Sometimes when starting out it’s useful to have a bit of advice from someone who has already gone through the experience. In the following Blog post Dr Rebecca Casey shares some of her practical and technical lessons learnt so far from her move to remote delivery:
Recording synchronous teaching sessions can be tricky. On Day 2 my home bandwidth was dismal and therefore experienced trouble downloading the slide deck from Blackboard. One of the students kindly offered to share their screen so that the rest of the class could follow the slides on MS Teams. It was the only thing I did differently to the previous teaching session and therefore it is possible this may have interfered with the successful recording of the session. Usually the recording will appear in the chat feed a few minutes after the session has finished. If you cannot see it then log into MS Stream and go to ‘My Content’ – you should see a copy of it here. If you are using Zoom there is an option for ‘automatic recording’ when you are setting up the meeting – definitely do this so that is one less thing to think about during synchronous delivery;
Establish a convention for managing conversation because i) if too many people have their mics switched on it will create an awful echo and ii) people will be constantly talking over one another. You will be focussed on your lecture so it is worth nominating one of your students as a facilitator. If students have a question or want to comment they can signal using ‘Question’ or ‘Comment’ in the chat feed. The facilitator can then field these to you one by one.
I tried using ‘Notes’ to encourage students to post their own contributions/thoughts/reflections during and after class but this is proving patchy – only a couple of students use it. It requires more structure if it is going to work successfully e.g. incorporate such activities into the learning aims for the session so that expectations are clear.
Many thanks to Dr Rebecca Casey for sharing those experiences. If you wish to share your own experiences of moving to remote & online delivery please do get in touch to share your personal story.
Finally, if you haven’t already done so please join the Education and Technology Forum Microsoft Teams site for more information and frequent updates.