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

An appallingly tardy response to such an important element of reading - apologies. The growing recognition of fluency as the crucial developmental area for primary education is certainly encouraging helping us move away from the obsession with reading comprehension tests.


It is, as you suggest, a nuanced pedagogy with the tripartite algorithm of rate, accuracy and prosody at times conflating the landscape and often leading to an educational shrug of the shoulders, a convenient abdication of responsibility and a return to comprehension 'skills'.

Taking each element separately (but not hierarchically) may be helpful but always remembering that for fluency they occur simultaneously (not dissimilar to sentence structure, text structure and rhetoric in fluent writing).

Rate, or words-read-per-minute, is the easiest. Faster reading speeds are EVIDENCE of fluency development but attempting to 'teach' children(or anyone) to read faster is fallacious (Carver, 1985) and will result in processing deficit which in young readers will be catastrophic.

Reading rate is dependent upon eye-movements and cognitive processing development along with orthographic development (more on this later).
When the university starts sending out teaching evaluation reminders, I tell all my classes about bias in teaching evals, with links to the evidence. Here's a version of the email I send, in case anyone else wants to poach from it.

1/16


When I say "anyone": needless to say, the people who are benefitting from the bias (like me) are the ones who should helping to correct it. Men in math, this is your job! Of course, it should also be dealt with at the institutional level, not just ad hoc.
OK, on to my email:
2/16

"You may have received automated reminders about course evals this fall. I encourage you to fill the evals out. I'd be particularly grateful for written feedback about what worked for you in the class, what was difficult, & how you ultimately spent your time for this class.

3/16

However, I don't feel comfortable just sending you an email saying: "please take the time to evaluate me". I do think student evaluations of teachers can be valuable: I have made changes to my teaching style as a direct result of comments from student teaching evaluations.
4/16

But teaching evaluations have a weakness: they are not an unbiased estimator of teaching quality. There is strong evidence that teaching evals tend to favour men over women, and that teaching evals tend to favour white instructors over non-white instructors.
5/16

You May Also Like