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Experiences in both Emergency Remote Teaching and Online Learning

 In my teacher experience I have had the luck of experimenting Online Learning design well before the COVID-19 emergency hit the whole education world. In particular, I have been creator and organiser of a distance course for professionals. In that context I had 1 year time frame to design a course, its contents, and ways of delivery and examination. Together with other colleagues, we learned about the importance of keeping teaching videos short, partitioning adequately the material and giving a good structure to the contents to help students. In other words, we followed several recommendations that can be commonly found in pedagogical research on distance learning [1]. We also tried to create learning communities by promoting virtual forums and discussions, however those opportunities have never been taken into account by the students. My personal opinion on this was that, due to the type of students, i.e. professionals that follow a course in their spare time, being part of a learning community is not part of attendees' goals.

During the past two years I also experimented the emergency remote teaching: due to the pandemics I have been forced to move my on-campus courses online, and given the time boundaries there has been no way to adequately revise those courses in an online version. So, indeed I basically run the courses as remote teaching and examinations [2]. With my big surprise, during these courses I observed a similar behaviour to the distance courses mentioned above: despite the learning community support students very rarely took the opportunity to interact and collaborate. Moreover, they tended to disappear from the lectures as soon as they discovered the need of some form of interaction with the teacher and other students (the recordings of the lectures have been always made available to everyone). Even more, cheating episodes tended to completely disappear, as students seemed to miss a concrete solution to communicate with each others.

Taking into account the two previous experiences, I plan to gradually introduce group works to create learning communities [3]. The main goal would be to let the students appreciate the great opportunity of sharing experiences with others and managing their learning paths. I expect this to be also an important engagement factor, especially important at the beginning of the course (when most of the students either drop-out or become scarcely active). The on-campus courses will represent a good way of testing some of those works, first of all because the number of students is relatively larger; because there exist assignments that are more suitable to be adapted to group works; and because several times students show kind of dissatisfaction and low interest to the kind of problems they are given [2].

1. Hodges, C. et.al (2020). The Difference Between Emergency Remote Teaching and Online Learning. EDUCAUSE review.

2. Weller, Martin; van Ameijde, Jitse and Cross, Simon (2018). Learning Design for Student Retention. Journal of Perspectives in Applied Academic Practice, 6(2)

3. Brindley, J., Blaschke, L. M. & Walti, C. (2009). Creating effective collaborative learning groups in an online environment. The International Review of Research in Open and Distance Learning, 10(3)

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