 and we're back for the Moodle Mook Global Online. We're here in the education room. Back with Michelle Moore from My Learning Consultants who is going to talk about five ways to make online teaching tougher. Should be interesting. For those in the audience following along live, there will be a short Q and A following. So feel free to post any questions. That said, over to you, Michelle. Very good. Thank you very much, Paul. And thank you for joining me. So the goal of today's conversation is to talk about the things that I have seen people doing that are making online teaching tougher. This comes from, gosh, 15, 17 years of experience, working with different organizations, educators, trainers, using Moodle in their classrooms. I've also, over 17 years, I've had lots of opportunities to practice and make mistakes and learn. I've also studied and collaborated with lots of others on these ideas and experiences, the master's degree in instructional design and technology and the never-ending doctorate in learning technologies where I've really been spending time thinking about online learning. And so I'm hoping that I can share a few things with you to help make your job a little bit easier and provide some nice benefits to your students as well. As I go into this, I will say that I recognize we're in kind of a weird time with COVID. People are having to move online more quickly than ever and that does present some unique challenges. But hopefully I can provide some information here that'll help you make even that task a little bit easier. So the first thing that I see a lot of people do that makes online teaching more difficult is they make it their job to have all the answers. Now, I get this, right? Many of us are teachers, educators at heart and we feel like that's our role. People are paying us to have all the answers, to give them all the information and we take that responsibility on and we feel bad if we leave our students to struggle too much. But really, there are other ways to do this and other ways to make your job easier. So one of the ways this comes out is teachers and trainers feel compelled to produce all of the content. So they're writing the content, they're producing videos, they're gathering web links, YouTube videos of all the best stuff out there. And I would say there's a better way, right? Try instead open educational resources or Creative Commons content. Try collaborating with colleagues. There are other people, if not in your own organization here at the Moot, all around the world who are developing the same kinds of information, the same kinds of content. Put your heads together and see what you can come up with and then consider sharing it back out with the community. Also think about asking your students to source and share information. One of my favorite examples of this and I apologize if you've heard this before but a lot of times teachers will spend a lot of time trying to find the perfect video or creating the perfect video on a given topic. I would say instead ask your students to go search for the perfect video, the thing that resonates most for them. And in that case, the students will actually probably watch more videos and do more thinking about the content within than if you had provided the single, the one video. So it lets students find information that works the best for them. And then think about letting students do the teaching. There's a certain level of information in many cases that the students can source and present and that could be in a live session, that could be in creating a lesson, that could be in writing quiz questions. There are lots of ways to engage students in this process. The second thing that I see is the teacher, the trainer trying to make sure they answer all of the questions. So if you have a question and answer forum in the course or a general discussion forum, or even in introductions, I see people try to answer every student as they come in. You actually kind of disempower your students, I don't know if that's a word, but when you do that, right, if the goal is to have students engage and contribute, let them answer each other's questions. Take a step back. So instead of trying to answer every question, like I said, create a space for students to ask and answer questions. Create a collection of FAQs. Let students submit to those FAQs. You can set it up so you can approve them, to make sure that nothing goes out that's not quite right. Also think about videos for common topics or common questions, or let the students record those videos. How did you do that? Will you create a video and share it with the class? Let students take the lead on office hours. This one's kind of interesting to me, right? In my own courses, when I would work with students, I would find that a fair number of their questions were fairly straightforward. We would walk through a certain process or clarify the instructions. What would happen if you let students answer each other's questions? Or maybe you have a program where you have more experienced students in advanced courses, and perhaps they could take the lead on office hours for the introductory courses. Think about what that does for your students. The students learn that they are resourceful, they have the information. It reduces the amount of reliance on you, and as nice as that is, that's not the end goal. So you can actually create all sorts of opportunities for you and your students both, freeing you up to do what you do best. Another thing I see is that the teacher tries to provide all the feedback. So they're spending hours grading papers, providing feedback, recording videos, whatever it is. There are other ways to manage this as well. So look for automated feedback options. There are lots of tools in Moodle that would allow you to provide feedback and help catch students earlier in the learning process to know that they understand or to help them figure out where they've gone wrong before you get too far, and then the feedback becomes a novel that you have to write to kind of straighten them out. I'd also encourage you to engage students in the peer review process. And again, Moodle offers lots of choices here, whether it's doing ratings on discussion forums and glossary entries, or using the workshop module for a full-on peer review process. Another thing that teachers are doing that makes teaching tougher is they're limiting access to content. Now this sounds kind of crazy, like the goal is to teach, the goal is to get the information out there. They're not reading my stuff as it is. Why would I try and make that harder? Well, it's not that we're doing it on purpose. It's that it just kind of happens, right? Because we're used to a certain set of tools and capabilities, and we don't always realize the complexity that that adds for students. Think about this. For those of you who don't know what these are, these are cassette tapes. We use these when I was a kid. And the cassette tapes are still a completely viable option for recording audio and playback, right? I could say here, I've recorded this cassette tape for you students, pull out your cassette recorder or your cassette player and play it back. It's completely valid, but the complexity of doing that would just be insane, right? The student has to find a cassette player. I have to develop all these tools. I have to, you know, all this sort of stuff. We do a similar sort of thing when we post things as word documents and PowerPoints. When really we could be delivering those as PDFs or even better yet, in forms that are developed and delivered strictly through Moodle. If we can make our content wholly web-based, then students can access our content from their phones, from their tablets. They can, yeah, they don't have to have any extra tools. And what we do know now is that students in this environment where students are unexpectedly being asked to learn from home, they don't have all the tools that they have in school. It might be fine to post those PDF files if you have students in the classroom and you know like you have control over the environment, but in this case, we don't. And we're just making things a little bit harder than it needs to be for them. So if you really want your students actually to send the content, eliminate those roadblocks. Think about distributing content as PDF files, again, better yet, as Moodle tools. Upload presentations to a content sharing site like SlideShare or Vimeo. So again, they don't have to download things. And then create content directly in the LMS or let students create content in the LMS. This next one. This has been like a perpetual issue since day one. We've gotten better with this in the Moodle community over the years and teachers have learned more, but I see a lot of educators and trainers spend time trying to make their courses fun, making it look fun, making it look interesting, things like that. But just like this woman, this woman's very colorful. And if she were to start talking to me, I think I would find it a little difficult because I'd be distracted by all of everything that's got going on, that she had going on on her outfit. We do the same things in our courses, right? Whether it's we're highlighting things in color block text. We're using seven different font styles and different colors. All of those things actually increase the cognitive load for your learners, which means your students are spending more time trying to get through the busyness to get to what it is you need to say. So recommendations. Think about universal design and accessibility. That's what this all boils down to. Use heading styles to organize and add emphasis instead of trying to make fonts a specific size and shape. Keep the formatting simple, simple and consistent. If you're not happy with the look of Moodle and you want it to be prettier, talk to someone or figure out how to build it into the theme. There's a lot that you can control at the theme level that carries through the courses that makes things beautiful. And then all you have to do is focus on the content. And then last but not least, strive for consistency. That's important, whether it's within your course and across courses. Another thing that I see being a challenge right now, especially is people are delivering content online only. They're not making it available in other formats. So as you're thinking about delivering your content, make sure that you are delivering it in ways that allows for offline access. Make the mobile app available so students can download your entire course offline. Otherwise, we find students sitting in school parking lots, McDonald's parking lots, trying to access Wi-Fi on their phones to complete their courses. Make it easier for them to be successful. And then offer content in multiple formats. Maybe you love the video idea, but you know that you need to offer that also in text so that people can access that information online. This again meets the demands of universal design and accessibility, improves the situation for all of your learners. The next thing that educators and trainers do is they hold these online meetings and then they do all of the talking. I like to say that if somebody can do an online meeting and watch the recording afterwards and get the same experience, you're not doing it right, right? If you're going to ask your students, your learners, to come in and meet with you and set aside a particular time and take a break from whatever it is they have going on in their house or their other experiences, then make it worthwhile. Make it worth the effort to come in. So if you're doing all the talking, then that's part of the problem there. Make sure that it's worth their effort. So make sure you're not doing lecture, lecture, lecture. This is too common. Instead, if you really want to do the lecture, if you need to present information, record it. And then think about amping that up a little bit by working that into H5P, where you can ask questions along the way and help ensure understanding. The advantage of this is that, one, students can watch it on their own schedule, but it also gives them the option to rewind and watch again, which they can't do in a live session. So imagine the student that has a poor internet connection and is losing every other word. Those live sessions, while you may think they're great, are really problematic for them. Present content in alternative formats. So video is not always the best option. Depends on what they're learning and who your learners are. And then allow learners to source the content. I'm sorry to say, and I found this to be true for myself, that the way I say things, the information I present is not entirely unique to me. If you were to put me and Mary Cooch in the same room and deliver the same presentation, you'd probably hear a lot of the same stuff. There's very little that we have to offer the students can't find somewhere else and get the same information. So save your time and efforts for the things that you can do best. And then a lot of people use these live sessions to deliver information. So I'd say instead, think about announcements in the learning management system. Plan for learner interaction. So as you're planning this live meeting, think about, okay, what are my students doing now? Now what are they doing? What are they doing at the 15-minute mark, the 20-minute mark? And do all of those things that you can't do asynchronously. It won't work in Moodle. It'll be a better experience online in a live meeting. Take advantage of that and use it for those things only. Another challenge is that I see people grading everything. They try to make sure they provide feedback on every single element, whether it's form post, going through and rating each one, giving feedback on every assignment that's submitted, and then doing everything by hand, which makes it that much worse, much more time consuming. So instead, try developing activities that offer immediate automatic feedback, saves you time and provides students huge advantage and that they get the feedback right at the moment of interaction when it's most relevant and most interesting to them. And then allow learners to give each other feedback. As I said before, you can use ratings, you can use the workshop. There are a lot of ways to engage them and the students can cover much of the feedback that you might provide at the lower levels, saving you to be able to provide the more advanced feedback that they may not understand. And then people also spend time grading every submission. Instead, try grading holistically. The forum now offers features to allow you to do this. I would also think about grading your forums holistically across the course. For example, if I think about a face-to-face class and discussions that we might have in that class, we don't expect every student to have something to say about every topic every day. I think it shouldn't be any different in the online space. So think about, could you set up a model or a grading rubric that says, we're gonna have eight forums in this course. And I would expect over the period of this course that you would have something to say six out of eight times or maybe you don't have something original to say to make a new discussion forum post, but you're really great at doing the follow-ups and promoting further interaction and conversation. There's a lot of value in that. Think about developing activities purely for learning too. You have a lot of information about what your learners are doing in the course. So you don't necessarily have to give a grade for every activity to know whether or not students are being successful. And then number five, I see lots of people building from scratch. So they start from a blank course every time, every semester, every new course. And they're trying to remember, how did I set that last time? What worked? How did I do that? Living back to the old course. Instead, work smarter, not harder, duplicate an existing course. Develop your own course template. So figure out like, I know in all of my courses I always put a question and answer forum here. And I like a general discussion forum here and a glossary here. So build a template that works for you that you can apply every time you build a new course. Or, better yet, think about institutional or organizational templates. Organization I was working with yesterday. We were working on developing a template for K through three, another template that we'll use probably four through six and then another that we'll use in grades seven through 12. We also may use different templates for different subject areas. These things are not designed necessarily to lock people in. It's designed to let people make things easier for people to develop courses, save them time and make things easier for students because they don't have to guess or around to find where things are. I had a conversation with someone, a colleague just the other day and they had tracked across courses. They said, if you looked at five different courses, where would you go to ask a question? Where would you go to find the syllabus? Where would you go to submit an assignment? And it was really interesting to map out the workflow in those five courses and see how different that was. So that might be an interesting exercise to try in your own organization and think about what that means for your students who are trying to complete your courses. You can also use templates to get around the idea of building individual activities. So sometimes people are building every element. So I need a form here. So I'm gonna add an activity and add a form. Instead, build one, duplicate it, copy it and repeat it throughout the course. So you can use the same settings and then just tweak or adjust what you need to adjust. Import your own activities from other courses or if you know somebody else who's done it, import theirs. So that's the way I've worked with a lot of people to learn how to build workshops and lessons. We very rarely ever start with a blank lesson or a blank workshop. We say, let's start with one that works and then modify it. And then individualizing all feedback is another thing that people often spend a lot of time doing. Instead, find and implement rubrics. One of the sites I really love for doing this is Ruby Star for teachers. And perhaps somebody can post that in the comments or the chat, I'll post it in the discussion thread too. Think about developing your own rubrics. We're looking for ways to standardize and streamline the grading process. So, yeah, to make it easier so that you're not writing out all of the comments in every place. And then create a collection of common feedback phrases. In the assignment activity, you can do that and you can build that right in. If you're not using the assignment though, create your own bank elsewhere to save you time and again ensure consistency and allow you to compare apples to apples. And then I'm gonna sneak in at number six here because this is something I've seen, especially with COVID and schools moving completely online when they weren't expecting to. And that is people are worrying a lot about cheating. I understand it's natural. It's the way we were raised, right? We're worried about people cheating. I would say think about these options for controlling and minimizing the risk for cheating. One, randomized questions. Create a larger question bank if you're doing a quiz and give every student a slightly different set of questions. Shuffle the question and answers, set time limits, check your quiz review settings to make sure you're not giving away answers. Try reducing the weight of exams so that the exams are not so central. Try projects or other activities instead and then consider proctoring tools. And then I'll wrap up by saying these things save you time. I'm freeing you up to do what you do best. You can find out better what they know with these kinds of modifications, build connections, especially important where students are working from home and isolated now and provide students more chances to learn. So with that, I do see there are a few questions in the forums. If you don't get your question in here, please send me an email or join me in my learning consultants booth space and we'll do an Ask Anything session there. Thank you very much once again, Michelle, for sharing with us. From my point of view, it was interesting to see the pragmatic examples to counter each of the points that you've brought up. And I'm sure all of us that have worked in online learning of our own experiences similar to those and where we've encountered roadblocks, as you said, especially with the current COVID situation. So let me defer to some questions that we have received from the forums. So Dan McGuire, he asks, have you used open educational resources or openly licensed content? I have not put it into practice. We have worked with organizations to try to incorporate those things in their courses. I will say it can be challenging to try and find the right fit and it can take a fair bit of work. At this point, I'm probably more inclined to pick pieces of content from OER resources rather than try to develop a whole course around that. I think the content is continuing to evolve, but yeah, it still needs to continue to improve. I think for one person trying to develop a course from OER content, it's tough. As an organization, I think it becomes more feasible because you have a team working on it. But there are some cool textbooks out there that are OER. Good answer. Gavin would like to know if there was only one change in typical actions in online teaching, what would it be? So this answer may vary depending on the day and what I've been working on, but the thing that comes to mind right now and I've really been pondering is I see a lot of people who the default is, oh cool, I can just drag resources, files into my course and give them to students that way. And I think that's one of the worst things that we can be doing right now, knowing that we have students who are working on courses from their phones and devices that don't have all of these tools, things like that. So if I could change one thing, I would say, let's start by changing how we're delivering the content. So pull it out of a PDF and put it into a lesson or put it into a book. And then a nice thing that that offers for us too is it's only a minor step to take that content from the PDF to the lesson and then start to build interaction in. So to start to replicate the kind of interaction that we provide in a face-to-face class. Yeah, Leslie likes frequently asked questions. So she asks, what modal activity do you use to compile a frequently asked question bank? Glossary. So the glossary actually has a type or a setting, a display choice that lets you say, present this as an FAQ. So it's just built right there. And then once it's in the glossary, you can do so many things with it. If you've not used the glossary with the random glossary entry block, you can connect that glossary to that block on your course page and have that present those frequently asked questions on the course page. You can have it reload every day, every page reload every week. And then the nice thing about that is you expose those questions to students who may not know they had the question or you may hit them with that question right at the moment they need that information. So big advantage is to do it that way rather than a web page. It's a great example of how to use a modal tool to solve a natural problem. Thank you once again, Michelle. It's always interesting for us to hear your perspective and thank you to everyone in the audience who has joined us. Okay, David enjoys the glossary, but also enjoys the book tool as well. With modal there's always multiple ways to achieve the same goal. Definitely. Okay, so in the absence of any more questions, thank you once again. And I think we can close out the session and bid everyone an enjoyable remainder of the moot. Thank you so much.