Whether teaching an asynchronous distance learning course or delivering your course through live online classes, there are some commonly perceived challenges in asking your students to take part in group-based activities, such as whether your students will have the motivation to carry out the task, will there be equal participation within the group, how can you avoid disputes or disruption, and can you afford the time in class that the group activities will take up? I’ve previously blogged on the reasons why group activities are a good idea in your online classes. If we accept that, then it’s worth taking the time to think about how we can overcome these challenges to create really engaging and effective learning opportunities when asking our students to work collaboratively with their peers.

Group work in online courses can be challenging to run effectively. However, there are very strong reasons to make sure we give our students the opportunity to work with their classmates. In this blog, I consider some of the pedagogy and some of the classroom management reasons why it is a very good idea to facilitate group activities for your online students. If you would like to discuss this or any other online teaching matter, get in touch!

Will universities invest to embed the lessons learned following the pivot to online teaching? Covid-19, the worldwide lockdowns, and the closing of university campuses caused the great pivot from face-to-face teaching to fully online that has mostly endured throughout the last year. While this caused a huge degree of shock and stress across the teaching and student communities, it has brought the use of online learning technologies to the fore, and in many ways improved their use across the board. The hope is that what has been learned will become embedded in standard practice when we move back to the physical campus. However, unless universities are prepared to invest in staff development and support, there is a real risk that the lessons learned will be forgotten. This blog post is a reflection on the conversation that arose during the ELESIG webinar which introduced the Active Blended Learning approach adopted by the Universit or Northampton. Thanks to Dr Tünde Varga-Atkins for hosting the webinar and to Rob Howe, Alejandro Armellini and Virgínia Teixeira Antunes for their presentations.

As teachers, we usually have an implicit rationale for why we want our students to carry out learning activities at a certain time, in a certain order. You can better motivate your students to learn if you make your implicit rationale explicit to your students. In this short blog and vlog, I suggest why and how you might do this.

During a webinar today, I was asked "Do you distinguish between online courses and offline courses that are being delivered online?". This blog (and vlog) is my response to that question. Thank you Dermot O'Toole for the question.

It can be challenging to motivate students to work between classes. In this blog (and vlog) I suggest ways in which we can approach our online classes that will motivate, encourage and require students to do the tasks between their scheduled lessons so they can get a lot more out of your teaching and their learning.

University classes are still timetabled as they would be if the teaching were happening face-to-face. This faces teaching staff with the question of what to do with that time. For a lot of people, the simplest answer is to lecture. However, I would challenge whether this is the most effective use of your students' time, and in this blog (and vlog) I suggest another approach.

Short blog - and vlog - of my reflections on where we are at right at this point in time in terms of the lessons academic teaching staff can learn after the pivot to online, and how universities need to start supporting them.