ONLINE TEACHING
MEMBER STORIES
Improving your online teaching At Federation University Australia, a regional university with campuses in Ballarat, Berwick, Gippsland and Horsham, the Learning Skills Advisers (LSAs) are used to conducting online consultations with ‘flexi’ students. Yet now that all consultations are online, we’re finding it much more exhausting. How do we explain this? There appear to be multiple factors at work. In part, we miss the energy surge of face-to-face (f2f) student interactions, of cooperative engagement with study skills and knowledge needed to plan, develop and create relevant and interesting assignment tasks. We’re also finding that some interactions take far longer, that we struggle to identify student intentions for contacting us. This may be because we need first to address their anxieties: those who chose f2f instruction must now deal with a 100% online environment; the learning for and about university in the same physical space with other students, tutors and lecturers is missing; and Moodle contains a seething mass of text, with vital information spread between multiple ‘hidden’ sites. For example, a lecturer hides a useful resource on ‘How to write the essay’ in the announcements section. The email students receive, 'I’ve posted it in Moodle', is reminiscent of a complex Easter Bunny hunt for the hidden egg. In phone consultations with newly arrived international students from English as an Additional Language (EAL) backgrounds, the conversation fillers so necessary for meaning-making such as ‘Ah ha’, or ‘Oh, I see’, or ‘Sorry? What do you mean?’ are absent, resulting in communication breakdown.
Jennifer Anderson Learning Skills Adviser Federation University Australia
LSAs from other universities ask why we’re not using video conferencing as the default. It’s because so many students have lost their casual jobs, so cannot afford high bandwidth connections. We also understand that many of our students share laptops with friends, and do not have desks or quiet study spaces.
To tell your COVID-19 story to the NTEU member community, please contact Helena Spyrou
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Sentry
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may 2020
