A view from the teaching and learning center during learning

A view from the teaching and learning center during learning
7 min read
14 December 2022

In teaching and learning centers around the world, faculty developers, instructional designers, and educational technologists have been frantically helping faculty, staff, and graduate students transition to emergency distance learning. They offered workshops, provided one-on-one consultations, developed resources, and solved problems. The past few months have simply required them to help more faculty more quickly. Just one of our instructional technologists at the University of Connecticut Center for Excellence in Teaching and Learning offered 50 workshops attended by 1,650 faculty and graduate students over six weeks during the spring 2020 semester. In contrast, we typically train 2,000 across the teaching and learning center individuals per year.

Teaching and learning centers around the world have enjoyed the opportunity to work with and train thousands of faculty, staff, and graduate students over the past six months. However, in recent conversations with these colleagues, they all expressed the same desire as we move forward: to advance education through better teaching. As Ackoff and Greenberg aptly point out in Turning Learning Right Side Up, "the purpose of education is to learn, not to teach."1 Some of you have probably heard my story about the cartoon I had hanging outside my office in which one boy tells another boy he taught to whistle his dog, but when the other boy points out that the dog does not whistle, the first says something to the effect of, “I said I taught him; I didn't say he learned." One day I overheard two students in the hallway discussing the cartoon and theorizing about what it meant. One student thought it was my way of saying that I felt the students were too they don't know how to learn whatever they were being taught. 

Conversely, the other student thought it was my way of saying that I felt the faculty members were too incapable of teaching in a way that allowed students to learn. Too bad for the students, but I was sitting in my office listening to their conversation. This prompted me to invite them to discuss the true meaning of the cartoon. They probably rue the day they had to listen to me explain that teaching and learning are two different concepts. As shown cartoon, the mere fact that teaching has occurred does not guarantee that learning has occurred. On the contrary, learning can occur without the need for teaching because the learner can acquire knowledge, skills, and attitudes through experience or study. Therefore, teaching is not the most important aspect of learning í, so the center of the learning environment should remain the student rather than the instructor.



While technology allowed schools and colleges to transition to online instruction during the spring 2020 semester, emergency distance learning, not online instruction, was provided for the rest of the semester. The teaching and learning centers observed faculty members pretending nothing had changed and attempting to change their course without revising it. Some faculty members even asked how to deliver a three-hour synchronous lecture or a three-hour asynchronous video. Even at the best of times, neither of these is ideal without including activities during this time that requires significant student engagement with the content. During distance learning, reliance on synchronous attendance proves particularly challenging due to technology, connectivity, availability, and time zone issues.

Unlike emergency distance learning, online learning is bound by many standards to ensure optimal learning. Online learning provides opportunities for community building among students and with the instructor; opportunities to engage students in the material through realistic practice, spaced repetition, real-world context, and feedback; and opportunities for faculty members to support students. Online learning focuses on achieving learning objectives rather than simply covering content. Online education also creates a safe environment that addresses the needs of all students, including accessibility. Even for courses, they've taught face-to-face for years, it typically takes faculty members working with our instructional designers six months to create an online course that meets all the standards set forth by Quality Matters (www.qualitymatters.org), an online peer review process for course design.

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Over the years, many faculty members have expressed that they "don't believe in online learning." The two most common reasons given for this belief are that students will not learn this way and that students are not engaged. Research has shown that these fears are unfounded. In a U.S. Department of Education meta-analysis of online learning, researchers found that students in online courses performed better than those who learned face-to-face.2 Researchers also found that this increase in student learning was associated with more time spent on the online learning task.2 They also found that the effect size was larger when the online learning was collaborative or instructor-led rather than independent.2 In the research analyzed by Thalheimer, he found that the difference in learning was made by the teaching method rather than the modality. results. If the learning method is constant, then online learning and face-to-face teaching produce the same results. However, if the course is designed for online learning, then the results are better when taught online than when taught face-to-face.3

In fact, many institutions will face fall and possibly spring semesters that will be either fully or partially online. Now is the time to prepare. What was acceptable as emergency distance learning will not be appropriate for the online fall semester. Rather than attempting to replicate face-to-face lectures using technology, quality online courses require student engagement with the content, fostering collaboration, and building community. As any teaching and learning center will tell you, while there are many steps involved in creating an online course, the first step in preparing for an online course is to clearly define measurable learning objectives. 

Another important aspect when designing an online course is flexibility. An online course will not look the same as a face-to-face course. Online courses tend to be even more engaging and interactive than face-to-face classes, so students will interact intensively with the instructor, other students, and the content in a meaningful way. Flexibility in the types of assessments included in the course is also supported by the addition of more formative assessments and projects.




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