Wetland Wednesday
July 22, 2020
This is part one in a three-part discussion on the good, the bad and the ugly of online learning. We hope that this will help both students and teachers prepare for the upcoming school year and that they will benefit from our lessons learned discussion. Please share this with any educators you know.
The demand for online classes and training has grown exponentially as a result of COVID-19. Public and private elementary, middle and high schools are turning to online classes as well as colleges and universities. Working from home and collaborating with co workers is made possible using a number of online education tools. I think that it is a safe bet to say that online education is here to stay and may even replace traditional forms of education.
As with anything new to the marketplace there are good aspects of this and bad. Probably the biggest issue is the lack of student social interaction coupled with a teacherâs inexperience with the online format. Most teachers were not anticipating having to jump right into online learning and it is unfair to expect that they would immediately know how to run a virtual classroom.
Student social distancing is difficult if not impossible to manage in a traditional classroom setting. Unfortunately, online learning makes student social interaction very limited and the life lesson cost of the loss of student social interaction will be high. However, there are some things we can do to make it a little better with the online format and we will discuss these in the coming weeks.
Online classes have a short but dynamic history. We can probably put a start date on the online education technology around 2003. The Swamp School, being an early adopter to anything new and shiny started its first online wetland delineation class in 2006. We have learned a lot about what works and what does not work having taught thousands of online students in the last 14 years.
First, a Zoom meeting is not online learning. Zoom meetings much like its real-life counterpart, the office meeting is largely a waste of time. There may be a few tidbits of knowledge transferred, but given the time spent versus the benefit received, there must be a better way to transfer information. At least in the office meeting there are no barking dogs, kids running around, washing machines running and all the other generally noisy mayhem of normal home life. There are better ways to teach online without Zoom as we will discuss.
A successful online learning program needs to be built upon a learning management system (LMS). There are several very good LMS platforms in the marketplace. The top three are Moodle, Blackboard, and Schoology. There are also a few very bad ones. Google Classroom tops this list. The adage, âyou get what you pay forâ is very true when exploring LMS systems. Blackboard and Schoology are both proprietary LMS systems. They are hosted by the LMS providers and you pay a monthly or annual fee to keep them running. This fee can be quite high. Moodle is open source and therefore free to use. However, it is like getting a free puppy. The puppy is free but the vet bills, food, housing etc. are not. Moodle is very good but requires a robust server system to run on and IT experts to keep it operating smoothly. We use Moodle at the Swamp School and have been very happy with it, but it is not free to run and the server costs maintenance are similar to the hosted LMS fees.
Google Classroom is free. It has very few features and you give Google all your private teaching materials to do what ever the heck it wants to do with it. If you have any class materials that are unique or proprietary, they are available for all to see in the Google universe.
Google Classroom was developed out of a much smaller company that Google purchased and put out of business. It has very limited features, but if all you are looking for is a way to post publicly your class materials on a bulletin board then this is an easy and free way to do it.
Classroom control is a starting point for most LMS systems. Who can access your information and for how long is important to keep students on task. Having due dates for assignments and tests are critical to keeping a student engaged. We have seen this over the years. Students need gentle reminders to keep engaged with the class.
Most of the better LMS systems start with an admissions setup that gives the student a username and password. From there they are enrolled into a class. There should be a defined start and end date to the class and a way for the student to see their progress in the class. The more automated tracking of assignments the better. This will help both the teacher and student keep up to date on the class.
Speaking of teachers, there should be one assigned to the class. The teacher should be available to the students to answer questions in a timely manner. Generally, student questions should be addressed by the teacher during the normal class day or the next class day at the latest. It is critical to have a live teacher as part of the class. As good as you think your presentation materials may be, a teacher is still needed to answer those âwhat ifâ and âI donât understandâ questions that always come up.
Many technical training schools require a subject matter expert (SME) to prepare presentation materials to explain a difficult topic. However, SMEs generally make lousy teachers. They may be an expert on a topic, but teaching is a skill unto its own. If a teacher can grasp the topic, they can find a way to explain it to the student in a much more meaningful way. The teacherâs top skill is communications which is often lacking with many SMEs.
Next week we will discuss how to organize your class materials to make it more effective for your students.