Post 320: How do I translate my Face to face class lecture into an online environment?

How do I translate my Face to Face  class lectures into an online environment?

1. Make short 3 to 5 minute class lecture videos

For each short video, focus on one particular skill you want students to learn. Ask yourself, what can students learn in 3 to 5 minutes.  Chunk your one hour class lecture into 3 to 5 minute sound bites to record as a video lecture for an online classroom.

2. Add Video context to your forum discussions.

You can add outside 3 to 5 minute videos as context for your forum discussion thread posts or questions for students to view. Once again, you can either teach students a new skill or reinforce a skill they are already reading about in their class reading. Once you use this context, you can ask students to discuss what they are seeing in the video as impetus for class discussion. Sort of like when you have students ask you questions at the end of your face to face class lectures.

3. Forum Discussion context as part of your 1 hour face to face lecture.

As you add context to each of your teaching questions, you can use that context as bits and pieces of your class lecture. In an online classroom, it is all about 'chunking' where you place little bits and pieces of your traditional one hour class lecture into different parts of your online classroom.

4. Weekly Lesson summary as part of  1 hour your face to face  lecture.

At the end of each week, it is best teaching practice to wrap up the week with a wrap up summary where you summarize the main points of the week's lesson.  In this way, when students review for the cumulative final exam, they can just read each week's summary to get an overview of that week's lesson.  You can add elements of your traditional one hour lecture to that weekly summary and you can also give students a preview of the next week's work to give students additional overall context of the class material.

In an online environment, a one hour lecture is just not interesting as in a face to face context because when you are giving your one hour lecture in a face to face classroom, students get to see you live and seeing you live with your body gestures keep students interested longer whereas in an online environment, students do not get to see you 3D, therefore you get even less student attention. Also, looking at a computer screen is tiring for the eyes so that's why you have to teach online students skills in small digestible chunks.

As long as you chunk your lecture, then you can have the same learning outcomes in your online version of your class as in your face to face class.  Good luck to the newest online teachers forced to teach online because of COVID19!