Here is a university road map on how the strengths of conventional, face-to-face teaching and online T&L can be optimally used to address today’s lecture room challenges.

I am not an instructional designer, but I have been teaching online internationally for over 10 years (2)
In the last 2+ years, I taught hybrid & online undergraduate courses at the University of Maryland Global Campus, among the largest top-20 online colleges in the USA.

UMGC has received numerous awards for its innovations: https://t.co/jd7JkHIK8Q and https://t.co/IPKizZwclA (3)
15+ years ago UMGC was one of the founding members of QM “Quality Matters” a non-profit with 1,500+ members in 26 countries.

QM offers membership of a community of practice, numerous free resources, online training, and review/accreditation services https://t.co/ZoFVsgcBC7 (4)
It is obvious that universities will also be affected by the 4th industrial revolution, and things can not stay the same as they were after the invention of the printing press.

Until recently, a lecture room looked the same as 900 years ago incl. flirting and sleeping (5)
We can distinguish Luddite resistance to technology and stubborn clinging to “chalk and talk”, from reasonable questions on how to using online learning in 30-60% of all university courses, which is the likely post-COVID19 scenario. (6)
If active learning is already practiced, and reliance on lecturing is no longer 100%, it is easier to introduce effective, high-quality online teaching.

Lecturers who already use problem- or project-based teaching are at an advantage (7)
Dr. Carl Wieman, Nobel prize winner Physics, did systematic research on what works and what doesn’t in science teaching because he saw that PhD students after 4 years were still unable to do physics (at Stanford!!).

In his own words: https://t.co/7EjYs9qZ2y (8)
General pedagogy must be improved: concepts of active learning, student-centred teaching & intentional course design must be practiced first.

Lecturers can revise their conventional courses in workshops led by your friendly instructional designers. https://t.co/JkZfNW2nsV (9)
Secondly, specific online pedagogy must be introduced or strengthened. The 6 success factors for the successful delivery of online teaching must be taken into account, and challenges addressed (10)
Good instructional design is a first and fundamental step: implementing a few robust principles go a long way to make all online courses effective & accessible and engaging for all students.

Adding classroom-replicating technology usually makes matters worse (11)
In practice, the main challenge is to train ALL lecturers.

Your handful of friendly & helpful instructional designers at our universities, who were sufficient in the past, now can not possibly train faculty at scale within a short period of time (12)
We suggest you check out membership of QM “Quality Matters” in order to use all low-cost, online training and professional development activities.

Here is a video overview of the QM standard. https://t.co/1i2s0loEuC, and here a detailed guide https://t.co/SQkVHwjBgp (13)
The debate should now be redirected from dealing exclusively with WHAT to teach, toward HOW to teach effectively, realizing online teaching is now the main course, and will remain on the menu (14)
Are you interested in learning more about how QM can train your university’s lecturers? DM me so I can help you further 🙂

More from Education

Time for some thoughts on schools given the revised SickKids document and the fact that ON decided to leave most schools closed. ON is not the only jurisdiction to do so, but important to note that many jurisdictions would not have done so -even with higher incidence rates.


As outlined in the tweet by @NishaOttawa yesterday, the situation is complex, and not a simple right or wrong https://t.co/DO0v3j9wzr. And no one needs to list all the potential risks and downsides of prolonged school closures.


On the other hand: while school closures do not directly protect our most vulnerable in long-term care at all, one cannot deny that any factor potentially increasing community transmission may have an indirect effect on the risk to these institutions, and on healthcare.

The question is: to what extend do schools contribute to transmission, and how to balance this against the risk of prolonged school closures. The leaked data from yesterday shows a mixed picture -schools are neither unicorns (ie COVID free) nor infernos.

Assuming this data is largely correct -while waiting for an official publication of the data, it shows first and foremost the known high case numbers at Thorncliff, while other schools had been doing very well -are safe- reiterating the impact of socioeconomics on the COVID risk.

You May Also Like