Converting an offline course to an online one

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Introduction

The purpose of this article is to describe the steps I took in order to teach a course online that I had previously taught in a physical classroom. If you are facing a similar challenge, I hope this will be helpful.

The nature of the course

In 2019 I taught an introductory course on blogging, for adults. I was invited to teach it again. Then a small event called a pandemic intervened, so I was told that the course would be moved from a physical classroom to an online one.

My reaction? Excellent.

Some people maintain that an in-person environment makes it much easier to interact with the class, and for students to interact with each other. I agree to some extent, but I think from a teaching and learning point of view, the online approach has more to offer.

Well, let me pull back from that position a little. I think teaching a subject that has practical elements like carrying out a scientific experiment or, come to that, designing a computer program, would pose some interesting challenges. But I don’t think it’s impossible, not by any means.

The blogging taster course is really an introduction to the idea of blogging, and the kind of things which are useful to consider when creating a blog and writing and publishing blog posts. It also provides course participants with the opportunity to look at a range of different kinds of blogs and evaluate them with a critical eye – critical in the intellectual rather than negative sense. One thing it is not is hands-on and technical. If someone wants to learn about the intricacies of WordPress, or how to program in JavaScript, this course is not for them.

The potential of an online-only course

An online-only course spanning two evenings offers several advantages over an in-person one running for one day, because it enables you to set the following with the expectation of a reasonable degree of success:

·       A pre-course questionnaire.

·       Homework assignment(s).

·       Time to think and consolidate between sessions.

·       Digital handouts rather than paper ones.

·       More ways of preserving class discussions.

Pre-course questionnaire

When I ran the course originally, I would have loved to have known something of the course participants first. However, I think that it’s sometimes the case that the time simply isn’t right. By definition, the people who signed up for the course were more than likely to be consumers of web content than authors of it. At least, that was my working assumption.

I should say at this point that I was not interested in conducting a pre-course survey by email or post. Who wants to spend a long time entering data into a spreadsheet even before starting to look at it?

I had also noticed from other classes I’d enrolled on as a student that many people found it difficult to use Google Classroom. All they had to do was join a class by entering a code, and then upload some writing they’d done to the Stream. For some, this proved too difficult.

Extrapolating from my observations, I thought that asking people to log into their college account and take a survey in Google Forms might be a barrier – a psychological one as much as a technical one. I didn’t particularly want people dropping out of the course before it had even started!

However, by one year later pretty much everyone is far more tech savvy than they were. I therefore assumed they would be reasonably receptive to the idea of an online pre-course questionnaire.

The big advantage of a pre-course questionnaire is that you can find out about the students and their needs before the course starts. That gives you the opportunity to tweak your approach or resources before it’s too late.

In other words, it’s a type of needs analysis, the responses to which establish a baseline you can work from.

To illustrate this, look at the anonymised extract from the responses to the pre-course questionnaire I set. In the first column are the responses, and in the second are my notes to myself about how to act on this information. Note also the highlighted sentences starting with “Update” in the left-hand column. Those notes came from the first session of the course, when I asked the students to introduce themselves to the class, taking no more than a minute to do so.

Thus, the pre-course questionnaire enabled me to personalise the course for each student to some extent, something that is far harder to do in a one-day online course where you’ve had no interaction with the students in advance.

Homework assignment(s)

Another advantage of having a break between sessions is that you can set homework. You can do this with an offline course too, of course, but in my case the original offline was a day long course with a lunchbreak in the middle.

An opportunity for workshopping

Having a break between the sessions meant that I could invite students to write a blog post in the week between lessons, and then submit it to the scrutiny of the class if they felt comfortable to do so. This is known as “workshopping”, and is common practice in writing courses.

Time to think and consolidate between sessions

Having a break between sessions means that people can try things out, mull over their notes, think about things, and then come back with questions about issues they’d like to have clarified. There was no opportunity to do that when my course was a day course in a physical classroom – not least because I didn’t wish to encourage email correspondence between the students and myself. This was for two reasons.

Firstly, I didn’t want to open myself up to a potentially endless stream of questions from around 20 people.

Secondly, I am always wary of entering into private correspondence with students. As a schoolteacher I never did so, for obvious reasons, and old habits die hard. I think it’s a very good habit to have.

Digital handouts rather than paper ones

I like to do my bit to save the planet, but I have a huge number of resource sheets for students to enjoy. I’d rather make them available electronically. Obviously, some people will probably print them out, but not necessarily everybody.

Also, digital handouts are easier to search for specific words or sections, and are more convenient to update at the last minute should the need arise. (It’s hard to justify having an extra 20 copies of a sheet made and dumping the original batch just because, for instance, you’ve added a new website you’ve discovered.)

More ways of preserving class discussions

When you have a class discussion it’s hard to capture it effectively. You could have a class scribe, I suppose, or ask people to put their thoughts on post-it notes, put the post-it notes on the wall, and then encourage the students to take a photo of the wall. I’ve been on courses where that has been the approach, and it’s useless. For a start, everyone is bumping into each other taking the photos, and then afterwards you can’t search for specific text. That’s why I used an application called Padlet (see below).

Training

If you’re offered training in the applications you’ll be using, take it. The college offered basic, intermediate and advanced training in Zoom and Google Classroom, plus miscellaneous other courses such as tips and tricks for using YouTube, dealing with difficult situations, and others. I had already taught myself to use Zoom and Google Classroom, and I spent my whole teaching career dealing with difficult situations! However, I take the view that I don’t know what I don’t know. Most of the training was very useful, as were the less formal practice sessions we were offered, and so by the time I was ready to look over my materials for my blogging course I had acquired a huge degree of expertise.

Expertise which I promptly decided to not fully use. But more of that later.

Understanding adult education

When teaching a course online at an adult education institute I would say that proficiency in using the technology to teach a lesson online is an obvious prerequisite of success. In addition, an understanding of good practice in teaching adults is also essential. The theory of teaching adults is known as “andragogy” (as opposed to “pedagogy”, which refers to the teaching of children) and comprises four basic tenets. (These notes are taken from my MA dissertation.)

Self-concept

In the pedagogical model, learners see themselves as being dependent upon teachers to gain new information, whereas in the andragogical model learners see themselves as independent and self-directed. In a sense, of course, no-one can be entirely independent of a teacher, for even an autodidact using books is dependent upon teachers (the authors), albeit at one remove. Thus, the pedagogical and andragogical models represent the two extremes of a continuum rather than discrete models in themselves.

Life experiences

The pedagogical model makes little acknowledgement of the usefulness or relevance of the learner's life experiences to the subject matter in hand. In the andragogical model the learner's experience becomes an educational resource for further learning.

Readiness to learn

The pedagogical paradigm assumes that a learner is ready to learn a particular subject at a certain age. In andragogy the learner is ready to learn a particular subject when the need for such learning is perceived, whatever the learner's age.

Orientation towards learning

In pedagogy the learner is taught subject matter which is deemed to be useful in the future --  subject matter which assists the socialization process by giving the learner access to the (dominant) culture. But as people mature, they tend more and more to demand knowledge which is immediately applicable, and so the student’s relationship to learning is problem-centred rather than subject-centred.

Although these contrasts between pedagogy and andragogy are almost certainly exaggerated, as a general rule they hold true. Hence the college’s insistence on student-led learning, which I interpret, for practical as well as philosophical reasons, not so much as students unilaterally determining the curriculum or the structure and nature of lessons, but helping to inform these aspects. Thus, in my course I used the pre-course questionnaire and the students’ comments in the lesson to more tightly focus the lesson in particular directions. Also, where there was a choice of type of activity, I checked with the students to make sure they were happy with my suggestions. For example, in the light of more students wishing to have their blog posts workshopped, I thought it better to accommodate all of them rather than stick rigidly to the planned lesson. In anticipation of the students’ agreement with this, I produced a couple of videos covering the “abandoned” material for students to watch in their own time, an example of so-called “flipped learning”.

How much technology?

The more technology you use in a lesson, the more there is to go wrong. This is, of course, a truism, but the dangers are greater than you may think. If you decide to use only one application, let’s say Zoom, only two situations can arise: either it works or it doesn’t.

To be honest, this in itself is a simplification. Any online video conferencing application relies on access to the internet. That can be compromised by the intermittent dropping of the wi-fi connection, which can cause the common phenomenon experienced as “freezing”. Even the choice of web browser can make a difference. But please bear with me, and let’s assume that Zoom (or whatever you’re using) either works or it doesn’t.

So, we’re agreed that with one application, there are two possible situations: it either works or it doesn’t.

As soon as you decide to also use, say, Google Classroom, four situations can arise:

1.     Both applications work.

2.     Neither application works.

3.     Zoom works but Classroom doesn’t.

4.     Classroom works but Zoom doesn’t.

Introduce another application, and the situation is compounded. In fact, it’s my view that as you increase the number of applications you employ at any one time, the number of potential problems rises exponentially, because not only are there more of them, but they can start interfering with each other. You can even experience unforeseen (indeed, never seen) problems!

This may all sound a bit far-fetched, but consider this. I had planned to show a video clip in my lesson. When I practised doing so in a Zoom practice session, the other participants told me the sound and vision were out of sync. Everything looked perfectly fine to me. I changed the web browser, and all was OK.

I also tried Padlet, an online post-it note application, and that worked fine in the Zoom practice session. But when it came to the lesson itself, some students in breakout rooms said the link wouldn’t work for them.

For these reasons I was pleased that I’d adopted an approach I call the “minimum viable technology”. In my case it consisted of Zoom, Google Classroom and Padlet. Plus YouTube videos and PDFs that the students could access in their own time. I eschewed the use of polls during the lessons, though of course I did make use of Zoom breakout rooms.

There is another consideration as well: diminishing marginal returns. I could have used Google Docs for student collaboration, polling during the lessons, and a range of other applications. but the question to ask is: would the costs, whether measured in terms of time, energy or anxiety, have been justified by any extra learning which may have occurred? I think that after a certain point the answer has to be “no”.

Evaluation: what worked, what didn’t?

In my opinion the following worked very well:

·       Having a pre-course questionnaire.

·       Inviting students to workshop.

·       Breakout rooms for small group discussion.

·       Padlet, because it enabled most people to add their thoughts to a discussion board, even outside of the lesson, and for me to then save the discussion board as a PDF and make it available to students subsequently.

·       Making videos available for students to watch in their own time.

·       Flexibility in adapting the lesson “on the fly” to suit the needs of students.

The following didn’t work as well as I’d hoped:

·       An interim feedback questionnaire between sessions. A few students filled this in, but not enough for me to base many decisions on.

·       I hadn’t realised that Padlet might be unavailable to every breakout room. I think it was because too many people were trying to access the link at the same time. Perhaps a way around this would be to set up two discussion boards, so that some students have a different link. Then afterwards both discussion boards could be shared. It would be clunky, but it would mean that everyone would be able to contribute to the board in writing, not just orally in the discussion afterwards.

·       I had quite a few browser tabs set up so that I could easily select the correct one when sharing my screen. Unfortunately, a combination of having several tabs plus some nervousness because my class was being visited (see below) meant that sometimes I chose the wrong tab. I don’t think it was disastrous, but the slight degree of “faff” did nothing for my blood pressure!

Student feedback

The numerical scores from students were good. In addition, there were the following comments:

• Really enjoyed Course wish it was longer. I am a novice to this blog world and really enjoyed interaction with other professional and the Tutor Terry Freedman his expertise his experience including his mistakes and how to navigate, and about how you could move your company or idea into a blog space and how to protect your work — the inside information.

• The tutor had a really nice approach which made it very warm and easy to discuss. His humour made it a nice course to do on a Friday evening.

• The tutor was excellent. So easy to understand and entertaining to listen to.

• I thoroughly enjoyed the course and the tutor's knowledge and expertise lived up to my hopes and expectations. I fully intend starting a blog as a result of the course. It was lovely to meet (virtually) so many others on the same journey and I enjoyed reading and commenting on the blogs of those who were ahead of me. I look forward to following their progress.

Visitor’s  key messages

I mentioned earlier that I had a class visit. This took place in part of the second session. The following is quoted with permission.

What worked well

·       Most students made excellent progress from their starting points, as demonstrated through their response to the recap, questions, their comments on each other’s blogs and student feedback on the Individual Records of Learning. 

·       Students showed very good peer feedback skills – they followed the ground rules, and were able to give supportive and constructive feedback on each other’s blogs with guidance from Terry. 

·       Terry’s high quality subject expertise and the rich resources provided enabled learners to develop their understanding of what makes an effective blog.

·       Students were stretched and challenged well.  They were given individual feedback on their concerns and specific ideas for development, including further reading. 

What didn’t work so well

·       Two or three students didn’t participate in whole group discussion in the part of the session I saw. Terry had to work hard to see who did want to speak and did draw in most students.  Perhaps they were less confident.

·       Not everyone in the breakout rooms could access Padlet.

·       Use SMART objectives (i.e. specific, measurable, achievable, realistic and time-related) rather than general ones.

·       Perhaps give students individual thinking time.

Conclusions

I’m an experienced teacher and found the process of converting an offline course to an online one exciting and interesting, but also challenging. In light of this, Ofsted’s recent declaration that one of the myths about “remote education” (a terrible term, by the way) that:

“remote education is fundamentally different to other forms of teaching/learning…”

serves to indicate, to me at least, that whoever wrote the document What's working well in remote education has little or no first-hand experience of teaching online.

The role of the teacher is to set up the conditions that will enable the greatest amount of learning to take place. That means a balanced mixture of exposition from the teacher, small group discussion and whole group discussion.

At the same time, it’s important to remember that adults are also there in order to socialise and have fun. But “fun” doesn’t mean mere frivolity! The work set should be challenging, and push students to go beyond what they may regard as their limit. This is where individual guidance and feedback resulting from such devices as a pre-course questionnaire comes in. It enables the teacher or tutor to implement Vygotsky’s concept of the zone of proximal development, which simply means finding out what a student can almost do and then helping them to actually achieve it.

Finally, is online education better in some way than offline education? I believe that each has their strengths and weaknesses. Now that so many people, students and teachers alike, have developed good technology skills, perhaps once we have learnt how to live with coronavirus adult education institutions could adopt a blended learning approach in order to get the best of both worlds. This would entail a mixture of meeting online, and meeting in person. Adapting courses to fit a model like that would, of course, be whole new challenge.

Summary checklist

Based on my experience, I suggest the following considerations need to be made when converting an offline course to an online one.

1.     What existing materials and activities will work in an online environment with no or very little modification/

2.     If a resource or activity requires a major modification, could it be more cost-effective to jettison it altogether?

3.     How will the course be structured? For example, two sessions of three hours each a week apart if very different, in organisational terms, from one session of six hours in a single day, or three weekly sessions of two hours.

4.     Will you have a break halfway through?

5.     Do you know what digital tools are available that will support your preferred way of teaching?

6.     What digital tools will you actually use (you may not wish to use all of them)?

7.     Do you have enough know-how to use them in a technical sense?

8.     Do you have enough know-how to use them effectively in an educational sense?

9.     How will you gain the expertise you lack?

10.  Will you create a pre-course questionnaire?

11.  If so, how will you make use of it to tailor it to students’ needs? (If not, what will you use or do instead?)

12.  Can you arrange to have practice sessions in order to check that everything will work as you expect?

13.  How will you communicate with students? For example, will you use Google Classroom or similar, or an official email address, or what?

How will you judge the success or otherwise of your course?