they can see their progress throughout each activity as they learn each objective. Our practice number five. So use both synchronous and asynchronous activities. So multiple online courses almost always use asynchronous activities. It is important to use the tools we have in the course management system, virtual live classrooms and audio tools to make it possible to do almost everything we do on campus. So bringing that element of the classroom on a full online class is gonna be important. We shouldn't have those students do different types of activities. We should find the way and be creative to make them almost similar to what we do in the classroom. If we do a group activity in the classroom, how can we bring that into an online learning classroom utilizing those break rooms and Zoom, utilizing the different resources we have on our learning management system to make those group activities. Plus we often engage learners in more collaborative and reflective activities. And what happens is recorded in archive and is there for their review. That is one of my favorite things about online learning is being able to record what we do. Being able to share with a student that has missed the class, the recording of the class. So they're able to come back and review those activities. In many of my lessons, I actually prefer teaching them on Zoom, especially when it's something that I know my students are gonna need to review. I almost prefer teaching it on Zoom because I can record it. They have that archive of coming back and watching a step-by-step process online. There's nothing better than real-time interactive brainstorming and sharing discussion. So those discussions are really rich resources for our students that they're able to come back and review them. For example, real-time problem-solving questions and answering review sessions can be very effective for the learning experience. And it also allows to build our students' self-efficacy, right? So when we start looking at self-efficacy is how do we scaffold that learning, right? Providing those instructional support systems early on to build in multiple opportunities to practice and gradually remove those supports. So as we're able to present this material in a group setting and we're able to record it and our students are able to come back and see it, it's building in their self-efficacy. It's building in that positive influence and that motivation that they can do this on their own as well. Practice number six. So early in the course, get feedback. So course evaluations are usually called post-evaluations, right? So we usually do them at the end and they're usually done after the fact and nothing can change or increase the satisfaction to facilitate learning to a class that has just completed. You want that feedback, that feedback is so important. But research has also showed us that early feedback is just as important. So early feedback surveys or just informal discussions to ask students to provide feedback on what they're currently working on in the course is going to be helpful to you to better the course experience, right? Especially as we're teaching online, we wanna get that feedback from our students of what is working, what is not working? What are they having trouble with if we're utilizing any online tools? We want that feedback early on so we can provide resources, so we can go back and reteach that specific technology that we're trying to get them to learn because as we teach our students, not only are they learning a new technology, they're also learning course content, right? So we wanna get that feedback on how are these tools working for you? So early feedback, those early surveys are gonna help us find out what's really going on in the back and it's gonna give us that early feedback so we can make those corrections, we can make those modifications as we go along, not just getting early feedback on what they're learning, but also the early feedback is important on how the course is going. What do they like? What don't they like? Especially early on in the course so we can engage in and capture those things we wanna change so they can complete the course. Practice number seven is prepare discussion posts that invite questions, discussions, reflection and responses. So discussions in an online course are equivalent to class discussions in a face-to-face class. The key difference, of course, is that discussions are asynchronous, providing time for thought and reflection and requiring maybe a written, a video, audio responses that become part of the course archive. So these are gonna be really important according to research, discussions, really the purpose is to provide an open question and surf forum to encourage critical, getting creative thinking, reinforcing domain and procedural process and really to achieve that social interaction and community building within our classroom. So one of the first activities that I usually do for all of my online learning classes is, I build that community because I want them to feel comfortable in the classroom posting their posts. So for example, the first activity that I do in my online courses, if I'm gonna use discussion forums every week, I explain what the discussion forum is and maybe one of their first activities is to post a picture of their favorite shoes and provide a story as to why they're their favorite shoes. So I use the teaching of the online discussion board and how to use it, but then I provide a really simple activity to build community within the post itself and to kind of guide the students to let them know, like, hey, every week you're gonna have a post and these are the expectations and we kind of build that community within it. And it also, as we build these discussion courses in the learning process, it validates their experiences, it validates what they're learning. It helps support their own reflections and their own inquiries. So at least that minimum, depending on your course, right? We should have discussions daily, weekly, depending on your course time and what the expectations are for that course, but we should definitely be taking advantages of this course in ESL, one of my favorite things to do when we were learning fruits. And I taught ESL literacy over the pandemic and it was super difficult to try and teach that class through Zoom, but it was interesting, my students were resilient. They had to post a picture of something they ate that week and explain the food of what they ate and even my literacy students found a way to communicate in English and in a very, very simple sentence, would be able to upload a picture of an apple, a picture of a banana and explain this is a fruit, it is an apple, right? Or whatever they were experiencing and it was pretty amazing to see the validation of their learning from that week. Practice number eight, focus on the content resources and links to current events and examples that are easily accessed by learners' computers. So if content is not digital, so if the content's not digital, it is as if it doesn't exist to our students. This means that content that students will more likely use is content and applications that are available from their computer. So we also have to think about what we're posting for them, right? If it's a PDF, is it accessible on their phone? If they're only using their phone to access the class, what format are we utilizing? One of my favorite tools is Google Drive, sharing documents through Google Drive because you share that link, they open it and no matter if they're accessing it from their phone or a computer or a tablet, it's easy, it's accessible. So are we actually uploading a PDF into our learning management system or do we wanna upload a link? Which one is all formats accessible through the use of what your students are using for the class? So students want to be learning everywhere, especially those students taking those classes online, they access the course at any time and often while they're doing other things, many of our students are working parents and they're watching your videos while they're cooking dinner at home. So we wanna make things as accessible as possible for them. So content that is mobile and content that can be accessed through all devices welcomes students to access that content. And this really also kind of falls into place with expectancy value and the rationale that include a discussion of the importance and the utility value of learning, them wanting to take the content that they're learning at that time and apply it, not just the content that you're teaching, but also the content of the technology used as well. They wanna be able to apply it. Many of our learners are learning the technology as they're taking our course and they're learning in our course, they're learning new things, they're learning how to access new links and a new learning management system. So practice number nine. This best practice combines a number of basic learning principles explained in length in other resources. So very briefly, it means that faculty identify core concepts to be learned in a course, the performance goal and then mentor learners through a set of increasingly complex and even customized projects applying these core concepts. Supporting learners with their personal goals that are closely linked to the performance goal of the course and even beyond the course is a win-win for learners individually and as a class. So we wanna combine our course concepts with our personal learning goals that our students have. So that's really us as instructors getting to know our students, right? Being able to match up their learning with their own individual lifestyles and what their learning goals are for themselves. So another key principle that aids in the concept of learning comes from Vagosky. He notes that concepts are not works but rather organized and intricate knowledge clusters. So this is a simple but profound principle. This means that while we must teach in a linear fashion presenting concepts individually and in small clusters is gonna really allow our students to link them up to those real life scenarios. And here's just a little bit on principles of information processing. We wanna break it up as much as we can into small little clusters that they're able to grasp and comprehend. So we wanna present information in manageable parts. That's why one of the things that I do in the beginning of my course, my first couple of classes, I'm really just focusing on them learning the learning management system and then learning the different applications that I'm gonna use in the class. So I'm kind of setting them up for success by pre-training the concept of the technology before I start to develop mastery in the course content itself. So first I wanna develop the mastery on the tools that they're gonna use, the different links that they're gonna access and then I start to bring in all the other different pieces or the different objectives that I wanna teach for my class. Our final best practice is plan a good closing and wrap up activity for the course. So of course, as the course comes to a close, it's easy to forget the value of a good closing experience in the final weeks of the course. Students are likely to be stressed and not take the time to do the list and the planning to help them reduce and calm stress. So remember to take time and remind students of the final course activity but designing a course activity that closes your course and encompasses some type of learning reflection and the integration of the knowledge that they have learned both the content and the technology itself, maybe utilizing the tool that you're using to teach your online learning tool for them to present from. So these are gonna be some really good student presentation, some student summaries, analysis of the course where they're able to provide their insights and their knowledge to really show us what fundamental principles they've taken from the course. So this was a really quick synopsis of the 10 best practices. Each one of these can be taken into an individual training and we can kind of take each one of these and apply different technology tools that we can use into each of them. So just a reminder, this is only a quick synopsis but if you want the full presentation or if you need, please make sure you contact O10. I'm gonna leave you with a quick thought. So E-learning can cover up to five times the material of instructor-led training in the same amount of time. So if we utilize our learning management systems properly, we can cover five times the amount of curriculum that we normally would, right? And it's just setting it up for student success. So having said this, I'm gonna go ahead and close out today and I'm gonna hand it back over to Anthony here at O-10 and it's all yours. Thank you, Yesenia, for all of that great information. O-10 would also like to thank all of its viewers and if you have an ed tech tool or tip that you'd like to share with the adult education field, email your O-10 Tech Talk idea to us at supportatotan.us. Please also subscribe to the O-10 YouTube channel where you can watch a number of videos on a variety of technology related topics, including previous O-10 Tech Talks. We'd also like to remind you that O-10 is a leadership project for adult education in California. And if you are at a WIOA funded agency, you can contact O-10 for additional services, including face-to-face and online, hands-on professional development at your site. Visit the O-10 website at www.otan.us or contact us by phone or email. Thank you again for watching today's O-10 Tech Talk.