OLDaily

Four Lessons We’ve Learned from Moving Online
Anabelle Morgan, Education Next, 2020/04/13

The teaser for this article is "students with ADHD, executive function challenges, and anxiety can thrive in a virtual 'schoolhouse'," which gives you a sense of where it's going. The four lessons are (quoted):

• Anticipate, plan, prepare, reflect, repeat
• It’s still all about community and relationships
• Differentiation is for everyone
• Don’t forget to breathe

Now I've had a lot of pushback against my "online learning is unplanned" post from a couple of weeks ago. Which is fair enough, because if you interpreted that what I meant was 'no planning whatsoever' then you would have concluded quite correctly that it was stupid advice.

Here's what Anabelle Morgan means by planning: "asking our teachers to start thinking about how they would transition their classes to an online environment; taking an in-depth look at our technological capabilities to deliver an effective educational program remotely and developing step-by-step written and video Virtual Learning User Guides for our students and parents; creating daily schedules for each division; and reviewing and updating our risk management, business continuity, and operational documents." And these are all good things to be doing, and please don't mistake my advice as meaning anything different.

What I wanted to say (and obviously failed to do so properly) was that the experience of online learning should feel like it's fast, fun, crazy, unplanned, and inspirational, etc. I still think this is the opposite of building online courses where every student activity is preplanned ahead of time. I still think improv is better than script. I don't expect everyone to agree with me (especially those whose careers consist of building carefully planned online courses). But when the dust settles, and when we reflect on what we want from online learning, and how we can offer it sustainably for everybody without running ourselves ragged, I think something more like my perspective will prevail.

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Zooming
D'Arcy Norman, D'Arcy Norman Dot Net, 2020/04/13

D'Arcy Norman offers a startling statistic from the University of Calgary: "Since we launched Zoom as a campus platform on March 13, 2020, there have been 36,439 meetings conducted by our community. That's a lot of meetings, and indicates the scale of the potential limited by the bad technology we've had to endure up to this point (I'm looking at you WebEx, Connect and Skype). And 3 reports of ZoomBombing (so far). There may have been others, but we have only 3 reported cases at this time." This post describes their attempts to counter the ZoomBombing, though instead of the focus on security, I'd like to know what happened in the remaining 36,436 meetings where (so far as we know) ZoomBombing did not happen. Indeed (and I've expressed this elsewhere) I wonder how much of the Zoom security scare is Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt (FUD) manufactured by its competitors.

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Beyond Does It Work: Meaningful Questions to Ask about Online Education Amid COVID-19
Yong Zhao, National Education Policy Center, 2020/04/13

"When schools are closed," says Yong Zhao, "we should not simply accept the default answer of going online. Instead, we need to consider what we want to achieve through converting schooling into online, that is, why do we want to move online?" It's a good question. The trend has been to simply place classes and courses online. But arguably, online is not really suited to that, and online could potentially do more than is possible offline. In particular, one-size-fits-all doesn't work as well online. "When making decisions about what forms of online education to use, it is advisable to examine the evidence of effectiveness of specific configurations of each program and the measured outcomes rather than accepting or rejecting a program or model simply because it is online."

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Online Learning in a Hurry – a Course in a Hurry
Dave Cormier, Dave’s Educational Blog, 2020/04/13

There has been a flurry of activity in recent weeks as providers prepare online courses to help the many instructors who will be teaching online for the first time. This is Dave Cormier's contribution. Like many such courses, it does not focus on the technology (the course will be taught in Blackboard, which is the institutional system the University of Windsor professors will be using; the company has its own tech instruction). Cormier is of course drawing from several decades of experience providing support for online learning, so it's interesting to see how he would structure the course and the first session.

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Where Are They? Students Go Missing in Shift to Remote Classes
Stephen Sawchuk, Christina A. Samuels, 2020/04/13

One of the benefits (if you can call it that) of in-person education is enforcement. You can make sure each student is sitting in class, and create absentee and truancy policies and laws to address those who aren't. In online learning, especially during a pandemic, it's a lot harder without significant surveillance technologies. And it forces us to recognize that schools and (to a lesser degree) colleges are a surveillance system, and for that matter, so is our entire system of in-person employment. There are also social justice issues at play, as the students who go missing are also the ones who are homeless, or who are living in poverty, or in unstable homes. I have articles from Gallup, Education Week, EdSurge, Tampa Bay Times, SJ Mercury News, each of which tells a different story.

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Student Participation in Online Content-Related Discussion and Its Relation to Students’ Background Knowledge
Miikka Turkkila, Henri Lommi, Education Sciences, 2020/04/13

I think this is an interesting result: in computer-supported collaborative learning (CSCL),  "the structure and extension of a student’s background knowledge does not explain their activity and role in online discussions." The study (17 page PDF) consists of a social network analysis of online discussions. The sample size is quite small, unfortunately. But the discussion is fascinating, especially the use of McDonnell's method of computing roles in a directed network based on triadic motif-role fingerprints (the paper contains a chart of them). The result is a quite complex analytical description of the roles played by the participants over 6 periods. What would be interesting would be an interpretation of that description - that is, what it means in terms of content and learning - but as the authors write, "our focus is on developing network analysis methods. This would allow us to readily analyze larger data sets in the future without time-consuming and resource-heavy content analysis." This is genuinely leading-edge work.

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7 Ways to Make Distance Learning More Equitable
Victoria Saylor, Common Sense Education, 2020/04/13

I think these are all good suggestions, and more importantly, they represent a way of thinking that is based on more than just ways to get content to people. Here they are (quoted):

• Check in with your students regularly
• Help your students' families get connected
• Choose tools that are mobile-friendly and/or can be used offline
• Try to keep online lessons asynchronous vs. synchronous
• Double down on project-based learning
• Maintain extracurricular communities
• Partner with community-based organization

What I like about this list is how it treats individuals as individuals, takes care to support them, and places learning into the broader community and social contexts students findthemselves in.

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