We are almost at the end of November. The HE institutions in India with semester systems are now winding down while the ones with annual systems hopefully are settling in the rhythm of teaching online. In the beginning of the academic year, I wrote about thinking differently to achieve best outcomes for online teaching and ideas for assessment and final exams. I hope many were able to tweak their teaching strategy to suit the online environment keeping in mind their students’ background and resources.
The strategy of teaching with multiple 10 min long videos and 1 hour synchronous time per week seems to have gone well. The good part is that now the teachers have multiple recorded videos that can be reused for online teaching or teaching in flipped classroom mode after the f2f teaching resumes.
Some teachers just imported their classroom to online mode with the same hour long or longer lectures multiple times a week. Most of these teachers reported dwindling interest from students. Fatigue has set in for both teachers and students as the crucial element of classroom interaction that kept up motivation was missing. It has been especially demotivating for students without resources to attend synchronous lectures everyday. Some of the constraints for synchronous learning were: lack of a dedicated device for each person in the house, patchy data connectivity, lack of space in the house at specified time.
If you were unable to implement some of the suggestions from my previous posts, I would love to know what the constraints were. If moving from an hour long lecture to 10 minute chunks of videos seems daunting, I can help you figure out how to do it. If institutional policy is the constraint, I am happy to help redesign policies that work for all in the given circumstances keeping in mind specific constraints of your teachers and student body.
devayani tirthali 