3 Tips for Adapting from In-Person to Online Teaching
If you are one of the many teachers suddenly adapting an in-person class to an online environment, here are some tips and assignment outlines to help you make the transition.
The biggest and best tip is to create a repeatable one- or two-week template for your course. In unpredictable times, students crave a predictable structure. Having a template to work from also saves time, making you a more efficient and better rested teacher.
The benefits of using a template are clear, so the only question that remains is how to think about constructing that template.
1. Think in Terms of Total Time
For traditional classes, the lesson plan fits the class meeting time. We plan sixty minutes of activities for a one hour class session.
It may be tempting to think about your obligations as an online instructor in the same way and create five different lesson plans for a week of online education. This methodology creates a greater burden on the instructor than is necessary and, more importantly, it misses out on the benefits that asynchronous education offers.
Think in terms of the total time your class sessions were meeting. If you are a high school teacher and you had 300 minutes of class time, devise ways to use those 300 minutes in chunks of various sizes. If you are a college instructor and you had 160 minutes of class time, do the same thing.
You are not anchored to the same units of time you once were. Use that freedom to your advantage.
What does that look like? We’ll cover some example assignment types below, but here is a quick sketch of how an English teacher can create an effective 300 minutes-worth of weekly course work.
- 40 minutes of grammar work using an online program that offers certification/documentation such as Quill or Grammar Bytes.
- 40 minutes of proofreading practice (send students a sample essay with mistakes and ask them to make specific corrections for grammar, MLA, citation style, or argumentation)
- 60 minutes of instructor assigned reading
- 60 minutes of instructor-led discussion where students respond with brief answers to questions on provided instructional material
- 100 minutes of student-led research and analysis following specific assignment guidelines
We’re not trying to recreate the classroom environment here, because we’re not in the classroom anymore.
Under normal circumstances, you might create more varied instruction than this and plan a tight, multifaceted hour. But that is partly because under normal circumstances you have to account for attention span deficits that you can stop worrying about now.
Keep things interesting. But don’t shy away from 100 minutes of research–based work or a big chunk of grammar work. Build a week of varied work.
There’s no need to do it in the same time increments you did when the school bells were still ringing on the hour.
2. Create Sequenced (& Repeatable) Assignments
It’s time to think openly and to think big. When you were in the classroom, it was you and your students. Now, it’s you, your students, and the internet.
Online education offers a great opportunity for student choice for this reason. Instructional designers will be quick to point out that assignments that utilize this advantage help to activate a sense of ownership and student curiosity, both of which increase student engagement.
Creating opportunities for student choice also helps to avoid the inevitable tedium of doing computer work all week for students who no longer have much chance to interact with their peers. (If school is now just each isolated student sitting alone with the instructional materials, nothing has been gained by going online and much has been lost. It doesn’t have to be that way.)
Research assignments are perfect for allowing student choice. They are sequence-able and they are also repeatable, which means one assignment template can provide a hours of rich and varied instruction.
In addition to building real-world internet skills, research offers prime opportunities for teaching reading and analysis, summary and comparison, and evidenced-based essay writing skills.
A quick example of an assignment like this could go as follows:
- Provide a topic (or small set of subject and grade appropriate topics) to your students.
- Provide a short list of sources for research (specific websites or specific categories of sites like periodicals or .gov sites).
Part 1.
Ask students to find one article. Then respond to these prompts.
- In one paragraph, identify the topic of the article and describe the kind of evidence presented (statistical evidence, examples, opinion or commentary from experts, anecdotal evidence, etc.).
- In one paragraph, identify and explain two key points in the article.
- In one paragraph, comment on how helpful this article would be in an essay on the topic. Consider the publication where it appears, publication date, amount of information, specific content of information, etc.)
- Submit this three paragraph assignment for a grade.
Part 2.
Ask students to find another article on the same topic in a different publication/website.
- In two paragraphs, compare the new article to the previous article. Which article would be more helpful in writing an informative essay on the topic? (Why?) Which article would be more helpful in writing persuasive essay on the topic? (Why?)
- Submit this two paragraph assignment for a grade.
Part 3.
Ask students to share their research on a discussion platform or in a shared Google Doc or Google Slide.*
- In one sentence, identify your topic.
- Pull one citation from each article that you feel is interesting or important.
- After all students have posted this material, ask students to comment on another student’s post and pose a question that requires more research. (You can also pose these questions.)
Part 4.
Answer the question with more research.
- Ask students to either review the articles they have already read or find another source to answer the question that has been posed to them.
- Then answer the question in the discussion forum.
Parts of this assignment can be repeated weekly or bi-weekly. The entire assignment can also be spread across several weeks. You can add analysis activities or increase the emphasis on summary. You can use videos, podcasts, or other media. You can incorporate the research process into a culminating essay.
There are many, many ways to build from this assignment structure and most of them will represent a very effective use of instructional time, creating strong student engagement, practicing vital intellectual skills, and taking full advantage of the online environment.
With an assignment structure like this in place as a lodestone, you can add smaller assignments around it to practice any specific skills that still need to be worked in.
3. Use or Convert Existing Resources
You’re in a new educational environment now, but that doesn’t mean you have to re-invent your instructional strategies entirely. You can adapt strategies and resources that you already use.
Reflect on your curriculum.
- Identify the activities that reinforce existing knowledge.
- Identify activities that allow computer use.
- Find texts that you already have discussion questions for.
Take these activities and create an online version either by using your school’s learning management platform or by creating a simple website with Wordpress or Google Sites. Make the page private but give students the access code then have them post discussion question answers as comments in a comment box. Keep things simple.
You can also shop around for resources online that match your needs. People like me offer instructional resources at Teachers Pay Teachers and similar sites. Many of these resources are easily adaptable to online teaching and even have evaluation strategies included.
A few plug-and-play or repeatable activities can go a long way to giving you the new course structure you need. And these activities also can help you to simplify and take some of the work off your plate.
It’s a time-consuming chore to adapt an in-person class to the online environment, but it’s worth noting that there are opportunities too.
If your school subscribes to a database, this is a great opportunity to have students explore that database. If you have wanted to explore Project Gutenberg for open source literary texts in your English class or for primary texts and documents in your history class, this is a great time to do it.
The goal of this article, however, is to bring home the point that a few key strategies can help to simplify and focus the transition to online education for teachers who are new to distance learning.
*To use a Google Slide document for this kind of sharing, you can assign each student a slide number and ask them to present their work on that slide. Keeping students in the roster order keeps things easy to track and grade.
