Don’t let anyone tell you online teaching is easy
Teaching online is hard. When I first started, I didn’t know what to expect. My teacher training had no exposure to the online learning environment with the majority of the training favouring face to face delivery. To say the least, I was not prepared moving into the online learning environment 😬.
This is likely the reality of many teachers now entering the online space with little formal training on what to do. This can also be compounded by issues of schools having largely neglected their transition to a more digital and technology driven pedagogies.
Additionally, the online courses that I and many others have taken also do not serve as good working models for teaching online either. Like many, my first ever exposure was through MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses). These MOOCs have little interactivity with teachers, low peer to peer learning, and often leaned on a ‘watch and do the quiz’ or peer marking’ style of delivery. And you wonder why the completion rate in MOOCs is so low (less than 5%). I get it, some of the courses have thousands of enrolments, and managing that is a hard ask when fully self-directed courses are so much easier. But by no means are they models for what to do, or what is possible online.
And that has largely been my experience, and for many first entering into this space. You get thrown into the deep end with very little constructs of what to expect. Now that Covid-19 has forced everyone online in some form, we can’t neglect this part of teaching and learning anymore. It has become ‘mainstream’.
All these changes transitioning to online can be in direct conflict with your pedagogical identity – existing assumptions, beliefs, and views that one has about teaching (Maggio et al. 2009). There is a sense of devaluing the experiences and skills that some practitioners bring from the face to face environment. Online teaching is different and that challenges who we are as teachers. The predictability we have in mind when we think about the classroom environment.
That’s not to say that it’s a bad thing.
It just means that many are now finding out how difficult teaching online really is, from a skills and identity perspective.
Reliance on Technology
The first thing that dawns on you when you’re about to teach online for the first time is just that, the online part.
This means, computers, internet, a variety of software, and a range of hardware. Teaching is a marriage of technological 💻, pedagogical 👨🏫, and content knowledge 📚 (TPACK) (Koehler & Mishra 2009). The practice sits in the middle of these three domains of knowledge. In the ideal online learning environment, technology needs to be ubiquitous and invisible. What allows this to happen are partially the technologies themselves, but also the way practitioners use these technologies to teach.
In the online learning space, there is no hiding from this responsibility. You’re entire delivery medium is technology mediated.
I’ve worked with hundreds of tutors and teachers, and to some the thought of the technology required to teach online gives them instant anxiety 😰. Through my coaching conversations with new teachers, I’ve learned there is generally the same sentiment. That ‘I am just not confident using these tools’ or that ‘what if the technology doesn’t work when I am in front of my students?’. Inevitably we’ll talk about a survival plan, equipped with templates and a kit to make sure the first lesson is less frightening. But this is the fastest crash course I can give someone before they have to take the wheel, and that is challenging.
You’re a one person live studio. That is anxiety inducing.
Here is a thought experiment to give you a better idea if you’ve never taught online before. Imagine having to give a presentation, in a new room, with a laptop you are unfamiliar with, not knowing how many individuals will attend, and your boss wants you to do something ‘fancy’ for the session. Additionally, you aren’t sure whether the tech will ‘play nice’ and if it doesn’t what to do about it. You also don’t want to waste peoples time, some of which paid quite a lot to be there.
This happens to teachers teaching online every day, all the time.
You’re a one person live studio. That is anxiety inducing. Often you don’t have the space and time to take a breather and learn how to use the tech to it’s potential when you are just trying to work through the problems of your current lesson. That doesn’t take into account the changing landscape of edtech and the continual feeling of being out of date with your practice 😵.
The many colours of an online teacher
As you continue to do the role of online teaching, you’ll begin to notice how different the role can be from face to face and that it encompasses many different jobs. This includes: Process Facilitator (things like online activities), Adviser, Assessor, Researcher, Content Facilitator (helping students understand the subject matter), Technologist, Designer, and Administrator (Goodyear et al. 2001).
The sheer range of skills you need to do all these domains is quite wide. To do this role at its maximum capacity is to be able to:
Plan, design, and build courses and learning material online
Investigate, trial, and use new technologies
Facilitate students learning in a new medium, with its own inherent challenges
Build, deliver, and mark authentic assessments
Personalise the student journey
Give advice to students about how to best learn online
Run action research to test what is most effective in the online environment
This is by no means an exhaustive list, but it serves to demonstrate the many hats 🧢 an online teacher must wear to do the role successfully.
It is, without a doubt, unreasonable to expect a teacher to be a master of all these dimensions at the first onset. As we spoke about before, many of the training and experiences most teachers have had previously are devalued or underappreciated in this space. Give them time and a safe environment to experiment with the practice.
Change in identity
So yes, moving to teaching online is hard. It’s an entirely new discipline, a new subset of the teaching profession as a whole. There is no doubt that it’ll challenge your identity in the process. I’ve often, and continue to, redefine who I am in this space. Through coaching I’ve realised this isn’t a unique phenomenon. Practitioners will define their philosophy and to ultimately find new meaning in their work. Practicing online teaching causes one to change their frame of reference about what teaching can be (Mezirow 1997).
As you continue to work online, you’ll transform.
Like a phoenix you’ll emerge a new practitioner, one that is prepared for this brave new world.
But don’t ever let anyone tell you that online teaching is easy.
Bill Simmalavong
—-
Goodyear, P., Salmon, G., Spector, J. M., Steeples, C., & Tickner, S. (2001). Competences for online teaching: A special report. Educational Technology Research and Development, 49(1), 65-72.
Koehler, M., & Mishra, P. (2009). What is technological pedagogical content knowledge (TPACK)?. Contemporary issues in technology and teacher education, 9(1), 60-70.
Maggio, L. A., Daley, B. J., Pratt, D. D., & Torre, D. M. (2018). Honoring thyself in the transition to online teaching. Academic Medicine, 93(8), 1129-1134.
Mezirow, J. (1997). Transformative learning: Theory to practice. New directions for adult and continuing education, 1997(74), 5-12.