Author: Eleanor

Zoom and MBBS at NUMed with Fiona Clarke

This case study concerns the MBBS programme at NUMed, and the different ways interactive tools and humanising teaching techniques on Zoom has helped facilitate learning during lockdowns. Zoom tools have been used in many different ways, and tools and tips from colleagues, internet searches, and the FMS TEL Humanising the Online Experience webinar have helped enhance these sessions.

From Beginner to Teacher

The prospect of teaching online can be quite daunting, especially if you don’t already have a lot of interest in or experience with the technology. Initially Paul Hubbard offered a help session for Zoom, which was a great help and provided inspiration on how to use the different tools in teaching. With practice, a lot of skills were developed and put into practice with students. After hearing about how Zoom is used in these MBBS sessions, colleagues now come to ask for advice based on the techniques and tools that have been used, and it’s great to be able to provide that for them now.

Humanising the Online Experience in Practice

Turn off Self-View

Some students are very shy, and a range of techniques can help them build their confidence. One among these is turning off self-view in Zoom, which only takes a couple of clicks. This is useful when teaching as well, as your own image can get a little distracting. At first you might worry that you are fidgeting without being aware, but it soon becomes easy to remember that you are still on camera. Students who had initially struggled with presentations or speaking in front of others did become more confident after these interventions, and after getting more comfortable with the Zoom environment.

Encouragement to Switch on Cameras

One thing that has worked very well is giving a lot of deliberate positive feedback to students about switching on their cameras. At the start of sessions students are greeted warmly and the benefits of having the camera on are shared. More importantly, efforts are made to share how lovely it is to see their faces when they do turn the camera on. Even saying something like ‘it’s so nice to see you’ or ‘I’ve missed seeing you all’ as cameras come on encourages others. Since making this deliberate extra effort, a lot more students turn on their cameras during sessions, which helps lift the atmosphere.

Teaching Ethics

Teaching concepts like ethics can be tricky, as they don’t lend themselves to a practical format. To help bring the subject material to life, the ethics segment of the Medicine, Acute Care and Surgery course was previously presented in a very interactive format in person. Students used flipcharts to collate information, moved around the room, worked in groups, did card sorting activities… initially this seemed difficult to replicate online, but it was possible to adapt the sessions using Zoom tools like polling, breakout rooms for group work, and interactive whiteboards.

Approximating In-Hospital Experience

One thing that has been a challenge for the programme is the lack of access to hospitals due to the pandemic, especially for The Hospital-Based Practice course. This is normally case-based, interacting with real patients. The decision was made to create staged patient interactions. These sessions work a bit like branching scenarios in that what the student chooses to do guides the rest of the interaction. A ‘patient’ acts from a script on the Zoom call, and the lecturer can coach the student through the interaction and offer feedback. If the student chooses to, for example, listen to a patient’s breathing, the lecturer provides a sound file of what the student hears when they do so. While this can’t perfectly replicate what it’s like on a ward (patients don’t follow a script!), students still get the chance to practice skills like decision-making and explaining diagnoses.

Advice

The best advice is to try things out and experiment in a Zoom meeting on your own, or with colleagues. Even if you have used a tool before, if it has been a while, just start up an empty Zoom meeting and refresh your memory before it’s time to go live. Google has also been invaluable – it’s possible to fix common issues or refresh your memory by finding software instructions online. Finally, don’t be afraid to try out new tools with students. The interactivity tools such as polls and whiteboards can help bridge the gap and make sessions more engaging.

“Don’t be afraid, just try it out! It’s so worth it, it makes such a difference.”

Fiona Clarke

Resources

Contact

Dr Fiona Clarke, Associate Professor and Senior Lecturer in Medicine, NUMed

Fiona.clarke1@nhs.net

Humanising the Online Experience – Guide

A new guide has been created in the Humanising the Online Experience area on the FMS TEL Canvas Community, and can be accessed directly. You can download this document to keep a summary of the webinar tips handy, or read it below. If you can’t access the FMS TEL Canvas community, please enrol yourself before retrying the direct link.

Humanising the Online Experience

This document summarises the tips from the FMS TEL Humanising the Online Experience webinar. The full set of resources can be found on the FMS Community, including rationale, research, and links to resources. This should be read in conjunction with the University guidance and the guidance available within your school. Not all tips will be useful for all situation or all students – you know your students and can select appropriate strategies.

Objectives

  • know how to set expectations and maintain these
  • have strategies to make synchronous sessions more like PiP interaction  
  • have strategies to be more present in non-synchronous aspects of a course  

Summary

  • Humanise your teaching by being compassionate to your students and yourself.
  • Set clear and reasonable expectations, and be predictable.
  • Know your student (‘s names)!
  • Ensure student contributions are easy to make and clearly valued.
  • Be authentic rather than perfect – acknowledge the awkwardness and tech troubles.
  • Create opportunities for regular quality authentic interactions with students.
  • Appreciate the strength of video and live interaction in terms of richness of interaction, while noting that this makes it more intense to participate in.
  • Recognise the benefits of non-synchronous activities in reducing pace and intensity, allowing for more reflection and considered responses, and bridging time zones.

Expectations

Learning online is a change of culture and this needs to be recognised. Students and staff are still negotiating how the classroom works in an online context and sometimes there is a misalignment between staff and student expectations.

Expectations and Assumptions

Remember that your session may not be the only session that students are attending that day. Acknowledge the challenges of the online way of working and work with students to adapt to these. Consider:

  • A poll or survey to check what is going on with students.
  • Reach out to learners who are not engaged or are not progressing.
  • Discuss how to adapt to the online environment.
  • Draft a Group Learning Agreement together and share your expectations clearly.

Make it easy for students to access your session by being predictable. Repeat similar task/session structures and activities to cut down on instruction time.

Maintaining Expectations

Consider using a holding slide at the start of each session with session expectations on it. Repeating these helps remind students of the required standards. Include/be mindful of caveats. For example, instead of ‘Students must have cameras on at all times’ try ‘Students should keep cameras on where possible’. Encourage through gentle nudges – thanking students for complying rather than taking an ‘enforcer’ stance. Lead by example wherever possible.

Synchronous Strategies

Camera Off

You can use these camera breaks for any type of task, such as considering an answer to a question or looking at a new resource and responding. Make sure that you use clear start and end points, stay silent for some time yourself, and warn students before feedback or further input starts. If students don’t have to worry about how they appear on the camera, they can more effectively concentrate on the task. Camera-off time allows for moments away from the emotional stress of being ‘under scrutiny’, and it eases screen fatigue if the student has had other classes prior to yours.

Explain that camera-off time will be included in your session introduction and expectations. This mitigates the problem of people thinking they need to choose on or off at the beginning of the session and then stick to it, making ‘camera on’ a much less intimidating choice and allowing an easy way in for shy students.

Hide Self View

If you find your own image distracting, click on your image in Zoom and choose ‘hide self’. Note students do need to be warned that this doesn’t hide others from seeing them! This feature is not yet available in Teams, but you can always stick a post-it on your screen!

Chat

Asking students to drop their responses in the chat box allows shy students to participate more easily and allows those who prefer to learn through discussion to do that without taking over the session. Students can go back and review the chat if it is saved for them too. This is quicker than setting up a shared document.

Authenticity

Acknowledge the awkwardness of video teaching and that you understand their awkwardness too – we’re all in it together and may need to push out of comfort zones. Be animated and show your personality/humour a little – it’s OK to smile or make jokes. People always come across ‘flatter’ on screen than in person, so the extra effort is worth it. Admit if things are a little tricky or go wrong and take a moment to fix them before moving on smoothly. Suggest a five-minute break if the whole session has been halted for tech reasons so that you can fix the problem and regroup your thoughts. Have a question or little task for students in your back pocket in case of difficulties.

Icebreaking

Icebreakers almost always feel contrived but still work – acknowledge this and be encouraging as you try these activities out. Try these in small groups in breakout rooms first. You will likely need to visit the rooms and push the energy levels up initially. Whole group icebreakers can include things like asking everyone to send a reaction emoji or give you a thumbs up/down on camera in response to questions.

Wait Time

Teachers are often guilty of not waiting long enough for an answer – usually overestimating the time they have waited. This wait time feels worse in the online environment. You need to wait longer than normal online because it takes time for students to type a response or switch on their microphones. Give a long wait time for your questions and use a timer (either on screen or silently on your phone/another screen) to make sure you are giving students enough time to respond. Lengthen your wait time if students haven’t responded, and state that you are giving them more time.

Acknowledge Individuals

Start the room early and greet students as they arrive in the room – a simple hello and using the students’ names is a lovely start! Ask students to set profile pictures on Zoom (not necessarily of themselves) to help differentiate them visually if they don’t put their cameras on. This makes them more memorable individually than a sea of names in text. Explain why you are doing this. Make effort to learn and use students’ names as you would in PiP. That doesn’t necessarily mean picking on students for questions, it can be thanking them for contributions and greeting them too. Suggest students do a video/audio introduction either privately or in a shared discussion space.

Have we started? Are we done?

Normally this is done non-verbally or with body language like standing up and coming to the front or packing away notes. Clearly announce the start and end of the class time. Consider leaving the room open for a little while after class for less formal chat.

Breakout Room Strategies

Set expectations: What do they need to achieve? By when? When will you check in with them? Warn students if/how you will do this and be consistent.

Use monitoring strategies as in PiP. Visit each breakout room quickly at the start to check everything is understood, say when you will visit again and follow up. You do not always have to contribute ‘in person’ by dropping into the room – you can also drop comments and annotations on the page. Some tasks can be monitored by a Sharepoint folder in tile view to watch multiple documents being updated simultaneously. You can’t read text, but you can set up documents with visually distinctive features such as empty boxes to be filled, or items to be sorted/moved around on the page. You can also monitor web tools and documents for each group by opening each group’s document or page in a new tab in your browser and clicking between, or even tiling them in separate windows if you have enough screen space.

Non-Synchronous Strategies

In addition to the above strategies, some of which apply in a non-synchronous setting, the tips below are unique to the non-synchronous environment.

Presence

Maintain an online presence by regularly participating in discussions and giving feedback. Show students that their discussion board posts etc. are being read by someone. This doesn’t mean always being available; it just means setting aside some time to connect. Consider running an ‘office hour’ drop-in via Teams, Zoom, or Canvas chat.

Text-based interactions

Bear in mind that tone is more difficult to convey in writing than in person. Supplement your text with emojis where appropriate or if you think there is a chance of misinterpretation. If a message seems impolite consider differences in culture and language usage – English has a tendency to be full of pleases and thank yous in a way that other languages aren’t.

Scheduling, planning, linking

Ensure that non-synchronous tasks are part of the flow of learning and that the knowledge gained is referred to in synchronous sessions. Create clear learning objectives with completion linked to synchronous events or certain dates, and make sure you feed back on them. This gives the learning more value. Set time aside to clear up issues arising from non-synchronous teaching if needed.

Download The Guide
Visit the Community

Digital Code for Teaching Anatomy Online – Joanna Matthan

Jo Matthan (Director of Academic Studies, School of Dental Sciences) talks about the teaching of Head and Neck Anatomy (DEN1101) within the School of Dental Sciences (SDS) at the Faculty of Medical Sciences (FMS), and how the move to online teaching necessitated the development of a specialised Digital Code around the use of cadaveric imagery.

Background

In Present-in-Person (PiP) teaching, students attending this foundational head and neck anatomy course would typically have access to the Dissecting Room for their learning. This would be delivered over a six-month period in their first year on either the Dental Surgery (BDS) or the BSc Oral and Dental Health Sciences degrees. This face-to-face time has been reduced to 12 hours from the approximately 50 hours of hands-on anatomy teaching delivered, which left a considerable amount of content to be covered in the digital format. In normal times, a code of conduct is signed by every student the first time they enter the restricted Anatomy and Clinical Skills Centre teaching facility. This was utilised in a digital format during the pandemic but, due to the major overhaul in teaching delivery, there was no way of reinforcing the messages contained within the code of conduct on a regular basis. It felt like a tall order to expect students to remember and understand a list of statements that is seemingly far-removed from them at the start of their anatomy learning journey, and to retain this volume of information in the digital era.

Due to the highly sensitive nature of working with donated cadaveric material and the associated professional standards and ethical considerations linked to this usage, it was necessary to develop a set of guidance to protect the dignity of donors, whilst simultaneously guiding educators, students and institutions on the manifold issues to consider when transitioning to online cadaveric teaching. The sensitive material (i.e., cadaveric images) would not normally be available to students on an ad hoc basis on their own devices. As this content still needed to be covered to ensure the healthcare professionals received all of the necessary training they needed to practice their profession safely and keep patients safe, questions arose around the potential for covert screen-capture, unauthorised viewing and wider sharing of cadaveric content. Such breaches of professionalism have widespread implications, not merely for the course and programme but potentially for the institution. It became clear that it was necessary to collate clear guidance for staff and students to steer through the digital landscape.

Developing an In-house Digital Code

An in-house digital code was developed as part of the SDS Digital Delivery Working Group – a student-staff collaboration that convened over summer 2020 to specifically mitigate for any anticipated issues that could arise from the shift to online delivery for both students and educators within the School. Three different digital codes were created, each in the form of a holding slide that could be utilised in (1) Cadaveric Anatomy Teaching, (2) Clinical Teaching and (3) Seminar or Lecture-based teaching situations. These slides were circulated to the FMS TEL Group and then circulated for feedback from the other Schools that grapple with similar concerns around donor dignity and patient confidentiality. A basic confidentiality agreement was later put in place institutionally, but this was not specific to anatomy or teaching involving potential breaches of patient information. It was felt that, in the new era of digital delivery, it would be more beneficial to reinforce the message of a common digital code at every learning encounter to clearly communicate to students the expectations and behaviours appropriate for this form of teaching. For this purpose, the Digital Code for anatomy was developed, with the aim of utilising it as a holding slide for every synchronous encounter, and as a recorded slide at the start of each non-synchronous session that included cadaveric content.

Digital Code in Practice

The Digital Code slide is displayed at the beginning of every teaching session, whether synchronous or non-synchronous. In synchronous sessions, it is used as the ‘holding slide’ displayed as students enter the video call. When teaching begins, the slide is also reinforced verbally to signal the start of the learning and shared professionalism code of conduct. In practice, it may feel that the points around ethical standards and professionalism are somewhat overemphasised but, given how important they are, the Digital Code does bear repeating. In non-synchronous sessions, a pre-recorded initial slide is added to every lecture recording to reinforce the message not to view the recording in public and to adhere to the digital code. This is added to all recordings from all contributors.

The slide shows 10 dos and don'ts. Do find a quiet place for viewing, switch off from other devices and social media, be mindful many are working from home and disruptions may occur, focus on the session at hand, mute yourself when not speaking and unmute yourself when speaking, raise your hand if you want to ask a question, switch your camera on if possible when speaking. DO NOT view this material/session in a public place, breach confidentiality, take screenshots, use and screen-recording or recording devices to capture these sessions, share material from the sessions, post or discuss sensitive material on social media
The Digital Code slide (download .ppt slide at the end of the post)

The Digital Code slide gives a simple overview of both the required professional behaviours for healthcare professionals and unacceptable behaviours, bringing the more abstract guidance document into clear actionable focus. As a result, students are very clearly aware of the professional expectations expected of them in their chosen field of study, and these regular reminders serve to reinforce this. This is much more effective than simply citing a document which may have only been seen once at the beginning of the course. The existence of this Code is beneficial not only for students who, it is hoped, develop a sense of responsibility with the access to sensitive content, but also for donors, teachers and institutions who can rely on clear guidance but also appreciate that institutions have pre-defined consequences for any breaches – of which none have been reported thus far. Students have displayed high levels of professional conduct throughout the anatomy teaching in SDS and have adopted the digital code without any apparent reluctance or challenges. It is highly likely that, once students return to physical classrooms, this practice will be continued and developed.

Taking it a step further: Developing National Guidance for Online Cadaveric Imaging

Due to manifold misunderstandings on the legislation and guidance around the use of cadaveric images, it became clear at an informal National Designated Individual (DI) / Head of Anatomy Forum (convened to improve communication during the pandemic and consisting of heads of anatomy units and DIs from across the UK, as well as representatives of the regulatory bodies from each country) that educators could benefit from a unified front with regards to digital cadaveric education. A small group from within this informal forum (consisting of representatives from Brighton Sussex Medical School, Newcastle University and University of Nottingham) collated anecdotal and professional experiences with patient confidentiality and social media guidance documentation and developed a three-pronged approach to using cadaveric content online. The first step was to search for guidance from the relevant professional bodies. The Human Tissue Authority (HTA), the national body who regulate teaching related to cadaveric specimens in England, is virtually silent on the use of images of a cadaveric nature, and decisions relating to how images can be used are made by the local HTA DI within institutions. There is also a paucity of guidance on image usage in this context from the devolved nations’ regulatory bodies/inspectors. Some institutions do have some guidance around social media and images, but there is no unified and unambiguous guidance on cadaveric teaching in the online era.

The draft guidance document was circulated to the DI Forum and to the HTA for comments and the final document amended with suggested changes. The current version, along with a suggested PowerPoint slide, is already utilised at SDS for teaching purposes. It has recently been presented at the March 2021 meeting of the Trans-European Pedagogic Anatomical Research Group (TEPARG), at which it proved very popular across the European countries represented, and has been widely lauded for its clarity and utility during this period of intense change. The guidance document, with the digital code appended to it, is now in use across many institutions nationally and internationally and is being reviewed for formal dissemination.

Resources

Human Tissue Authority

TEPARG – Trans-European Pedagogic Anatomical Research Group

Newcastle University Digital Etiquette Guide

Newcastle University Staff – Join our Canvas Community for access to all resources

Download the Slide and Guidance from our Canvas Community

Webinar – Getting the Most out of Discussion Boards

The FMS TEL team are proud to present our upcoming Webinar – Getting the Most out of Discussion Boards

Thursday 17th June 2021
9am-10am and 1pm-2pm BST

Discussion boards are very difficult to ‘get right’ and trying to encourage and maintain student participation can be a challenge. Students may be reticent to engage initially and it is sometimes difficult to design an exciting discussion task in a non-synchronous teaching environment. This webinar is a practical session which aims to give you tips that you can quickly implement to boost engagement with your discussion boards.

By the end of the session you will: 

  • Have a range of discussion board task ideas to incorporate into your teaching 
  • Understand techniques to encourage student engagement 
  • Be able to set up different types of group discussion tasks 

We look forward to seeing you there. Click below to book a place, or to receive a reminder to access the recorded session and materials when available.

Book Now

FMS TEL Webinar – Podcasting

This webinar ran twice on 21st April 2021, and we were happy to see colleagues from across the faculty and NUMed in attendance.

The webinar covered:

  • Teaching strategies that are well-suited to audio content.
  • Types and forms of content that suit audio delivery.
  • The basics of recording audio, uploading it and making alternative accessible content (in resources).

Colleagues can find the resources from the webinar – including the recording and links to further reading – on the FMS TEL Community in Canvas. If you have trouble accessing the community, please get in touch via fmstel-enquiries@newcastle.ac.uk 

View all FMS TEL Webinars

Randomness

As part of our Humanising the Online Experience webinar, we suggested the use of name selectors to take the decision-making out of selecting a student to answer a question. We recommend you use this only when you have gotten to know your students well enough to know how they respond to being asked questions by name. Using a randomiser tool can also reduce the feeling that the teacher is ‘picking on’ a particular student too often – both for the teacher and the students!

There are a lot of online tools available, such as:

The slight hitch with using these is that they are not reusable – you need to paste the names in every session.

It’s possible to create one of these yourself using Excel, which you can then save and re-use for the class time and again. A 2-minute tutorial for this, and an example file, is available on the FMS TEL Canvas Community. If you haven’t got access to that community in your Canvas yet, first enroll here.

Of course, you can use these tools for more than just selecting names. You could use this to randomly assign cases for students to study, or assign group roles. You can use them to generate lists of anything in a random order by noting outcomes.

During icebreaker games or other tasks, you may want to try a heads-or-tails or dice-roll randomiser, and there are many other randomising tools available on Random.org.

FMS TEL Webinar – Humanising the Online Experience

This webinar ran twice on 11th March 2021, and we were happy to see colleagues from across the faculty and NUMed in attendance.

The webinar covered:

  • Setting and maintaining expectations for online teaching and interactions.
  • How to make your synchronous sessions feel more like PiP interaction.
  • Simple strategies to be more present in non-synchronous aspects of your course.

You can find the resources from the webinar – including the recording and links to further reading – on the FMS TEL Community in Canvas.

View all FMS TEL Webinars

Communities of Practice and Building a Professional Identity

I was able to present an instance of FMS Journal Club in February 2021, and chose to present the paper Medicine as a Community of Practice: Implications for Medical Education (Cruess, Cruess and Steinert, 2018).

“Communities of practice can guide the development of interventions to make medical education more effective and can help both learners and educators better cope with medical education’s complexity.”

Cruess, Cruess and Steinert, 2018

The paper suggests the framework of the Community of Practice (CoP) for activities in medical education, specifically, cultivating a sense of belonging and professional identity associated with that community.

The authors put forward a long list of recommendations as to how CoPs as a framework can be embedded. The area I was most interested in was that of helping people to join these communities, particularly in relation to forming professional identity.

One of the key elements is that of regular meaningful interactions. This goes beyond simple matters of curriculum, but also incorporates something of a pastoral side. As well as bolstering students’ confidence in their skills, these interactions help students to form their identities as aspiring professional practitioners.

While video conferencing software offers a fairly rich interactive experience, there are many non-synchronous tools that provide arenas for interaction as well. The tool chosen is not the most important part – the important part is the regular, high-quality authentic interactions that can be facilitated between students and others with more experienced positions within their communities of practice.

What does this look like in practice?

  • Explicit acknowledgement of the difficulties faced when building a professional identity
  • Regular engagement with online discussions / Q+A / chat rooms
  • Unstructured / less structured time for students and teachers to talk less formally
  • Engagement with formal mentoring processes
  • Encouragement for students to form supportive relationships with one another

Further Resources

Communities of Practice overview from original authors

Journal Club (Newcastle University login required)

Medicine as a Community of Practice: Implications for Medical Education

Liaison Librarian team Case Study previous blog post on CoPs

Upcoming seminar for staff: Humanising the Online Experience

Building Community – Case study concerning connecting PhD students with one another and staying on track.

FMS TEL Webinar – Humanising the Online Experience

The FMS TEL team are proud to present our upcoming Webinar – Humanising the Online Experience.

Thursday 11th March
9 am-10 am and 1 pm-2 pm GMT

Many of us – staff and students – have struggled with the feeling of losing the human connections we would normally have in face-to-face teaching spaces. This webinar concentrates on how to regain some of that connected feeling. The webinar will include plenty of examples and quick tips that can help reduce the awkwardness of teaching online. The webinar will cover the following:

  • Setting and maintaining expectations for online teaching and interactions.
  • How to make your synchronous sessions feel more like PiP interaction.
  • Simple strategies to be more present in non-synchronous aspects of your course.
Book Now

What is the value of being in the same room?

On 19th January I attended a TALKSocSci session run by the Institute of Social Science titled Learning and teaching in the digital, post-Covid era: what’s the benefit of being in the same room? The session was hosted by Professor Liz Todd and the speakers were Dr Pam Woolner and Christian Lawson-Perfect.

The session comprised of presentations from Pam and Christian, followed by a series of questions from the audience that they responded to. Pam’s initial presentation focused on the impact of the physical learning environments on the learning process, highlighting that while the learning environment itself doesn’t have direct influence over the learning, it can have an indirect impact – as long as the learners’ basic needs are met in terms of physical comfort (temperature, air quality, etc.). Whether or not PiP learning is preferable over online learning can be dependent on what the room is like! Physical spaces provide access to information such as body language in interactions, as well as the opportunities for chance meetings, or hanging back after class to speak to the teacher when you might be too shy to speak in front of others or send an email.

Christian covered aspects of online learning including automation of feedback, analytics and the role of the instructor in online learning. When considering MOOCs such as those hosted on Kahn Academy, for example, there is usually no direct personalised feedback for learners – it is intentionally prepared. He also discussed aspects of accessibility, both in the sense of physical access to spaces/content and the work being done to make online content more accessible, e.g. through captioning. Content needs to be planned in advance, and interactions can become purely intentional. Non-synchronous activities such as discussion boards can help students who prefer to plan what they want to say rather than having to respond in the moment.

A common theme I have taken from both of these talks is the idea of intentional vs unintentional interactions – both in terms of learning experiences and social interactions. Intentional interactions include things like seminars and talks, as well as interactive learning activities such as quizzes with feedback. These types of planned interactions are fairly easy to replicate online. Unintentional interactions are usually a side-effect of being in the same room as your teacher, or other learners. There can be a social aspect to this – such as meeting new people, or a pedagogical side, such as when teachers bring the class back together to address a difficulty they have noticed is common to all. This is much easier to do in PiP teaching.

While social aspects of teaching and learning are difficult to replicate online, there are some guides available on the Flexible Learning 2020 site that can help with this. When it comes down to unintentional interactions, if we want these to happen the best thing we can do is try to create time and space for it. While it may feel a little counterintuitive to formally schedule informal chats, in reality, it’s one sure way of ensuring they can happen.