Show Empathy for your Students

• The situation is all new and different to the students too. As educators, we now must change the way we teach, and we need to start using new tools and to start using existing tools in different ways than what we did before; our daily lives will change. We must not forget that the students’ daily lives will change, too. The students will most likely be working hard to get used to the new tools and the new study routines. It is, therefore, more important than ever for us to collaborate with the rest of the teaching staff to coordinate our plans and activities to avoid overloading students with new tools and study routines.
• Communication and information needs are larger. In familiar settings, the need for communication and information sharing may be low. Staff and students mostly know what needs to be done; only small cues are needed to initiate the expected responses. In these days where there are many simultaneous changes, however, we often need to act in different ways than before, and mere cues will often not result in the expected responses. The risks for miscommunication and misinterpretations are larger.
• Students have lost their main social learning arena. Classrooms, laboratories, study rooms, group rooms, and, not at least, the cafeteria constitute the students’ main social learning arena. We, the educators and managers of learning activities, need to contribute in creating new social learning arenas for our students.

Communicating with the Students

• Communicate early, communicate often. The best we can do reduce the risks for misunderstandings and misinterpretations is to be in frequent dialogues with the students.
• Be concise. Too much information may be confusing to the students and, therefore, might be as counterproductive as too little information. One should focus on information and communication that is important for the students to accomplish their tasks and perform well.
• Set clear and proper expectations. All of us tend to become confused and frustrated when expectations are not met. When teaching, therefore, we must set clear and proper expectations. This will reduce the likelihood for student confusion and frustration.
• Set clear objectives for the learning activities. It is even more important than usual to set clear objectives for the learning activities we develop for the students since the students no longer have access to their on-campus social learning arena where informal coordination among students and between students and teaching staff usually takes place.
• Share information with all students. Some students are more eager to approach teaching staff directly – to ask questions or to initiate a scientific discussion. Other students are more aloof. In many cases, information that we share with students contacting us individually may be relevant to the other students, too. We should, therefore, adopt routines and tools that make our interaction with students as transparent as possible, when relevant.
• Make it easy for students to be up to date. We should adopt good – and preferably standardised – routines for informing students about important issues, course updates, and learning activities. The LMS, Blackboard, should be the default place for such information.

Facilitate Student Interaction and Collaboration

• Create digital arenas for student collaboration. Teaching staff has the main responsibility for creating alternative arenas for student interaction and collaboration now when the campus is closed, and the students have lost many of the informal collaboration and interaction arenas. This can be done by creating Q&A and chat groups related to the course. We should also assist students in building their own study communities.
• Ensure student participation and contribution. Creating Q&A and chat groups alone is insufficient. We also must initiate and ensure that students engage in group activities. We may, for instance, give students assignments related to these groups. As an example, students could be assigned the task of submitting a given number of posts on chat groups or they could be assigned the task of replying to several of the messages posted by other students.
• Have students reflect on their own work and contributions. We may also assign tasks for students to reflect on their own experiences in adopting new tools and new study routines. Such reflections may help students develop new and effective working routines and habits.

Communicate with other Educators

• We are also learners in this situation. Without much time to prepare, we have had to learn to use new tools and new ways to communicate with our students and to manage new types of learning activities. Learning is a social activity. You may find it beneficial to participate in educator communities for sharing experiences, ideas, and worries.
• We also lost our main social arena. Most of us now work at our home offices and no longer have easy access to the social arena that exists at the main office. Leaders (formal and informal) should create alternative arenas for the daily social interaction between staff members.

Facilitating Teaching and Learning

There are a few alternative technologies to be used and several different ways to use them to facilitate teaching and learning when preparing for the current situation where neither teaching staff nor students are physically present at campus. One key choice is whether teaching and learning takes place simultaneously.

Simultaneously or Different Times?

• Asynchronous activities are more flexible and result in less spiky system loads. Most campus education is synchronous – i.e., students and teaching staff are present jointly. Such solutions are efficient in terms of teaching and room resources. Asynchronous solutions, on the other hand, may be more suitable when teaching and learning activities are no longer bound to campus. Asynchronous solutions are more flexible than synchronous solutions. Asynchronous solutions typically generate a smoother and less spiky system load and may therefore reduce the number of technical problems that we might experience. Experiences from cross-campus teaching tells us that just recording and streaming traditional lectures often is an inferior way to teach remote students. Asynchronous solutions will often be superior for sharing information with a large group of students.
• Asynchronous solutions require more work to create an active learning environment. As educators we want to create active learning environments where students may ask questions, discuss, and collaborate. This can be achieved in reasonably easy ways even within a distributed, virtual classroom. For asynchronous solutions, however, more deliberate actions are required to facilitate the creation of active learning environments.

Technical Systems

At NTNU, we have several alternative tools and systems available for teaching on digital platforms.

• Tools for asynchronous activities. Most of us should be used to asynchronous tools already, being it tools for document sharing, email, podcast, chat, question and answering (e.g., Piazza), etc. Such tools become increasingly important now in the fully off-campus teaching setting. We will most likely use these tools in more and in different ways than before. We, therefore, also need to consider how to combine multiple tools in ways that may result in a unified learning environment.
• Tools for synchronous activities. Most of us have less experience in using synchronous tools, i.e., tools for webinars (e.g., Blackboard Collaborate and Zoom.us), online meetings (Blackboard Collaborate, Microsoft Teams, and Zoom.us), one-on-one audio-video calls (e.g., Skype for Business, Microsoft Teams, and Zoom.us), and student response systems (e.g., Mentimeter).

Given this selection of tools, how do we set up a good technical solution for our teaching and learning activities? Let us illustrate this by considering some on-campus teaching scenarios.

Lectures and other Plenary Activities

Many on-campus activities are plenary activities where students are gathered in classrooms or lecture halls. The teaching is to a large degree unidirectional communication between one – or a few – lecturers and a usually larger group of students. Interaction is usually quite limited, e.g., in the form of short question and answer sessions.

Educators are generally aware that the lecture is not an efficient way of teaching and learning. Unfortunately, it is even less efficient when students are physically present in the same classroom as the lecturer(s). Streaming lectures, of traditional format, should not be the preferred form of teaching in when teaching on a digital platform even though it may be a cost-effective way of teaching. A better alternative would be to create smaller podcasts accompanied by relevant exercises and assignments that the students can work on asynchronously. More interactive parts of the lecture may be turned into shorter net meetings or webinars that make real time discussions possible. The use of chat rooms and the use of student response systems should be considered when planning for net meetings and webinars to facilitate even more student participation and interactivity.

Seminars and Discussions

In seminars and discussions, students and educators interact much more than in typical plenary activities.

On a digital platform, seminars and discussions can be run as online meetings where each participant can be given the opportunity to talk and/or to share a presentation. Chat rooms and/or student response systems should be considered to activate students in this case too. We also should make sure that all students contribute, as we typically would in a classroom. Tools for online meetings usually offer the possibility to create breakout rooms where students can be discussed in smaller groups simultaneously. Breakout room sessions are helpful for achieving increased student interaction.

Assignment and Lab Work

A common on-campus scenario is where students are gathered in a classroom or a laboratory to work on assignments or lab exercises under the supervision of educators and/or teaching assistants.

On a digital platform, assignment and lab work can be run as a online meeting and/or a real-time chat/question and answer session where students may post general questions for anyone to answer or they may post requests for individual assistance from a supervisor or a teaching assistant. The supervisor or the teaching assistants may respond to this request by setting up a direct audio-video call with each student asking for assistance.

Supervision

Supervisors regularly meet with students – individually or in small groups. On campus, supervision usually takes place as physical meetings between students and supervisors.

Supervision on a digital platform can easily be organised as net meetings., the Centre for Excellent IT Education at NTNU and NORD university, has collaborated with teaching staff who has been assigned – or who has volunteered – to extend their courses from being offered at a single campus to become cross-campus offerings. Through this collaboration, we have gained experiences that should be useful to all of us educators – and thereby also to our students – in this new situation where students and teaching staff are no longer collocated.

Show Empathy for your Students

• The situation is all new and different to the students too. As educators, we now must change the way we teach, and we need to start using new tools and to start using existing tools in different ways than what we did before; our daily lives will change. We must not forget that the students’ daily lives will change, too. The students will most likely be working hard to get used to the new tools and the new study routines. It is, therefore, more important than ever for us to collaborate with the rest of the teaching staff to coordinate our plans and activities to avoid overloading students with new tools and study routines.
• Communication and information needs are larger. In familiar settings, the need for communication and information sharing may be low. Staff and students mostly know what needs to be done; only small cues are needed to initiate the expected responses. In these days where there are many simultaneous changes, however, we often need to act in different ways than before, and mere cues will often not result in the expected responses. The risks for miscommunication and misinterpretations are larger.
• Students have lost their main social learning arena. Classrooms, laboratories, study rooms, group rooms, and, not at least, the cafeteria constitute the students’ main social learning arena. We, the educators and managers of learning activities, need to contribute in creating new social learning arenas for our students.

Communicating with the Students

• Communicate early, communicate often. The best we can do reduce the risks for misunderstandings and misinterpretations is to be in frequent dialogues with the students.
• Be concise. Too much information may be confusing to the students and, therefore, might be as counterproductive as too little information. One should focus on information and communication that is important for the students to accomplish their tasks and perform well.
• Set clear and proper expectations. All of us tend to become confused and frustrated when expectations are not met. When teaching, therefore, we must set clear and proper expectations. This will reduce the likelihood for student confusion and frustration.
• Set clear objectives for the learning activities. It is even more important than usual to set clear objectives for the learning activities we develop for the students since the students no longer have access to their on-campus social learning arena where informal coordination among students and between students and teaching staff usually takes place.
• Share information with all students. Some students are more eager to approach teaching staff directly – to ask questions or to initiate a scientific discussion. Other students are more aloof. In many cases, information that we share with students contacting us individually may be relevant to the other students, too. We should, therefore, adopt routines and tools that make our interaction with students as transparent as possible, when relevant.
• Make it easy for students to be up to date. We should adopt good – and preferably standardised – routines for informing students about important issues, course updates, and learning activities. The LMS, Blackboard, should be the default place for such information.

Facilitate Student Interaction and Collaboration

• Create digital arenas for student collaboration. Teaching staff has the main responsibility for creating alternative arenas for student interaction and collaboration now when the campus is closed, and the students have lost many of the informal collaboration and interaction arenas. This can be done by creating Q&A and chat groups related to the course. We should also assist students in building their own study communities.
• Ensure student participation and contribution. Creating Q&A and chat groups alone is insufficient. We also must initiate and ensure that students engage in group activities. We may, for instance, give students assignments related to these groups. As an example, students could be assigned the task of submitting a given number of posts on chat groups or they could be assigned the task of replying to several of the messages posted by other students.
• Have students reflect on their own work and contributions. We may also assign tasks for students to reflect on their own experiences in adopting new tools and new study routines. Such reflections may help students develop new and effective working routines and habits.

Communicate with other Educators

• We are also learners in this situation. Without much time to prepare, we have had to learn to use new tools and new ways to communicate with our students and to manage new types of learning activities. Learning is a social activity. You may find it beneficial to participate in educator communities for sharing experiences, ideas, and worries.
• We also lost our main social arena. Most of us now work at our home offices and no longer have easy access to the social arena that exists at the main office. Leaders (formal and informal) should create alternative arenas for the daily social interaction between staff members.

Facilitating Teaching and Learning

There are a few alternative technologies to be used and several different ways to use them to facilitate teaching and learning when preparing for the current situation where neither teaching staff nor students are physically present at campus. One key choice is whether teaching and learning takes place simultaneously.

Simultaneously or Different Times?

• Asynchronous activities are more flexible and result in less spiky system loads. Most campus education is synchronous – i.e., students and teaching staff are present jointly. Such solutions are efficient in terms of teaching and room resources. Asynchronous solutions, on the other hand, may be more suitable when teaching and learning activities are no longer bound to campus. Asynchronous solutions are more flexible than synchronous solutions. Asynchronous solutions typically generate a smoother and less spiky system load and may therefore reduce the number of technical problems that we might experience. Experiences from cross-campus teaching tells us that just recording and streaming traditional lectures often is an inferior way to teach remote students. Asynchronous solutions will often be superior for sharing information with a large group of students.
• Asynchronous solutions require more work to create an active learning environment. As educators we want to create active learning environments where students may ask questions, discuss, and collaborate. This can be achieved in reasonably easy ways even within a distributed, virtual classroom. For asynchronous solutions, however, more deliberate actions are required to facilitate the creation of active learning environments.

Technical Systems

At NTNU, we have several alternative tools and systems available for teaching on digital platforms.

• Tools for asynchronous activities. Most of us should be used to asynchronous tools already, being it tools for document sharing, email, podcast, chat, question and answering (e.g., Piazza), etc. Such tools become increasingly important now in the fully off-campus teaching setting. We will most likely use these tools in more and in different ways than before. We, therefore, also need to consider how to combine multiple tools in ways that may result in a unified learning environment.
• Tools for synchronous activities. Most of us have less experience in using synchronous tools, i.e., tools for webinars (e.g., Blackboard Collaborate and Zoom.us), online meetings (Blackboard Collaborate, Microsoft Teams, and Zoom.us), one-on-one audio-video calls (e.g., Skype for Business, Microsoft Teams, and Zoom.us), and student response systems (e.g., Mentimeter).

Given this selection of tools, how do we set up a good technical solution for our teaching and learning activities? Let us illustrate this by considering some on-campus teaching scenarios.

Lectures and other Plenary Activities

Many on-campus activities are plenary activities where students are gathered in classrooms or lecture halls. The teaching is to a large degree unidirectional communication between one – or a few – lecturers and a usually larger group of students. Interaction is usually quite limited, e.g., in the form of short question and answer sessions.

Educators are generally aware that the lecture is not an efficient way of teaching and learning. Unfortunately, it is even less efficient when students are physically present in the same classroom as the lecturer(s). Streaming lectures, of traditional format, should not be the preferred form of teaching in when teaching on a digital platform even though it may be a cost-effective way of teaching. A better alternative would be to create smaller podcasts accompanied by relevant exercises and assignments that the students can work on asynchronously. More interactive parts of the lecture may be turned into shorter net meetings or webinars that make real time discussions possible. The use of chat rooms and the use of student response systems should be considered when planning for net meetings and webinars to facilitate even more student participation and interactivity.

Seminars and Discussions

In seminars and discussions, students and educators interact much more than in typical plenary activities.

On a digital platform, seminars and discussions can be run as online meetings where each participant can be given the opportunity to talk and/or to share a presentation. Chat rooms and/or student response systems should be considered to activate students in this case too. We also should make sure that all students contribute, as we typically would in a classroom. Tools for online meetings usually offer the possibility to create breakout rooms where students can be discussed in smaller groups simultaneously. Breakout room sessions are helpful for achieving increased student interaction.

Assignment and Lab Work

A common on-campus scenario is where students are gathered in a classroom or a laboratory to work on assignments or lab exercises under the supervision of educators and/or teaching assistants.

On a digital platform, assignment and lab work can be run as a online meeting and/or a real-time chat/question and answer session where students may post general questions for anyone to answer or they may post requests for individual assistance from a supervisor or a teaching assistant. The supervisor or the teaching assistants may respond to this request by setting up a direct audio-video call with each student asking for assistance.

Supervision

Supervisors regularly meet with students – individually or in small groups. On campus, supervision usually takes place as physical meetings between students and supervisors.

Supervision on a digital platform can easily be organised as net meetings.