What’s covered in this article

Introduction

Having run a couple of very successful courses online, I’d like to convert one of them to a course in a physical classroom, having launched it as an online course right from the outset. (The other one started life in a physical classroom, and I converted it to an online course.)

Which of the following elements of the online course would I like to retain?

·       A pre-course questionnaire.

·       Homework assignment(s).

·       Digital handouts rather than paper ones.

·       Ways of preserving class discussions.

Pre-course questionnaire

Now that many people have become used to using digital technology to take part in courses, I’d like to keep the pre-course questionnaire as something to be completed online in advance.

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.

(It also, as a happy side effect, reminds them of what will be covered in the course. The implicit message here, of course, is that if at this point they feel that they misunderstood the nature or content of the course they still have time to pull out and obtain a refund or credit.)

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.

Moreover, using something like Google Forms, rather than a paper test given on the day, has the following advantages:

• It makes it more likely that students’ needs will be taken into account as part of the preparation of the course sequence and materials, rather than as a last-minute bolt-on.

• It avoids the need to enter the data manually into a spreadsheet, which you’d have to do if the answers were on paper. As I described in Creating A Staff IT Skills Audit With Google Forms, Google Forms can be asked to automatically create and populate a spreadsheet.

• Last but certainly not least, by asking people to complete the questionnaire before the lesson you save valuable lesson time.

Homework assignment(s)

If the course lasts for more than one session I will set homework assignments, as ever.

An opportunity for workshopping

This is another important aspect of courses that I have always used, and will continue to use. The main difference between an offline and an online course in this respect is that when you’re in a physical classroom you can tune into different group conversations without being intrusive. When you break into a break-out room online you simply cannot do this: you are “too” present.

Digital handouts rather than paper ones

What I should very much like to do is to make digital handouts, sent by email or posted in Google Classroom in advance, the default. That would mean having just a few copies of each one available in the lesson rather than several large piles. Obviously, some people will probably print them out, and bring them to the session, but not necessarily everybody. There are several advantages to digital files, some of which may convince course participants that it’s in their own interests to avoid paper copies if possible:

• There’s less to lug home after the session.

• If someone misses a session, they don’t have to email the tutor to ask him or her to bring to the next lesson copies of the handouts you’ve missed.

• Digital handouts are easier to search for specific words or sections

• They 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.)

What I’d need to do, though, as part of the pre-course instructions, is to send out instructions about how to get documents onto a Kindle, and how to annotate them, for those people who have a Kindle Fire or similar.

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 for my online courses. Unfortunately, short of recording the whole lesson, which is not encouraged because of privacy concerns, I think the old-school method pf post-it notes will have to used.

Understanding adult education

The following is the same, more or less, as I wrote in Converting An Offline Course To An Online One (Updated). As there are some misconceptions about adult education, and how it differs from school-age education, it bears repeating.

An understanding of good practice in teaching adults is 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 largely 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, perhaps even more so than in school teaching simply because adults have been around for longer and so, in theory, have a larger and possibly more diverse pool of experiences to draw on..

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 socialisation 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”. These videos are still available, and I will certainly continue to produce such resources as the need arises.

Google Classroom

I was using Google Classroom for my lessons before the pandemic forced us to go online, and I will continue to do so. It’s a good place for handouts, not just as a place to store them, but to make them appear (and disappear) according to a schedule. You can also set assignments, making it easy to keep track of who has completed them, or not.

Conclusions

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. Socialising is much easier in a physical setting than online, because people can have coffee together before, during or after the lesson has ended.

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 offline education better in some way than online 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.