This presentation was delivered on 15 October 2020 to the Learning for Employment (Lfe) consortium, Melbourne, Australia.
The focus was on changes made to the model of delivery associated with migrating my own adult EAL class online from the beginning of the COVID-19 health emergency in March 2020. Developments and refinements to the model continue.
PS. Click on each slide for a better view. There are links to short video snippets accompanying some slides.
PPS. the commentaries below are lecture notes - more "stream of consciousness" than crafted composition
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Then e-learning comes along, and the old school seems to change. We don't have to be in the same time and space to learn. But pedagogically, things stay much the same. The cells of the timetable become the cells of the learning management system, blocks of time in the syllabus, day after day, week after relentless week. In “flipped classroom” videos, the teacher still mostly talks and the student mostly listens. The communications architecture is still one-to-many. Didactic knowledge transmission has gone online.
—- Bill Cope and Mary Kalantzis, ‘Five Theses on the Future of Learning’ https://tinyurl.com/y4gtpg7n
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"Why we go back I can do all online? We working together just like in classroom, why we go back?”
—- M., Adult ESL learner, surveyed about study preferences for 2021 in an imagined COVID free situation
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Slide 1 : Frontispiece /Intro
...Even if COVID went away tomorrow, isn't it time to reconsider the traditional teaching set up that has been with us for the better part of a century now? How useful, flexible and satisfying is traditional classroom delivery for busy adults who are also searching for work and have a range of other responsibilities and issues? As the astonished disbelief of my student, M., demonstrates, not all adult learners are so keen to get back to the traditional bricks and mortar classroom as many would assume.
Shouldn’t we be taking the opportunity of this period to reform the system? Students need to start genuinely owning and managing some of their own learning and teachers need to start developing a range of skills to help them (and themselves) adapt to online and blended environments that are going to be with us into the foreseeable future.
Hopefully this presentation can provide some pointers.
Slide 3: Changing direction
My initial model was influenced by the belief we would be returning to the classroom within a few weeks! Little did I know it would be most of 2020 ... and who knows what the future holds?
Let’s take the use of print based workbooks during the first lockdown phase. While others rushed to produce them and struggled to distribute and collect them I had serious doubts about the whole strategy.
The logistics of their delivery, retrieval and correction are very problematical.
1) When exactly do the workbooks reach the student and get returned to the teacher - either through arrangements for pick up and drop off, or the postal service? Both systems became progressively problematical during the restrictions as direct personal contact between students and centres was cut due to OH&S considerations. It was also costly, risky and slow asking students to make use of the postal service to return photocopied work.
2) Aren’t there issues around “correcting” work in any case? Is corrected student work really revised by the student when it is returned? In my experience the answer is usually "no” so just like “homework” which has limited value in most cases, this exchange is essentially a time wasting exercise for both parties.
Or was it just a way of proving work had been set, done and returned to please management, funding bodies and the like regardless of whether learning was actually taking place?
All of this went against the rich collaborative work and communication amongst students we normally facilitate in class. I was determined to involve the students themselves in working together and reviewing their work amongst themselves - and not just have me receiving homework to tick and return.
Sure, there is a role for the teacher - but the time for direct review of student work and progress by the teacher is better spent with the student face to face whether it is actual or virtual - see my discussion about online mini-lessons with students below)
Multiple dialogues and lots of group interaction are key. Learners should not be confined by the narrow one-to-many teaching approach : this transmission model is amplified in an online situation with studying online becoming a very lonely place for students stuck at home.
My approach attempts to encourage pair and group work, to build relationships and communication between students.
My “workbook” is really an "anti-workbook" of sorts - it is more an occasion for setting up situations for inter-student communication and collaboration rather than focusing on content which the individual consumes in isolation from others. It should be a jumping off point for actual practice in the macro skills rather than a lonely and tedious form of busy work.
My “workbook” is really an "anti-workbook" of sorts - it is more an occasion for setting up situations for inter-student communication and collaboration rather than focusing on content which the individual consumes in isolation from others. It should be a jumping off point for actual practice in the macro skills rather than a lonely and tedious form of busy work.
Slide 4: More points of communication
The first version of my workbooks were also focused heavily on content (as the slide above illustrates) although each activity had some ‘talk’ engineered around them. Students used the phone and later video chat to talk about their answers with one another but more you interaction was needed.
Something interesting started happening almost of its own accord during that first phase - the students themselves were restless for more interactivity and began photographing and sending the work by email and SMS to me on their own volition. I also noticed that a few were starting to use video chat clients and the like to communicate and socialise with one another.
Overall the work returns were actually patchy and only the most technologically savvy or best supported students were reliable.
There was a downside to these electronic returns - a huge increase in collecting, correcting, responding and filing it at all hours throughout the week - in fact, it became overwhelming.
In response to these developments and challenges I started to reconfigure my workbook, reducing the amount of content and setting up more points of communication (by phone, video chat, and later, Zoom) with each activity I designed.
The workbook was in PDF - a huge advantage over its paper-based counterpart as it could be reliably and quickly distributed by email without delay. But it occurred to me that these efficiencies afforded by the technology could be better (See Google Docs discussion below as an instant channel for distribution and interaction)
Slide 5: Towards plasticity
Imagine, a workbook which could ....
- be delivered to the students instantly;
- be completed and corrected effortlessly;
- be a document in which a range of other media, links and resources could easily be embedded;
- be shared with more than one student with strategies developed to get them working together and communicating with one another.
- that could be read on any device and require no installation of software;
- that is not just a workbook but more of an environment in which students and the teacher "meet" to share, edit and comment on each others'work;
- that is linked to a series of cloned copies that can be shared and be moved between by the teacher and even other students;
- that is totally free.
That workbook is already potentially available in the form of Google Docs.
Slide 6: Interconnected Activities
The reformed learning cycle aimed to be like the dynamic structure of an Ecosystem rather than be an inert, management system. A learning cycle in which the parts flow into one another and work together (activities in the workbook prompt communication between students who must work together to complete it.
The workbook prefigures extension activities done in Zoom or followed up on discussion boards or through quizzes ... and a range of other platforms / use of apps --- and these in turn, flow into others and this worked well, as long as there are not too many difficult layers for learners to navigate (multiple logins, difficult interfaces, etc)
*Supportive use of "low-tech" (phone!) to support activities and encourage peer interaction
*More time can be carved out during the week for short one-on-one sessions with the teacher.
Time to review and check on students individually is important so a key "affordance" of online delivery is that there is time and space for this to happen, unlike the classroom, in which the group is pushed along a certain path together and assessed at the end of the cycle regardless of whether they are ready or not.
Slide 7: Google Docs as a communicative learning environment
Google docs can be used as an environment or location in which work is done collaboratively with interactions between students and teacher almost being synchronous.
Google docs can be used as an environment or location in which work is done collaboratively with interactions between students and teacher almost being synchronous.
The workbook can be stand alone and self paced to a degree - it can be downloaded and worked on offline whenever a student chooses. However, it was the potential for devising “real time”, “plastic” virtual structures for collaboration and direct communication between students that most interested me.
I developed a range of workbook types : individual workbooks and assessment booklets, pair work and larger group workbooks.
The latter types prompt the teacher to think about activities in terms of interaction not just content to be consumed and completed by each students individually.
Using Google Docs as the workbook medium, they can actually be released simultaneously. If all students are logged on and have their workbooks open, the teacher can literally line them up across her screen and jump between each workbook, correcting, commenting and observing as students work in pairs or teams. Imagine being able to talk to the student while she and her partner work together - not possible as yet
For now the teacher can enter into a “chat” dialogue with the student(s) in the margins with the workbook using the Comments tool.
Google Docs can also be used as a good channel for written assessment - When an assessment task or booklet is completed in Docs it can be instantly converted to PDF and be sent to the assessor via that student's unique email address thus providing a certain level of reliability as regards authentic authorship.
The 2 step verification process which is required to take out a Google account helps to verify the identity of the student - it is almost as good as an electronic signature, and cannot be easily exploited.
Slide 8: Three types of Google Docs workbook
As stated above, I have designed three types of "workbook"
1) individual (mainly for assessment);
2) pair workbook - students working collaboratively on information gap type activities - incorporate use of phone and video chat into pair activities - use as a base for group activities in Zoom ;
3) Group Workbook - students working on larger projects of 3,4 or more. There is no reason you could not design a single class workbook in which everyone works on the same page (something I am experimenting with now) with the smart use of designated tables.
Slide 9: Mini-lessons as a more effective mechanism for teacher review and observation of student work
By scheduling a day in which students generally work together on a combined project in preparation for an online, whole class conference, time can be carved out for individual sessions with students.
This is something not afforded the teacher and student in the traditional, time bound, face to face classroom in which every student is more or less pushed through the same program at the same time, in the same place and at the same pace!
These mini-lessons or reviews evolved out of my individual work with students negotiating and overseeing learning plans which you can read about here.
Slide 10: Zoom Classes - beware the danger of allowing it to become a totalising classroom surrogate
Two scheduled Zoom meetings (1.5 hours Monday afternoon - picks up on activities collaboratively done by pairs or groups on Monday morning through the Shared Google Doc workbook.
2 hours on Wednesday - consolidates/extends work done on Tuesday in pairs or groups and shared through the Google Doc Workbook.
Zoom should not be used like some kind of “nanny-cam” - it is being used as such in many programs as a substitute for f-2-f classes. Again, just another way of proving the class is happening (you’ve got your students there and captive as you do in the f-2-f classroom) ...with little to show for actual learning?
There is a danger that this use of Zoom reduces possibilities for the development of other flexible and creative strategies, use of other platforms and products. Zoom is not a classroom replacement.
It provides an opportunity for some whole class socialisation, some role play through breakout rooms, some review through Sharing - but that’s about it.
It has its use as a virtual place to meet but the more I think about it, the more I am starting to think we need to move away from its application as a totalising “classroom surrogate” and start teaching students to use it to convene their own meetings?
*Why not teach students to use Zoom as a convenient recording tool for their own presentations, role plays etc?
*Why not re-purpose it as a tool for student initiated collaboration rather than always using it to ape the outdated practices of the traditional classroom environment?
Zoom needs to be used sparingly and amongst other tools and strategies so a productive and flexible balance is struck.
Slide 11: "Correction" and Review revisited - video use / mini-lessons
Correction and review videos - short screencasts produced by the teacher which allow students to review activities in their own time.
Correction and review videos - short screencasts produced by the teacher which allow students to review activities in their own time.
Why not use synchronous environments productively/creatively rather than a teacher led opportunity for dry, lock step correction of exercises dished out to students via workbooks?
Yet again, another mechanism in which we see platforms like Zoom being used to replicate the worst of the traditional classroom in online learning environments. One on one mini-lessons can be used as an opportunity for students to ask questions about aspects of set work they do not understand.
Better still, why not use peer review incorporated into activities themselves as another strategy for review and correction?
12. Links, readings, reviews ...
Kalantzis and Cope : https://newlearningonline.com/e-learning
Disclaimer: the views expressed and approaches taken are my own and not necessarily those of any organisation for which I work or am contracted.
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