Education 2.0 & 3.0

Allowing for greater flexibility, a HyFlex teaching model enables higher student engagement and options as opposed to completely hybrid or in-person learning.

If there ever was a time to create a flexible structure for student learning and success, the time is now. One of the most empowering and compassionate practices that we can integrate into our classrooms is scaffolding, an instructional strategy that provides students with a framework to guide and support their learning (Wood, Bruner, & Ross, 1976). Scaffolding can offer a weekly structure that supports student growth, creates autonomous learners who are responsible for their own learning, and gives learners more confidence in acquiring new skills.

One of the perks of teaching online is that there are so many great tools that make facilitating an online course easier. For example, not having to manually grade and enter grades for online exams since most learning management systems can automatically evaluate student responses and submit scores to a gradebook without the instructor needing to do a thing. 

With the ability to automate so much of an online course, along with the physical separation from your students, it can be challenging to find ways to let your personality, teaching style, and personal touches shine through in the online environment. 

Here are three easy strategies that you can begin trying and implementing in your teaching today to bring a bit more of your personality to your online courses. 

 The transition to online, asynchronous learning poses just as many challenges for students entering the online classroom as it does for academics mastering the platform. Cynthia Wheatley Glenn out…

The shock has passed, the sadness comes and goes, and the stretchy waistband pants are becoming a mainstay. Your college or university is staying online for the rest of this academic year, as well as summer, and you wonder about fall 2020.

While the trauma of the COVID-19 pandemic persists, it may be time to settle into an educational environment that will be more online than previously imagined.

Warning: You will not get through the same amount of content during this pandemic. Please do not try.

Social distancing. Stay-in ordinances. Home schooling. Experiences many of us never thought we would be living at the beginning of 2020. Now, the “new normal,” at least for the near future, involves students of all ages at home all day and parents trying to move their work to a virtual format. Managing the stress of change is a lot, but trying to do it while entertaining a kindergartner or overseeing a high-schooler’s online activities is enough to ramp up anyone’s stress level.

Compassionate teaching means connecting in a way that enhances learning and a sense of belonging for participants. Trust helps us to relax and learn.

This article was originally published in March 30, 2018 and updated on December 9, 2019.

As more and more teaching and learning moves online, contemplative teaching is transferring to the digital environment in the service of accessibility, low cost and development of international communities of practice. Because of the reliance on interpersonal relationships and a sense of safety and trust in these kinds of communities, there are some special challenges teachers of online contemplative material face that are different to those faced in the onsite/in-person environment.

"When we look at all the assumptions that have been overturned in higher education because of the pandemic and all the needs that have only grown during this time, what becomes clear is that frameworks that previously worked for higher education are no longer guaranteed to function. Something new is needed, and flipped learning may be exactly the right model for where higher education is headed once the pandemic is over."

When hundreds of spring and summer undergraduate courses were abruptly moved from onsite to online delivery in the wake of COVID-19, several faculty and students nationwide reacted with panic and uncertainty. Currently, instructors are busy preparing for the 2020-2021 academic year where several students will continue taking courses online. At my institution, fall academic courses will be primarily virtual (along with several others across the nation), with some in-person and hybrid instruction for performance-based, clinical, and laboratory courses, and some students living on campus.

Video lectures may have worked as a stop-gap measure in the emergency move to online learning, but they just don't cut it for the long term. Here are nine ways to bring distance education courses to the next level.