Take Your Teaching Online Printable

Take your teaching online
2 of 164 Thursday 12 September 2019

About this free course
This version of the content may include video, images and interactive content that may not be optimised
for your device.
You can experience this free course as it was originally designed on OpenLearn, the home of free
learning from The Open University –
There you’ll also be able to track your progress via your activity record, which you can use to
demonstrate your learning.
Copyright © 2017 The Open University
Intellectual property
Unless otherwise stated, this resource is released under the terms of the Creative Commons Licence
v4.0 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/deed.en_GB. Within that The Open University
interprets this licence in the following way:
www.open.edu/openlearn/about-openlearn/frequently-asked-questions-on-openlearn. Copyright and
rights falling outside the terms of the Creative Commons Licence are retained or controlled by The Open
University. Please read the full text before using any of the content.
We believe the primary barrier to accessing high-quality educational experiences is cost, which is why
we aim to publish as much free content as possible under an open licence. If it proves difficult to release
content under our preferred Creative Commons licence (e.g. because we can’t afford or gain the
clearances or find suitable alternatives), we will still release the materials for free under a personal end-
user licence.
This is because the learning experience will always be the same high quality offering and that should
always be seen as positive – even if at times the licensing is different to Creative Commons.
When using the content you must attribute us (The Open University) (the OU) and any identified author in
accordance with the terms of the Creative Commons Licence.
The Acknowledgements section is used to list, amongst other things, third party (Proprietary), licensed
content which is not subject to Creative Commons licensing. Proprietary content must be used (retained)
intact and in context to the content at all times.
The Acknowledgements section is also used to bring to your attention any other Special Restrictions
which may apply to the content. For example there may be times when the Creative Commons Non-
Commercial Sharealike licence does not apply to any of the content even if owned by us (The Open
University). In these instances, unless stated otherwise, the content may be used for personal and non-
commercial use.
We have also identified as Proprietary other material included in the content which is not subject to
Creative Commons Licence. These are OU logos, trading names and may extend to certain
photographic and video images and sound recordings and any other material as may be brought to your
attention.
Unauthorised use of any of the content may constitute a breach of the terms and conditions and/or
intellectual property laws.
We reserve the right to alter, amend or bring to an end any terms and conditions provided here without
notice.
All rights falling outside the terms of the Creative Commons licence are retained or controlled by The
Open University.
Head of Intellectual Property, The Open University

Contents
Introduction and guidance 8
Introduction and guidance 8
What is a badged course? 10
How to get a badge 11
Week 1: Teaching online is different 13

Introduction 13
1 Synchronous and asynchronous modes of teaching 14
1.1 Teacher reflections 16
1.2 Making use of asynchronous and synchronous online teaching opportunities
17
1.3 Interacting with students 18
1.4 Motivation, support and discipline 19
1.5 Developing skills and confidence 21
2 Blended learning 23
2.1 Flipped classrooms 24
3 Learner anonymity, backchannels and social interactions 27
4 This week’s quiz 29
Summary 30
Week 2: Discovering the connections: principles and theories

for understanding digital tools 32
Introduction 32
1 Principles of effective online teaching 33
1.1 Create a schedule 34
1.2 Keep learners informed 34
1.3 Foster a sense of community 35
1.4 Ask for feedback 36
1.5 Recognise diversity 36
2 How can educational theories help you take your teaching online? 37
2.1 Behaviourism 37
2.2 Cognitivism 37
2.3 Constructivism 38
2.4 Connectivism 39
3 Digital technologies for online teaching 40
3.1 Course management 40
3.2 Content creation tools 41
3.3 Networking and collaboration tools 41
3.4 Enhancing tools and materials you already use 42
4 Learning objects 43

Summary 47
Week 3: Selecting technologies: what to look for and how to

choose 49
Introduction 49
1 Technologies for content creation 51
1.1 Repurposing and extending slide presentations 51
1.2 Screencasting 52
1.3 Low-tech, low-complexity video recording 53
1.4 Image manipulation 54
1.5 Small interactive tools with big impact 54
1.6 E-learning development tools 55
1.7 Web conferencing platforms 55
1.8 RSS feeds and aggregators 56
1.9 Plagiarism detection 56
2 Personalisation with tools for learning 58
2.1 Serving diverse audiences 58
2.2 Giving control to learners 59
3 Technologies for social communication 61
3.1 Social technologies for promoting community 62
3.2 Social technologies for enhancing presence 63
4 Dealing with change in the technology sector 64
5 How to choose 65
5.1 Linking learning outcomes, activities and tools 65
Summary 71
Week 4: The benefits of support networks and how to develop

them 73
Introduction 73
1 Benefits of engaging with online networks 75
1.1 Sharing ideas 76
1.2 Developing partnerships and communities 76
1.3 Sharing information 77
1.4 Professional development 77
1.5 Making contacts 77
2 Communities of practice and network weather 79
2.1 Communities of practice 79
2.2 Network weather 81
3 Developing your networks 84
Summary 88

Week 5: Finding, using, and sharing educational materials
online 90
Introduction 90
1 Open Education Resources 91
1.1 What are Open Education Resources? 92
1.2 Why should I be interested in OER? 92
2 Evaluating the licensing and quality of online resources 95
2.1 Copyright and the role for Creative Commons licences 95
2.2 Evaluating open resources 96
2.3 Licensing your own materials 98
3 Finding resources online 99
3.1 OER repositories 99
Summary 104
Week 6: Supporting learners with different needs – accessibility

in online teaching 106
Introduction 106
1 What is assistive technology? 107
1.1 Types of assistive technology 109
2 Making your online materials accessible 111
2.1 Ensuring clarity of navigation and appearance 111
2.2 Making visual elements accessible 114
2.3 Making auditory elements accessible 117
2.4 Making display elements adjustable 117
2.5 Ensuring tasks can be completed without needing manual dexterity or visual
acuity 119
3 Checking the accessibility of materials 120
4 Alternative formats 121
Summary 125
Week 7: Making a change in your teaching 127

Introduction 127
1 Changing the technology or the pedagogy? 128
1.1 Visitors and Residents 129
2 Learning design 131
3 Making the change 133
3.1 Hints and tips 133
4 Analysing your practice and scope for change 135
Summary 137
Week 8: Evaluating changes and enhancing practice 139

Introduction 139

1 Learning analytics 141
2 Feedback and reflection 144
2.1 Eliciting feedback 144
2.2 Understanding feedback 144
2.3 Reflection 146
3 Action research 148
4 Review, modify, repeat! 150
5 Week 8 Quiz 151
Conclusion 152
Tell us what you think 153
Your notes 154
References 156
Acknowledgements 161

Introduction and guidance

Welcome to this badged open course, Take your teaching online.
The free course lasts eight weeks, with approximately three hours of study each week.
You can work through the course at your own pace, so if you have more time one week
there is no problem with pushing on to complete another week’s study.
Online learning has rapidly emerged and is now found in every area of education, from
schools to skills training. More people than ever learn through online courses. Even where
teaching is primarily ‘face to face’, online tools and interactions have become a key part of
the learning experience.
But teaching online is different. If you work in education or training at any level, you need
to develop new skills and understanding in order to make the right decisions, make the
most of the opportunities, and overcome common challenges.
It is almost 20 years since The Open University trialled our first fully online course with our
students. We are now world leaders in the research and delivery of online education. In
this free course, we share the fundamental knowledge needed to deliver effective
teaching online.
You will hear about the experiences of real educators, be introduced to cutting edge
research, and understand the ideas and tools that shape how we teach and learn online.
You will also learn useful methods that will guide you to test out these new ideas in your
own practice.
After completing this course, you should be able to
● Identify the differences between teaching online and teaching in a face-to-face

environment.
● Make informed decisions when choosing new tools and pedagogies for online
teaching.
● Identify major benefits and challenges of teaching online.
● Understand the changing practices of educators as they make use of online
opportunities such as social networks and open educational resources.
● Understand how to create and evaluate approaches to online teaching that are
appropriate for you.
Moving around the course

In the ‘Summary’ at the end of each week, you can find a link to the next week. If at any
time you want to return to the start of the course, click on ‘Course content’. From here you
can navigate to any part of the course. Alternatively, use the week links at the top of every
page of the course.

It’s also good practice, if you access a link from within a course page (including links to the
quizzes), to open it in a new window or tab. That way you can easily return to where
you’ve come from without having to use the back button on your browser.
Activities and storing your answers

Throughout Take your teaching online you will be presented with activities which are
designed to develop your understanding of the topics and give you the tools for study or
work beyond the course. The activities often require you to provide answers, responses or
comments in a text box which are then stored within the course itself, only viewable by you.
To make the most of the course we also advise that you store your answers together
elsewhere (perhaps in a Word document) for ease of access after you have completed the
course. We recommend that you transfer the answers to your own journal as you complete
each week of study.
All your answers to activities are also collated in Your notes at the end of Week 8.

What is a badged course?
What is a badged course?

While studying Take your teaching online you have the option to work towards gaining a
digital badge.
Badged courses are a key part of The Open University’s mission to promote the
educational well-being of the community. The courses also provide another way of helping
you to progress from informal to formal learning.
To complete a course you need to be able to find about 24 hours of study time, over a
period of about 8 weeks. However, it is possible to study them at any time, and at a pace
to suit you.
Badged courses are all available on The Open University’s OpenLearn website and do
not cost anything to study. They differ from Open University courses because you do not
receive support from a tutor. But you do get useful feedback from the interactive quizzes.
What is a badge?
Digital badges are a new way of demonstrating online that you have gained a skill.
Schools, colleges and universities are working with employers and other organisations to
develop open badges that help learners gain recognition for their skills, and support
employers to identify the right candidate for a job.
Badges demonstrate your work and achievement on the course. You can share your
achievement with friends, family and employers, and on social media. Badges are a great
motivation, helping you to reach the end of the course. Gaining a badge often boosts
confidence in the skills and abilities that underpin successful study. So, completing this
course should encourage you to think about taking other courses.

How to get a badge
How to get a badge

Getting a badge is straightforward! Here’s what you have to do:
● read each week of the course

● score 50% or more in the two badge quizzes in Week 4 and Week 8.
For all the quizzes, you can have three attempts at most of the questions (for true or false
type questions you usually only get one attempt). If you get the answer right first time you
will get more marks than for a correct answer the second or third time. If one of your
answers is incorrect you will often receive helpful feedback and suggestions about how to
work out the correct answer.
For the badge quizzes, if you’re not successful in getting 50% the first time, after 24 hours
you can attempt the whole quiz, and come back as many times as you like.
We hope that as many people as possible will gain an Open University badge – so you
should see getting a badge as an opportunity to reflect on what you have learned rather
than as a test.
If you need more guidance on getting a badge and what you can do with it, take a look at
the OpenLearn FAQs. When you gain your badge you will receive an email to notify you
and you will be able to view and manage all your badges in My OpenLearn within 24 hours
of completing the criteria to gain a badge.
Get started with Week 1.

How to get a badge

Week 1: Teaching online is different
Introduction
Week 1: Teaching online is

different
Introduction
Figure 1 Same teacher, different tools

Welcome to Take your teaching online! In this first week of the course, we will introduce
some of the key differences between teaching online and teaching in a face-to-face
environment. These differences mean that teaching online is a substantially different
experience to teaching face to face, with a substantially different skillset needed for the
teacher. The good news is that most teachers can adapt not only their skills, but also
many of their existing teaching materials, to suit an online environment. There are a lot of
possibilities, but as a minimum, if you and your students have computers and access to
the internet, then you can start to teach and learn online.
In this week, you will also meet Rita, our animated colleague who is working her way
through this course alongside you. Please allow Rita to introduce herself and to outline
what she hopes to get from this course.
Video content is not available in this format.

1 Synchronous and asynchronous modes of teaching
By the end of this week, you should be able to:
● discuss the main characteristics of online education activities and how these differ
from face-to-face teaching
● begin to determine the kinds of face-to-face teaching activities that might, or might
not, transfer successfully to an online environment
● summarise the elements of online teaching that need a different skillset to face-to-
face teaching.
The Open University would really appreciate a few minutes of your time to tell us about
yourself and your expectations for the course before you begin, in our optional
start-of-course survey. Participation will be completely confidential and we will not pass on
your details to others.
1 Synchronous and asynchronous modes

of teaching
One of the most common ways to think about teaching online is to consider whether it
might be synchronous, asynchronous, or a mixture of both.
Synchronous teaching
Synchronous teaching is where the teacher is present at the same time as the learner(s).
This is almost always the case in a face-to-face environment. Synchronous teaching can
also take place via online learning, through the use of video conferencing and live chat or
instant messaging. As with the face-to-face environment, the learners in synchronous
online teaching can ask questions in real time.

Figure 2 Teaching where learners are present at the same time is called synchronous
teaching
If a course is delivered entirely through synchronous teaching, face to face or online, this
can limit flexibility for learners. Because of the need for everyone to be present at the
same time (even if online), all students must work through the course at a similar pace,
allowing only minimal flexibility in scheduling. As everyone needs to be online together, if
a learner is not available for a lesson, they miss it (although some learning organisations
will record lessons for these students to view later).
The teacher’s role in online synchronous teaching might not be so very different from their
role in the face-to-face environment. Synchronous learning may feature webinars (live
online lessons), group chats, or drop-in sessions where teachers are available to help at a
particular time. However, teaching synchronously online will require some new skills to be
developed, for example in managing the faster pace of this form of teaching.
Asynchronous online teaching

Asynchronous online teaching is where teaching materials are posted online, and
learners work through them in their own time, communicating with each other and the
teacher via discussion boards or forums, or even by email. Good asynchronous teaching
will include a variety of media, including (but not limited to) audio and video clips. With an
asynchronous mode of teaching, the learner can work at their own pace and at times of
day which are convenient for them. The teacher may find that the pattern of their input is
very different from the synchronous environment, with many shorter visits to the
discussion boards or forums being more valuable to the learners than one single, longer
session. There may still be deadlines for work to be submitted for feedback, and there
may be a recommended schedule for students to follow so that they have some idea of
what they should be doing and when. As you will discover later in this week, a ‘blended’

approach can help teachers to bring together the advantages of synchronous and
asynchronous teaching, and of online and face-to-face teaching, into a single experience.
The importance of collaboration

Collaboration between students, and between students and teachers, is an important
factor in both synchronous and asynchronous online teaching, helping to create a sense
of connection between all participants and to build a sense of community and shared
purpose.
Collaboration in a synchronous environment can be achieved in much the same way as in
a face-to face-classroom, with discussions and group tasks. In the asynchronous
environment, collaboration can be trickier but is still very important in reducing the sense
of isolation learners may feel when working online. Discussions and group tasks can work
just as well asynchronously as synchronously. Indeed, because of the lack of time
constraints, learners can spend time composing a quality response when contributing to
an asynchronous online discussion.
1.1 Teacher reflections

Every week we will present video clips made at home by teachers who have moved their
teaching online. This provides you with a real world experience related to each week’s
material. At the same time, this also highlights how simple video clips can be produced
and used for online teaching purposes.
This week we have a clip from a teacher named Sarah S. Her experiences reflect a few of
the concepts we introduce this week and will discuss further in the weeks to come:

1.2 Making use of asynchronous and synchronous

online teaching opportunities
Throughout this course you’ll be introduced to research papers relating to the topics
discussed. The first such paper, by Murphy, Rodriguez-Manzanares and Barbour (2011),
reports on interviews with 42 Canadian high school distance education teachers
regarding their views on synchronous and asynchronous online teaching activities. The
authors found that:
● The teachers used different combinations of synchronous and asynchronous online

teaching. Some taught entirely asynchronously. Others combined asynchronous
teaching with synchronous forms such as scheduled classes or times where they
would be available for tutoring and responding to students.
● All those interviewed made some use of asynchronous online teaching, such as
providing learning materials for students to work through in their own time, use of
online quizzes, or supporting students to ask a question via email or forums and
receive a response at a later time.
● Teachers suggested that asynchronous and text forms of communication were
preferred by many students. One suggested that it was rare for students to request
voice chat rather than text communications, another noted that students could email
to ask multiple questions and the teacher could then take some time to construct a
response.
● There were also perceived advantages to synchronous modes of communication.
Some teachers felt that addressing a particular problem or query raised by a student
would be best achieved through videoconferencing or the use of a shared online
whiteboard. It was also felt that opportunities for synchronous online teaching could
help the students to feel less isolated, because they could include time for socialising
and informal discussion.
Activity 1 Thinking about synchronous and asynchronous online teaching

Allow about 10 minutes
Having read this section and watched the video that Sarah S. made about her
experiences, think about how synchronous and asynchronous modes of online
teaching could be applied to your work.
Try to come up with three short examples that fit the following situations. These could
be based on your own experiences of teaching or learning, or a situation that you can
imagine:
1. A situation where synchronous learning is appropriate and beneficial in

supporting learning.
2. A situation where asynchronous learning is appropriate and beneficial in
supporting learning.
3. A situation that combines synchronous and asynchronous learning to support
learning.
Provide your answer...

Comment
This activity is designed to help you begin to think about online teaching in your own
context. One of the very first considerations in taking teaching online is to decide which
elements lend themselves to synchronous learning, asynchronous learning, or both.
The study by Murphy, Rodriguez-Manzanares and Barbour (2011) was conducted in a
particular context: High school distance education. Some of the findings may hold true
for you, but they may not be universally applicable to all students in all courses.
It could be helpful to think about the practical issues, the preferences, and the benefits
in your own case. For example, there could be very good practical reasons for using an
asynchronous approach with your students, such as the expectations that learners will
be engaging at different times. But it might be that a synchronous mode of instruction
is beneficial because it offers a more immediate chance to understand and address
queries. Preferences might vary and could be gathered from students if there is
uncertainty about the best approach. Some students may like the way a synchronous
discussion allows you to create a sense of community and engagement. Others may
prefer the slower pace of an asynchronous activity where they can craft a question or
response in their own time and reflect on it before sharing with others.
It is often sensible to make use of both forms of teaching to provide a range of
experiences and opportunities for learning.
1.3 Interacting with students

One of the most noticeable differences between synchronous and asynchronous teaching
is the nature of the interactions between teacher and students. Such interactions include
providing feedback, answering questions, or guiding students through a particular activity.
Focusing on feedback, in a synchronous teaching environment, the teacher can deliver
feedback immediately whenever it is required. However, while the face-to-face
environment allows for visual cues when delivering feedback, these are not always
possible, or may take quite different forms, in the online environment. It is important when
teaching online to proactively make opportunities for feedback both from teacher to
learner and from learner to teacher, to make up for the loss of the face-to-face cues.

Figure 3 Giving and getting feedback from learners can be achieved both synchronously
and asynchronously.
Feedback in the asynchronous environment will be given some time after a learner has
asked a question. So, if several iterations of the conversation are needed to help the
learner with their issue, it can take some time to give the feedback. This is one of the
reasons why peer feedback is often used in the asynchronous setting, allowing learners to
aid each other without having to wait for the next input by the teacher (Gikandi and
Morrow, 2016).
1.4 Motivation, support and discipline

Keeping learners motivated and attentive online can be much more challenging than in a
face-to-face environment where your personal enthusiasm for the subject can readily rub
off on the learners. In an online environment, you will likely have learners who are more
self-motivated, learners who are more comfortable with online learning, and learners who
are less certain of how to interact. There might be particular challenges for those learners
who are less capable of structuring their studies independently.

Figure 4 Learning online provides different challenges from learning in a face-to-face

environment
It is worth providing a highly structured set of tasks in the opening stages of the course,
with discrete outputs, which enable you to see very quickly which learners are completing
the tasks on schedule and in the manner that you desire. You can then follow up
individually with those who are not engaging in the expected manner and offer advice on
how they should approach the tasks and their online learning experience.
On the other hand, maintaining control of a class online can be more straightforward than
doing so face to face. In the face-to-face classroom, individual learners can disrupt the
lesson or distract other learners, but the online environment is different. During
synchronous events, you can combine existing classroom skills with the features of the
environment (such as the teacher controlling whose microphone is enabled at any given
time) to avoid any one learner dominating discussions. In asynchronous discussions,
inappropriate or tangential comments can be moderated or, if appropriate, challenged
publicly, as with a face-to-face teaching setting.
A further difference with respect to discipline in the online learning environment is the
possibility for interactions outside of the channels that you are present in. We will talk
about the concept of ‘backchannels’ later in this week. When teaching online, educators
need to always be aware that interactions may be occurring between learners in places
that are out of your reach, and the possibility for bullying, for example, needs to be borne
in mind. If a learner is unusually reticent in an online session, or doesn’t post to a
discussion thread which you would have expected them to engage in, it can be worth
tactfully exploring with the learner (in private, of course) to ascertain what has caused the
change in their interaction / behaviour online.

1.5 Developing skills and confidence

It is important to note that supporting learners in an online environment requires a different
skillset to supporting learners in a face-to-face learning environment. A study by Price
et al. (2007) into the differences between learner perceptions of teaching in an online
environment and in a face-to-face environment found that the online teacher should have
a greater pastoral focus than that of a face-to-face teacher, and that often both teachers
and learners needed guidance and training in communicating online.
Without the ‘comfort’ of a physical classroom environment, learners can feel isolated and
unsupported, so an increased pastoral presence by the teacher, initiated via online
communications, can help reduce that feeling of isolation and develop a more
‘comfortable’ experience for the learner. A large scale, follow-up study by one of Price’s
co-authors (Richardson, 2009), which looked at the experiences of learners receiving
tutorial support online or face to face on humanities courses, concluded that with
adequate preparation, the online environment need not be a lesser experience for
learners in terms of support: ‘Provided that tutors and students receive appropriate
training and support, course designers in the humanities can be confident about
introducing online forms of tutorial support in campus-based or distance education.’
(pg. 69)
If you are moving into the online environment with your teaching, you also need to be
aware of the complexities that technology may bring. Whilst it is not usually necessary to
become a technical expert, familiarity with the common technical issues your learners
may face can be a very useful skillset to develop. If, for example, you can advise on the
common techniques to resolve audio issues during synchronous online sessions, you can
both save time and stress for learners and build their confidence. Your confidence to
approach new technologies and to deal with issues that arise in their usage will grow as
you gain experience and this makes teaching online a much more pleasurable
experience. So set aside some time to play and familiarise yourself with the tools you
expect to use. Also, it is always worth finding out whether there are training or
development opportunities focused on the specific online teaching technologies that you
expect to use.
Activity 2 Motivating and engaging students online

1. Watch this video ‘Engaging and motivating students’ which summarises views
from a range of experts on student engagement.
2. As you watch, make notes on useful tips that you would like to incorporate into
your own online teaching.
Comment
Teaching online brings many opportunities to use different tools and techniques with
your learners.

This activity should help you to begin thinking, in broad terms at this stage, about what
you might like to try. The upcoming activities will look to develop your ideas further and
guide you towards means of trying them out in practice. More on that to come!

2 Blended learning
2 Blended learning
Figure 5 There are many facets to online learning

Previously, we introduced the distinctions between asynchronous and synchronous
teaching. Another concept that might be very useful to help you understand how to teach
online is blended learning. Blended learning usually refers to a course that includes both
online and face-to-face elements.
A blended approach will usually bring together three core elements: classroom-based
activities with the teacher present; online learning materials (which may be used in
different ways – as you'll see in the section on ‘flipped learning’); independent study using
materials provided by the teacher, either online or in hard copy, to reinforce concepts or
develop skills. This blend of activities means that the teacher also has a blend of roles,
adding a ‘facilitator’ element to their role as they organise and direct group activities, both
online and offline.
Blended learning can help to bring together the main advantages of synchronous
learning:
● teacher presence
● immediate feedback
● peer interaction.
It can combine these with the main advantages of asynchronous learning:
● independence
● flexibility
● self-pacing.

2 Blended learning
It can help to avoid the pitfalls of asynchronous learning:
● learner isolation
● difficulty with motivation.
2.1 Flipped classrooms

‘Flipped classrooms’ utilise the blended learning model to reverse the traditional learning
environment such that the learners receive the bulk of the instructional content online.
Learners would, for example, be asked to understand and process a set of material in
their own time and at their own pace. This would take the place of more traditional post-
class ‘homework’ tasks. The classroom sessions are then used for interactive discussion
and exploration of the topic with the teacher, which takes the place of the more traditional
instructional scenario. Hence the type of activities undertaken in each context is the
reverse of what is usual. The class has ‘flipped’ to be the space for students and teachers
to be more active, engaging with each other in a more personalised and focused way. The
online environment then becomes the home for the more traditional lecture-style teaching.
Activity 3 Thinking about the flipped classroom

This video synthesises the benefit of a flipped classroom approach.

Watch the video and note down three benefits of the flipped classroom over a
traditional approach.

2 Blended learning
Comment
This activity is intended to introduce you to the concept of the flipped classroom
approach, and to help you to identify the benefits it may have in your own context.
The benefits suggested for the flipped classroom approach include the ability for
students to work through materials at a pace that suits them, and a reduction in
boredom for students who are finding the material easier. The teacher can spend class
time addressing individual needs.
There is a wider theme that can be found in this video and elsewhere in this course.
This is the way that the role of a teacher can change in response to a change in
approach using technology. In the case of the flipped classroom, the teacher is seen to
become more of a ‘coach, mentor and guide’, rather than acting primarily to deliver
knowledge. You might see this as a benefit, depending on your point of view on what
the role of a teacher should be!
Now that you’ve been introduced to some of the unique aspects of online teaching, the
differences between synchronous and asynchronous elements, the possibilities of
blended learning and the notion of the flipped classroom, the next activity prompts you to
reflect on your own practice and how it might fit with what you have learned so far.
Activity 4 Starting to build your plans for teaching online

This activity asks you to reflect upon what it is that you would like to achieve in terms of
online teaching. Now that you have read a little about the basics of teaching online,
think about what your goals are in this area. You may not have specific goals in mind
yet. If you don’t, simply focus on one course that you teach and consider how it might
be moved wholly or partially online. Note down answers to the following questions if
you can:
1. What do you want to deliver online? Do you aim to transfer online a small or
substantial element of what you currently deliver face to face? Will you move
entirely online or create a blended approach? Will you use synchronous or
asynchronous activities – or both? Might a flipped classroom approach be
appropriate?
2. To whom do you want to deliver the learning experience? What level of
experience with online learning is likely amongst your intended learners? What
support might your learners need to make a successful transition to online
learning?
3. What resources do you already have that you might be able to repurpose for
online learning?
Record your responses below and, if you wish, in your own journal as you will revisit
them later in this course.

2 Blended learning
Comment
This is the first in a series of activities that appear throughout this course, helping you
to develop a plan for taking your teaching online. This first step will give your plans a
starting point. You may find it helpful at this stage to keep a range of options available,
perhaps listing several ideas for each point. You could narrow these down to a single
plan a little later.

3 Learner anonymity, backchannels and social interactions
3 Learner anonymity, backchannels and

social interactions
In some online teaching environments, all interactions through ‘official’ channels will be
obviously attributable to individual students. Forum posts will usually only be possible
from students’ institutional online accounts, and therefore their name will be attached to
everything they contribute. Similarly, login information for synchronous online events will
usually be provided by the institution and will identify each learner clearly. However, there
may be circumstances where this kind of information is not provided by default, and
learners can choose to create accounts that do not identify who they are. Such anonymity
can have a great advantage for more reticent learners who may be reluctant to contribute
under their own name for fear of giving an incorrect answer, for example, and can be very
enabling for the entire cohort if discussing very sensitive topics. However, it can also
embolden trouble-makers or more dominant personalities, and because of this it can be
challenging for the teacher to moderate activities where the interactions are anonymous.
As you learned earlier in this week, any online teaching activity carries the possibility of
interactions developing between learners in spaces away from the official locations for the
online learning. Whilst there can be concerns about the lack of control over these
communications between learners, more often they can be exceptionally useful to
learners (Fiester and Green, 2016). If students are in touch with each other via an instant
messaging app, for example, during a synchronous online learning event, they can often
help each other with understanding the issues covered without having to declare in front
of the teacher that they need assistance. This can lead to a greater collective advance in
learning than would happen if only the official channels were used.
It is important to consider how we as educators can encourage and structure effective use
of backchannels. One example of backchannels being used to great effect is the use of
Twitter and a dedicated hashtag to synthesise and discuss presentations during a
conference (be it online or face to face). This image shows some of the use of the hashtag
#H818conf during the H818 Online Conference 2016, an annual event ran as part of one
of the modules of the Open University’s MA in Online and Distance Education.

3 Learner anonymity, backchannels and social interactions
Figure 6 Twitter responses

4 This week’s quiz

Check what you’ve learned this week by taking the end-of-week quiz.
Week 1 practice quiz
Open the quiz in a new window or tab then come back here when you’re done.

Summary
Summary
This week you’ve been introduced to some of the core concepts in online teaching.
Synchronous and asynchronous activities are a key distinction in teaching online, and
deciding which activities or resources should be used synchronously and which
asynchronously is one of the fundamental skills any online teacher must develop. Blended
learning and flipped classroom techniques could become a fundamental part of thinking
for teachers whose classes are divided between a face-to-face element and an online
element. We will move on next week to looking at what makes effective online teaching
and how education theories can inform how we approach online teaching. Before we
move on, however, let’s have a few moments with Rita, to see how she’s getting on.
You can now go to Week 2.

Summary

Week 2: Discovering the connections: principles and theories for understanding digital tools
Introduction
Week 2: Discovering the

connections: principles and
theories for understanding
digital tools
Introduction
How do you get started with online teaching? In this week, we will look at some principles
that underpin effective online teaching, and how learning theories can inform approaches
to teaching. Following this you will be introduced to a categorisation of the technologies
used in online teaching. Finally, you will be introduced to the world of learning objects.
Pulling all of this together should enable you to start planning what you want to achieve
with online teaching.
Teacher reflections
This week we have a clip from Leanne, who tells us about some of the tools and concepts
she has found useful in her teaching.

1 Principles of effective online teaching
● understand some of the essential principles of online teaching

● be aware of some key learning theories and classifications of online teaching
technologies
● understand the concept of learning objects and some of the different classifications
of these.

In Week 1, we introduced some of the ways in which online learning can create new
opportunities and benefits for teachers and learners. However, in order to realise those
benefits, certain principles need to be followed to optimise the online experience for
learners.
Activity 1 Challenging preconceptions about online teaching

Watch the video ‘What are some benefits to teaching online?’ and make a note of any
concerns expressed that you had not already thought of regarding your own teaching
context.
Comment
Often teachers have preconceptions about teaching online and what they or their
learners may ‘lose’ if they take their teaching online.

This week’s material and activities are designed to help you to separate perceived
advantages and disadvantages of teaching online from the real ones, as applied to you
in your own context.
Rather than being a simple binary choice, there are lots of options and ways of tailoring
online teaching to any context. So it is important to be aware of key concepts and
types of tools, consider what is known about these, and to have an approach that
allows you to trial ways of teaching online and to understand the results. The course
will help you to develop in each of these areas.
Searching the web for ‘principles of effective online teaching’ brings up many different
takes on the topic, each slightly different. On the following pages you will find a
summary of some of the key principles that almost always feature in these lists. They
have been gathered from a range of sources but have been inspired in particular by
Cooper (2016) and Hill (2009).
1.1 Create a schedule

In the face-to-face teaching environment, the teacher is not available to learners at all
times of the day and night, every day of the week. When moving to an asynchronous
online learning environment it is tempting for students to expect that the teacher should be
always available. As the teacher, you need to establish a set schedule of when you are,
and are not, available to learners. If they will need synchronous support, drop-in tutorials
can be scheduled. Otherwise agree that you will respond to messages within a specific
time period so that, for example, if a learner contacts you after a certain hour in the
evening, they know not to expect a response until the following morning. Similarly, provide
a schedule of expectations to learners – tell them by when you consider they should have
reached each milestone in the course and follow up when students miss core deadlines.
This should help keep on track those learners who are less capable of motivating
themselves to progress through the course.
1.2 Keep learners informed

Make sure you repeat information about core deadlines often. If there are to be
synchronous learning events (such as webinars and group tutorials) make sure learners
are reminded of the event several times in the weeks and days leading up to each event. If
there is to be a change to planned activities, for example if you will be away and unable to
respond to messages for a few days, make sure the learners are kept informed well in
advance, and designate an alternate person the learners can contact if they need
assistance urgently.

Figure 1 Learning online is very mobile
1.3 Foster a sense of community

Wenger’s (1998) concept of ‘communities of practice’ has gained traction in education
over the past two decades. Wenger suggests that people who share a common goal or
purpose can form a community of practice through which they share insights and
experiences. Members of a community are practitioners in a particular area. For example,
they could be teachers in a subject area who discuss their ideas and experiences in a
shared online space. Active participation in a community of practice is a social process,
and yet it enhances individuals’ learning and can also increase their social capital through
developing connections and recognition.
Building community is important for online learning, where learners can readily drift away
or feel isolated due to the nature of online engagement. So think about steps to keep them
together and engaged. This might involve reminding them of what they are supposed to
be working on at any given moment, or fostering a sense of community between the
learners by making yourself a key part of that community. Drawing on the concept of
communities of practice, you could emphasise that connecting and sharing with like-
minded others can be very beneficial.
You might find that you spend less time engaging with students through lectures or
traditional sessions because this material is instead presented in a form they can access
independently at any time. In an online environment, the role of the teacher can become
more supportive and collegiate, such that the learners understand that your primary role is
to help them to succeed on the course. To this end, it can be useful to construct an
individual relationship with each learner rather than always relying on mass or automated
emails.

1.4 Ask for feedback

In tandem with fostering a sense of community, you need to check at regular intervals how
the learners are doing, evaluate their progression through the course materials, and
ensure they are being supported. Those who respond negatively, and those who do not
respond at all, will need your attention to help them develop study strategies to get them
back on track. Online feedback mechanisms can provide more formative feedback for
tutors than traditional paper questionnaires (Donovan et al., 2006). It can also be very
beneficial to your online teaching practice to engage in peer observation with fellow online
teachers (Jones and Gallen, 2016). We will be exploring how you can make the best use
of feedback in Week 8 of this course.
1.5 Recognise diversity

One of the main advantages of the online environment is that students can learn in their
own way, at their own pace. This is attractive to people who have other responsibilities or
employment. As such, try not to curtail the freedoms that online study offers by imposing
unnecessary limitations on the way students undertake their learning.
Differentiated instruction – a term used to describe ways in which learning might be
tailored to the differences between individuals in a class – is important here. Online
instructors can usefully tailor their instruction according to factors such as the individual’s
ability or interests (Beasley and Beck, 2017). However, this might need to be considered
in light of our previous discussion of the potential for online study to result in isolation, and
the value of giving learners some shared structure to follow.

2 How can educational theories help you take your teaching online?
2 How can educational theories help you

take your teaching online?
Figure 2 Four theories help us to understand best approach to teaching online

There are many theories associated with education, and it is not the role of this course to
discuss them all. However, when referring to online education and its advantages to
learners, four theories are often discussed and can help us to understand how to go about
teaching online. These are behaviourism, cognitivism, constructivism and connectivism.
The principles of effective online teaching outlined in Section 1 are informed by these
theories.
We are not going to delve deeply into the four theories, but it can be useful to bear in mind
the general ideas behind them when considering moving into the online teaching
environment.
2.1 Behaviourism
Skinner (1968) and Thorndike (1928) were two of the main proponents of behaviourism.
Their work examined how behaviour is linked to experience and reward. So in the online
teaching context, teachers should be aware to ‘reward’ their learners for positive
behaviour. This need not be solely via the domain of the assessed parts of the course, but
also in giving encouragement and positive feedback for engaging in discussion activities
or reaching certain milestones on schedule, for example.
2.2 Cognitivism
Cognitivism largely replaced behaviourism and came to prominence in the late 20th
century. This theory concentrated on the organisation of knowledge, information
processing and decision-making. Ausubel (1960) and Bruner (1966) were two of the main
proponents of cognitivism. Bruner pursued the notion that learners should be given
opportunities to discover for themselves relationships that are inherent in the learning
material, a teaching technique he named ‘scaffolding’. In an online teaching environment,
this could manifest itself in the teacher providing regular and focused support to each
learner in the early stages of the course, but making less frequent supporting
interventions as the learner begins to act successfully by themselves. Ausubel’s work in
this area would suggest that it is better for the teacher to provide some materials in
advance, that allow the learner to ‘organise’ their learning approach prior to them

accessing the actual course materials, so that they have already developed much of the
skillset they will need to successfully undertake the course.
2.3 Constructivism
Figure 3 Some of the main theories associated with education

Constructivism is concerned with how knowledge is constructed. The main proponents of
constructivism were Piaget (1957) and Vygotsky (1986). Piaget was interested in how
knowledge is constructed by the individual, and in particular, how children move through
several quite different stages of development in terms of constructing knowledge.
Vygotsky, however, was more concerned with how the social construction of knowledge
has an important role to play in this process. With respect to online teaching, one of the
important notions to take from Vygotsky’s work is the ‘zone of proximal development’. In
short, this suggests that learners progress optimally if continually presented with tasks
that are just beyond (i.e. proximal to) their current zone of ability or development. If
learning tasks are repeatedly too simple, boredom quickly ensues and the learner can be
lost from the course. If the tasks are too advanced, enthusiasm can be lost, frustration
builds and again, the learner may lose interest. Vygotsky suggested that the tasks in that
zone of proximal development are ones that most learners can achieve with just a little
help – and of course, that is where the role of the online teacher becomes vital. Some of

the ways in which a teacher can offer support and challenge are different from those used
in a face-to-face teaching scenario, as this course will explain.
2.4 Connectivism
This theory takes into account the availability of a plethora of information on the web,
which can be shared around the world almost instantaneously with the rise of social
networking. Connectivism draws on chaos theory’s recognition of ‘everything being
connected to everything else’. It also draws on networking principles, and theories of
complexity and self-organisation, and is built on a notion that ‘the connections that enable
us to learn more are more important than our current state of knowing’ (Siemens, 2005).
Siemens explains that:
‘Connectivism is driven by the understanding that decisions are based on

rapidly altering foundations. New information is continually being acquired. The
ability to draw distinctions between important and unimportant information is
vital. The ability to recognise when new information alters the landscape based
on decisions made yesterday is also critical.’ (Siemens, 2005)
Unlike the other theories presented above, connectivism is ‘a learning theory for the digital
age’ (Siemens, 2005). It is also newer and less established in terms of a body of research.
Whether or not you agree with its arguments, two very important questions for this course
are prompted by connectivism: has the internet fundamentally changed what learning is?
And does the internet change what education, and educators, should aim to achieve?
Activity 2 How do educational theories match with your teaching?

Make brief notes on the differences between behaviourism, cognitivism, constructi-

vism and connectivism. Are there ideas that are present in your current teaching
practice? How do they appear? Do these theories fit with your experiences of
learning?
Comment
As a teacher, you are probably familiar with these theories already, but it can be helpful
to take a step back and look at your teaching with a critical eye. This activity should
help you to identify where you draw on the theories, which, as you move through the
course, should help you to decide where the theories will play a role in your online
teaching.
Here you have explored some of the theories that inform the underpinning principles of
effective online teaching. However, online teaching cannot take place without the
application of technology, and this is what you will focus upon next.

3 Digital technologies for online teaching
Figure 4 The SAMR model

This section of Week 2 gives an overview of the possible technologies available to an
online teacher, and the ways in which they can support and influence teaching and
learning.
The SAMR model categorises four ways in which the introduction of technology changes
teaching activity (Puentedura, 2017):
● Substitution: where technology is used as a direct substitute for what you might do
already, with no functional change.
● Augmentation: where technology is a direct substitute, but there is functional
improvement over what you did without the technology.
● Modification: where technology allows you to significantly redesign the task.
● Redefinition: where technology allows you to do what was previously not possible.
There has been substantial debate about the value of, and evidence for, the SAMR model
(for example Love, 2015). However, it has achieved some popularity amongst
researchers and practitioners. Here, we are simply using it as a way to categorise four
ways in which a teacher might start to introduce technology into their online teaching. If
you have time, you may wish to explore some of the discussions about the value of this
model, starting by following up the references above.
The following sections describe different groups of tools that teachers might commonly
use in getting started using technology in online teaching.
3.1 Course management

Online courses, and courses with any online component, are usually delivered using a
host platform, commonly referred to as a Learning Management System (LMS) or Virtual
Learning Environment (VLE). These systems support teachers in delivering materials to
the learner, keep track of registered students, and support other tasks such as
assessment and communications. Teachers based in traditional universities, colleges or

schools will not normally have much input into the selection process when the institution is
investing in one of these products (even ‘free’ LMS systems like Moodle require
investment in terms of adapting and running the product). Usually the teacher’s role is to
find out what possibilities exist for teaching online using the product, and to use the
elements that seem most productive in their individual context. Often a variety of tools can
be included, such as blogs and wikis, quizzes and automated assessment processes,
spaces for synchronous and asynchronous learning activities, and repositories for
learning objects. You will learn more about the ways in which LMS tools can be used in
teaching next week.
3.2 Content creation tools

With online learning comes the potential to use a variety of media within online learning
materials and to use content creation tools to package them all together into a coherent
learning experience. As well as providing interesting ways to use audio and video media
in teaching, there are online tools available for production of graphs and infographics,
animations, storyboards, and more. The teacher’s role in respect of these kinds of tools is
to browse and trial a range of software and to discover which kinds would help bring their
online teaching alive with a variety of media and presentation formats. Week 3 of the
course provides some guidance on this process. Once you have an idea of what you want
to create, you will need to identify how the outputs you create with these content creation
tools can be integrated with the course management system to create a dynamic and
engaging online learning experience.
In addition, you may design your materials to enable learners to use these tools in their
online work. Beetham (2007) points out that:
‘Applications can even be shared to enable collaborative representations to be

built, as happens face to face with electronic whiteboards, and with wikis online.
Learners’ representations can of course be used for assessment but they can
also be re-integrated into the learning situation for reflection and peer review, or
even as learning materials for future cohorts.’ (Beetham, 2007, p. 35)
3.3 Networking and collaboration tools

Google Docs and other elements of the Google Apps suite (as well as a range of other
similar tools) allow teachers to share materials with their learners and work on them
together in real time, or asynchronously. This can enable strengthening of the teacher-
learner online relationship, which is particularly valuable in the early stages of a course. In
addition, a range of collaborative networking tools can be used to foster group working
and a sense of community between learners on an online course. Instant messaging apps
can foster backchannels (Week 1 of this course introduced backchannels). Activities
using Twitter or Pinterest to search for information, or using Diigo to gather together
relevant internet bookmarks, can help bring an online group together with a shared
objective, as well as exposing that group to a wider community in a relevant subject area.

3.4 Enhancing tools and materials you already use

Many teachers will be familiar with creating Word documents and PowerPoint
presentations. Materials in both formats can be repurposed for the online environment.
They are a classic example of the ‘substitution category’ of the SAMR model
(Puentedura, 2017) where teachers move online the same methods they used in the face-
to-face environment. However, with a little more work, static documents featuring text and
images can be turned into online exploration tools, linking to websites, animations, videos,
blogs and so on to enrich the learning experience. These improved Word and PowerPoint
files can then be integrated with other materials using content creation tools, or mounted
within a course management system, for example.

4 Learning objects
4 Learning objects
Digital networks and tools support sharing and replication of content with little effort.
Unlike a physical object such as a printed book, a digital object can be copied, shared,
edited, and re-shared without any impact on the original object. Many educators have
explored how we might be supported to create and use digital objects in different ways to
those physical objects. Over time, this has led to the development of several concepts
which we start to introduce here, and return to in more depth in later stages of the course.
The concept of a learning object suggests that small, self-contained digital units of
learning can be created that can then be combined, reused or adapted for repeat usage.
When these started to emerge, the term Reusable Learning Objects (RLOs) was used to
describe them. This was because it was argued that when a learning object was shared, it
should be created in such a way that it helps another educator or learner to make use of it
themselves.
Recently, you are more likely to see the term Open Educational Resources (OERs) used
to describe content that is shared by educators. OER has become a more popular and
widely understood concept amongst educators across the world than RLO. OER is in part
an evolution of the idea of a RLO, however, the two terms are not completely
interchangeable. Firstly, RLOs are, by definition, designed to be shareable, whereas
OERs may be teaching materials that have been deemed shareable by the author but
which have not followed a specific approach that supports other educators to reuse them.
What OERs do provide, by definition, is a licence that makes it clear that there is legal
provision for reuse by others according to certain rules. RLOs do not necessarily have
these licenses, although to be truly reusable, they should.
Learning objects can vary in nature from multimedia packages with audio and/or video
elements, to single tasks presented in text or slideshow documents, with myriad variations
and varieties in between. The role of the online teacher may be to create or feed into the
creation of learning objects, or it may be to use learning objects produced by other teams
within the institution to deliver an online learning experience, by means of asynchronous
and synchronous activities. Repositories of RLOs exist on the internet, meaning that
adventurous learners may discover them and use them to enhance their learning outside
of the given course materials. Examples of these repositories include Wisc-Online, and
MERLOT, whose RLO contents are also OERs.
Activity 3 Learning objects and your own teaching

Watch this video ‘Learning Objects’, and then identify and note down three potential
learning objects that could be created from the materials that you have used in your
own teaching or learning. Consider whether these might be successfully reused by
others online, and what additions or modification, if any, they would need to be useful
learning objects.

4 Learning objects
Comment
This activity should help you to start thinking about resources you already use, and
how they might work in online teaching. If you completed this exercise quickly, you
might find it helpful to go on to perform a brief audit of all of the learning objects that
you currently use, so that you could consider repurposing any or all of them in your
future online teaching.
Churchill (2007) proposed a typology that may be useful when thinking about the variety
of learning objects and their purposes:
● Presentation object: Direct instruction resources to transmit specific subject matter.

● Practice object: Repeat practice with feedback, educational game or representation
that allows practice and learning of procedures.
● Simulation object: Representation of some real life system or process.
● Conceptual model: Representation of a key concept or related concepts of subject
matter.
● Information object: Display of information organised and displayed with modalities.
● Contextual representation: Data displayed as it emerges from represented authentic
scenario.
Now is a good time for you to develop your own plans for taking your teaching online.
Each week you will build further upon these notes until you have a comprehensive plan of
action.
Activity 4 Building learning objects into your plans for teaching online
1. Last week in Activity 4 you were asked what teaching you might want to deliver
online, who you would deliver it to, and what materials you might repurpose.
Revisit your notes about what you want to deliver online. If you typed your notes
into the box in Week 1, they will automatically appear below this list.
2. Now return to this week’s learning. Which types of learning object might you
develop or reuse in order to deliver the objectives you have?
3. Next, revisiting Section 1 of this week, consider how you might build or integrate
your learning objects in a way that takes into account the ‘principles of effective
online teaching’.
4. Finally, consider which tools you might need in order to create an effective
learning experience using these objects. At the moment, you might not know the
names of all the relevant tools, and that’s fine – simply write something like ‘a tool
that will allow me to…’ and continue the sentence with a specific action such as
‘combine video with passages of text’ or ‘give my learners a multiple choice quiz’.
Display of content entered previously
As with Activity 4 from Week 1, keep your responses in a safe place, as you will build
upon them later in the course.

4 Learning objects
Comment
Here you are building on your responses from last week, to move your plan for online
teaching another step forward. It is important that you consider not only the learning
objects you may wish to reuse, but also how you might use them, both pedagogically
(part 3 of the activity) and in terms of how the technology might help you to deliver
them (part 4).



Summary
Summary
In this week you have looked at the core theories and principles that underpin good quality
online teaching. You have also started to look at the digital technologies involved in online
teaching and the use of learning objects – both of these will be revisited in much more
detail later in the course. In fact, next week’s material is all about the technologies that you
can use to deliver your online teaching.
Finally for this week, let’s see how Rita’s getting along.

Summary

Week 3: Selecting technologies: what to look for and how to choose
Introduction
Week 3: Selecting
technologies: what to look for
and how to choose
Introduction
Figure 1 There are a range of tools that can be used in online teaching
This week will give you an overview of the main types of tools available for use online,
what they offer, and how you might use them in your online teaching. This section does
not aim to be, and could never be, completely comprehensive, and we’ll show you a few

Introduction
online resources that you may find useful for further exploration. We present some
categorisations of these tools as a way of helping you to understand the potential of some
of the main types of tools for your own context. The internet is replete with blog posts,
categorisations, discussions, and sales pitches about these tools. So what we want to do
is give you a starting point to better navigate and use it to your advantage in your work.
A brief note on privacy and personal information, which is particularly relevant to this week
and next week, where you may find yourself registering for and trying different tools. If you
are concerned by the privacy implications of using some of the tools covered in this
week’s materials, one approach is to use an alias when creating your account with them,
and to create a separate email address (e.g. using Google’s Gmail) for the purpose of
registering for the service instead of using your usual email address. However, this
approach will not make your actions truly anonymous or private, e.g. the service provider
or your ISP will be able to identify that it is your computer accessing the service. It is
possible to take further steps such as using a service to anonymise your computer
(e.g. www.anonymizer.com). However, discussion of the pros and cons of such
techniques is beyond the scope of this course.
Teacher reflections
This week we have a video from Sarah H., who tells us about how she decides on the
tools to use in teaching:
● describe some of the ways to categorise educational technologies for online teaching
● explain how some of the tools available might help with certain learning objectives
● start making informed decisions about which tools you might try in your own context.

1 Technologies for content creation
Figure 2 There are many resources online that can be used for creating learning
resources – just be sure to check how you can use them
There are so many technologies available that could be used for content creation, it is
impossible to cover them all. New tools are produced regularly, and older ones disappear,
so giving specific examples can be a tricky thing to do as tools can become outdated very
quickly. Here we’ve provided an overview of the kinds of tools available and some brief
guidance for things you should be aware of when using them.
1.1 Repurposing and extending slide presentations

Last week we touched on the idea of repurposing existing learning materials with some
enhancements. Presentation tools like PowerPoint contain features for achieving such
enhancement, for example, by adding narration to a slideshow, or adding sound clips to
individual slides. These features can enable you to repurpose your classroom or
synchronous online slideshow for an asynchronous online audience, giving that audience
the benefit of your spoken accompaniment without you needing to be there. One
advantage to adding individual sound clips to each slide is that the learner can choose
when to begin listening – for example, they may wish to read the content of the slide first.
Similarly, a vision-impaired student using a screen-reading program can listen to the text
being read aloud before selecting the audio clip. By contrast, a single narration file across
the entire slideshow forces the learner to pause the narration if they cannot read and
listen to everything in the time you allow before moving on, and the screen-reader user
will hear the text being read aloud by their assistive technology at the same time as your
narration, which can be incredibly confusing. If you are looking to share your
presentations online it may be appropriate to look at services for this such as Slideshare.
Tip
Use a good quality microphone to ensure clear sound. These are usually inexpensive, but
the increase in output quality makes investing in one worthwhile for an online teacher.

1.2 Screencasting
This is a way of recording what you are doing on a computer screen, with a voiceover. It is
ideal for demonstrations where learners benefit from seeing something being done. The
learners can replay the screencast as often as they wish, and can pause and rewind.
Applications of this kind of content creation tool include demonstrating how to use a
certain software program or how to access a particular database (Peterson, 2007). Free
screencasting tools, and free trials of paid-for tools, are available, although they may be
limited in terms of the length of recording that can be produced, and sometimes the
finished recordings contain a watermark ‘advertising’ the tool used. Paid-for tools offer a
much greater range of features and flexibility in output. But you can try it out first and see if
you or your organisation considers it worthwhile to purchase a licence. Camtasia and
Adobe Presenter are examples of paid-for tools which offer a free trial at the time of
writing. Wikipedia hosts a list of screencasting software that includes many free and paid-
for tools.
Tip
Screencasts can quickly accumulate very large file sizes because they capture both audio
and visuals. You may aid your learners by producing a number of shorter clips rather than
long ones, as these will download or buffer more quickly.
Activity 1 Demonstrations of screencasting

Watch these two short screencasts. The first is demonstrating how to align or justify
text in word processing software, the second shows some tips for using photo editing
software. It is not the subject matter of these clips that you should note here, but you
should use them as inspiration to think about the possibilities for which elements of
your own teaching might be explained or demonstrated effectively by the use of
screencasts. Note down some ideas for suitable topics in your own teaching.
Screencast 1: Aligning text
Screencast 2: Photoshop Lightroom
Comment
Screencasts can be very effective for explaining or demonstrating certain concepts or
topics. This activity should prompt some thoughts about elements of your own
teaching that might make good subject matter for screencasts. The videos show some
different approaches that can be taken and screencasts vary depending on the subject
matter. If you think there is potential then we recommend trialling some of the software
listed above as this can be a very powerful tool.
A related approach of sharing the screen during a ‘live’ video call is possible using
many modern video conferencing tools. However, if this is not recorded it would not be
available for later use in the way that these screencasts are.

1.3 Low-tech, low-complexity video recording
Figure 3 Creating resources doesn’t have to be complicated

Whilst it can be valuable in some circumstances to utilise high quality video recording
equipment and to create polished videos, often in online learning this degree of
complexity is unnecessary and can even be detrimental to the learning process.
Activity 2 The potential for low-complexity uses of video

This video highlights the benefits of a low-tech, low-complexity approach to producing

video content in online teaching:
View at: youtube:GuA8fPCHu9c
Watch the video and make notes about how achievable and effective this method
could be in delivering your own teaching online.
Comment
We really want to get across the idea that video does not need to be an expensive,
high-tech venture. This activity is designed to demonstrate how achievable it can be

for many teachers, and to help you to think about how it might be useful in your own
online teaching.
To demonstrate how uncomplicated, low-tech videos can be effective in online teaching,

the ‘Teacher reflections’ videos used in each week of this course were all made by the
people speaking in each one, at home, with just regular webcams or phone cameras. A
set of guidelines were provided to try to make each video look and feel similar, and we
have added the titles and adjusted the volume to be consistent, but that was all the
additional work that was needed to produce the videos you see here.
Tip
Even with low-tech approaches to video, certain techniques can make a big difference to
the quality and effectiveness of your clips. Keep the camera stable (by placing on a firm
surface or using a tripod, for example) and be aware of distracting elements in the
background (such as screens, people or pets moving around, or even personal items such
as family photographs).
1.4 Image manipulation

Images can be used to great effect in online learning – to illustrate a concept, provide
emotional impact, reinforce learning, or simply add visual decoration. Rather than only
including images in their original form, try using free graphics software to manipulate and
annotate images. For example, a teacher could digitally alter one image and post it side
by side with the original, asking learners to ‘spot the differences’, or the teacher could
obscure elements of the image and ask students to predict what is hidden (this method
works especially well with mathematical or chemical equations).
Tip
Ensure that the resolution and file sizes of your images are appropriate. If the resolution is
too low, details may not be sufficiently clear, especially for students using certain displays or
magnification software. Conversely, very high resolution images can mean huge file sizes
that take a long time to download for anyone with a slower internet connection. File sizes
can be checked through looking at the ‘properties’ of the file in your computer’s file
manager. While software tools all differ, there are generally options when saving a file that
allow resolution or quality to be changed. Also ensure that you have provided a description
of the image so that students unable to view it can still understand what is being depicted
(you will learn more about making your learning inclusive in Week 6).
1.5 Small interactive tools with big impact

Tools that enable you to add interactive items to web pages, such as word clouds,
quizzes, and drag and drop exercises are all freely available on the internet. If you have

an idea for an online teaching technique that you’d like to try with your learners, the
chances are that there will be a tool somewhere to help you to achieve it.
Tip
Some of these types of tools may use browser plug ins that add the ability to use
technologies, such as Flash or Java, to generate content for you. If this is the case, you
may need to ensure that you and your students have up to date Flash and Java installations
for these websites to work properly. Guidance on this can be found at Adobe Flash Player
and Java. It is worth checking whether the interactive components work well on different
kinds of browsers or platforms. For example, do they work on a tablet or mobile device?
Figure 4 A screenshot of a tutorial using a web conferencing platform
1.6 E-learning development tools

Creating engaging teaching content using the tools outlined in this section should be
within the capability of most computer-literate teachers. However, there are more complex
tools available which can help you to generate comprehensive, multimedia, interactive
online teaching materials. If you are interested in immersing yourself in new tools and
techniques for content creation, you might try one of the following authoring tools. A web
search for ‘e-learning authoring tools’ will bring up a range of current technologies you
could try. At the time of writing, popular tools included Adobe Captivate, Articulate
Storyline, Xerte Online Toolkits, Canvas, OpenLearn Create, and more – new tools
emerge every year.
1.7 Web conferencing platforms

Although not usually purchased by individual teachers, most institutions have invested in
at least one learning platform with web conferencing functionality. You may have heard of

Adobe Connect and Blackboard Collaborate, for example, but there are many similar
products available, including tools designed for individual use such as Skype, Zoom or
Google Hangouts. These platforms provide the online teacher with opportunities for online
classroom-like teaching scenarios, as well as offering opportunities for screensharing,
group work, peer review and more. The greatest strengths of platforms like this tend to be
in synchronous learning, although they can also be readily combined with tools like
discussion forums to broaden the impact to asynchronous environments (Çakiroglu et al.,
2016, Guo and Möllering, 2016, Kear et al., 2012). These tools can be used for replicating
a seminar environment by wrapping synchronous discussion tools around a central
presentation or video with voiceover.
1.8 RSS feeds and aggregators

RSS is a type of web feed that allows users to view updates to online content, such as
news or blog discussions. Often this is used to receive updates from news websites of
interest, but it can also have a useful purpose in online teaching. For example, RSS feeds
can be used to subscribe to discussion threads, so that the learner receives an email
notification every time someone responds to a particular thread. As a teacher, you could
also use this kind of technology to ‘push’ messages, schedule reminders and discussion
topics out to learners for them to receive in a manner that suits them. Tools that gather
together in a single place the RSS feeds that you have signed up to receive are known as
RSS aggregators.
1.9 Plagiarism detection

Plagiarism detection software is perhaps not a technology you would immediately think of
as an online teaching aid. However, plagiarism prevention tools (which automatically
compare assignments from students with each other, and with content found online) can
be used quite successfully in meeting certain learning objectives in an online
environment. Many institutions now provide staff and students with access to a plagiarism
detection service. This can be employed to illustrate to learners how to write or compile
assessment material in an appropriate manner, how to build on (rather than repeat)
previous work, and how to reference and quote appropriately. In this way, these tools can
be used to offer formative feedback rather than just being used to identify problematic
assessment submissions. If you would like to know more then the first step could be to
find out whether there are tools already in use at your institution, but Wikipedia also hosts
a list of plagiarism detection software.
Activity 3 Incorporating technologies into your plans

From the nine technologies presented in this section, select two of interest and make
notes about how you would like to use them in online teaching. Add these to your
existing notes about your plans for moving into online teaching.

Comment
As you build your plans for online teaching, you should already have some ideas of the
kinds of technologies that you could use to deliver your teaching online. This activity
helps you to identify several that you will explore further initially – you can always
investigate the others later on.

2 Personalisation with tools for learning
Figure 5 Personalisation
Personalisation is the tailoring of teaching and teaching materials (and the environment in
which they are delivered) to suit the needs and preferences of a range of learners. It links
closely to accessibility for learners with disabilities, and we shall examine this aspect in
more detail in Week 6. This week, however, we are considering how technology can be
used to support the whole range of learners, whatever their needs or preferences.
Online teaching usually has more opportunities for personalisation than face-to-face
teaching, simply because it is easier for learners to use the available technology to modify
their learning environment to suit their needs. (Imagine, for example, the ease of dimming
a computer screen, compared to the difficulties in dimming a classroom environment
without inconveniencing other learners.)
Figure 6 Learners can adapt online lessons to suit their own needs
Asynchronous online learning usually has more opportunities for personalisation than
synchronous learning because it gives the learners flexibility in terms of when and where
they access the learning materials.
The ideal way to optimise personalisation in online teaching has two elements:
● Design teaching materials that will meet a wide group of needs and preferences,
utilising a variety of media and teaching techniques.
● Put control in the hands of each learner, allowing them to adjust the materials to suit
themselves.
2.1 Serving diverse audiences

It is worthwhile designing materials and utilising technologies with as broad a range of
learners as possible in mind. By doing this, your materials are ready to reuse in later years
or different contexts. This section delivers some general points, so that you may start to
think about how these considerations would be applied to your own move into online
teaching. In Week 6 we cover this area in greater detail.

Instructions
Sometimes designing and delivering materials for a wide range of audience needs simply
means enhancing clarity. Ensure your instructions are clear and unambiguous (be
consistent with terms like Units, Pages, Weeks, Sections and so on) (Ernest et al., 2013).
If you are creating audio or audiovisual material, ensure you speak slowly and clearly,
taking pauses to allow digestion of key sentences or phrases.
Cultural references
Be aware that your learners may not all have the same cultural backgrounds, so be
careful when using idioms or cultural references in teaching materials (Arbour
et al., 2015). You may also need to consider your choice of images so that diversity is fully
reflected.
Flexibility of schedule
Whilst it is vital to provide students with a schedule of key dates and deadlines in the
course, and to ensure at regular intervals that they are aware of what is immediately
ahead of them, you can also design in flexibility where possible. If there is not a strict need
for every learner to complete a certain task at the same time, then allow a little more time
to those who need it. Some learners may need individual attention from the teacher in
order to keep to the overall schedule – this is a further element of personalisation (Ernest
et al., 2013).
Promotion of communication and peer support

Online learners should be encouraged to comment and reflect on the learning. This may
be achieved using their own spaces, such as blogs, or more ‘public’ spaces, such as
discussion forums. Asynchronous forums allow everyone the chance to input on their own
terms and at their own pace, whilst discussing and commenting upon each other’s posts.
These interactions, if supported and moderated appropriately by the online teacher, can
help to foster a sense of community among the learners, which in turn can lead to the
development of peer support. Peer support is a key aspect of personalisation as it allows
learners to explore and learn as a collective, with each member of the collective playing to
their own strengths.
2.2 Giving control to learners

It may sound like a complicated process, but there are several ways of giving control to
learners that involve little extra work on the part of the teacher.
Allow choice of formats

It is standard accessibility practice to provide transcripts for audio or audiovisual material,
to provide captions for video material, to provide alternative text for images and so on.

However, these alternative formats are often used by a much wider range of people than
those for whom they were originally intended, so ensure that all of these format options
are available as standard for all learners (Fidaldo and Thormann, 2017). Similarly, some
learners may prefer to receive your feedback as an audio mp3 rather than written text.
This can even be quicker to produce than annotating a document with text-based
feedback.
Allow choice of display characteristics

Many online teaching materials, including web pages, documents and slideshow
presentations, can be easily altered by learners to suit their needs in terms of font, font
size, colour and contrast. Point out to your learners how they can personalise your
materials, even linking them with guidance pages on the internet describing how to use
built-in web browser features to achieve these changes.

3 Technologies for social communication
Figure 7 Manage the introduction of social media into your online lessons
As you saw in the Week 1 section on backchannels, and the discussion of connectivism in
Week 2, social media can have an important role in online teaching. There are a variety of
social communication tools that can be employed in online teaching, each with its own
potential advantages (and sometimes drawbacks too).
There sometimes needs to be a phased approach to the use of social media tools in
online teaching. Skills in providing constructive feedback perhaps need to be honed in a
relatively closed environment (such as a discussion forum, commenting first on a teacher-
provided item, and later on each other’s contributions) before being moved to a more
public arena (Jones and Gallen, 2016). Twitter and YouTube can both be used to great
effect in demonstrating how public commenting can easily move away from ‘constructive’
and in an unhealthy direction.
If you wish to read more about the positive and negative effects of using social media in
teaching, Haylett (2016) gathers together a variety of literature on the subject and draws
the conclusion that there appears to be a significant effect on student engagement from

the use of social media. However, there may potentially be negative effects on student
attainment.
3.1 Social technologies for promoting community
Figure 8 Social media tools can give learners an easy way to communicate with each
other
Some social media tools can be used to enhance communication and cohesion among
your group of online learners. ‘Collecting’ tools such as Pinterest can help learners
discover a topic collectively and share their findings or ideas. Social bookmarking tools
such as Diigo can aid in broadening learners’ research skills, connecting them with
resources they hadn’t previously discovered. Of course, simply using the right
technologies will not force a sense of community and shared learning to develop in any
given cohort, but it will give it a chance of happening. If Facebook is available to all
members of your cohort (it is blocked in some countries), the creation of a class Facebook
group can give learners an easy way to communicate with each other, as well as providing
the teacher with an opportunity to provide prompt scheduling reminders, and to share
relevant resources. Coughlan and Perryman (2015) have written about the use of student-
led Facebook groups and their role in facilitating learning and achieving educational
inclusion.

3.2 Social technologies for enhancing presence

Some social media tools can be utilised in online teaching to help the learners develop a
sense of place within the ‘wider world’ and to start enhancing their online profile
(Veletsianos, 2016). Blogs can be used to help learners become used to critically
reflecting on a given topic, to become familiar with expressing themselves in a ‘public’
arena, to enable the teacher to put explanatory text alongside class materials to allow
absentees greater context when catching up. Twitter can be used to demonstrate the
power of the collective, to share discovered resources, to seek feedback, and to contact
‘experts’ in a given subject area. We will explore uses of social media in more detail in
Week 4 of this course.
Activity 4 Thinking about the role of social media in online teaching

Take a look at this infographic which provides a wide range of suggestions for ways in
which social media can be used in education: (You should be able to click on the image
to zoom in closer.)
Using the section entitled ‘How to use social media in class’, write down two to three
ideas that you might like to try out one day.
Comment
Social media tools can be useful in teaching, even though they may require careful
implementation. This activity is designed to get you started with thinking about how
social media may play a role in your online teaching, and what factors you need to
consider when implementing them.

4 Dealing with change in the technology sector
4 Dealing with change in the technology

sector
Change is an ever-present topic of conversation in education, and particularly with
respect to technology.
Figure 9 Technology changes rapidly across all sectors, including education

The rapid and constant evolution of technology means that some of the tools you read
about today will have disappeared in a year, while new ones will become available.
Hopefully, however, the principles will remain and you will be able to view the changed
landscape with the ability to select the tools that help you to achieve your objectives in
online teaching.
Before making substantial use of a tool, or committing to purchasing it, you may want to
consider aspects such as whether it has a substantial user base, or what the developer or
supplier’s model for sustainability, support or improvement is.
The next section provides some guidance on how to make choices, even if the tools we
have mentioned in this course are no longer available or suitable.

5 How to choose
5 How to choose
Figure 10 Choosing the right tool

How you choose which technology to use can depend on a number of factors
(Watson, 2011) such as:
● The intended learning outcomes for the course. Technology must serve the
pedagogical outcomes, not determine them.
● The students’ situation (location, access to internet, number of students in the class,
etc. This reflects the issues covered in Section 2 of this week).
● The activities or technical requirements of the course content (e.g. inclusion of large
graphic files, collaborative tools, live chat features, external guest lecturer access,
file sharing, discussions, etc.).
● The breadth and depth of the teacher’s previous online experience. While it is
tempting to use every new tool and feature in your teaching, it is better to start slowly
and build up your experience and confidence. Introduce one component, use it
appropriately, evaluate its success, and then adjust your teaching where necessary.
Slowly introduce more components once you and/or the students are more
comfortable with the technology. (In Week 8 of this course you will learn more about
‘action research’ and evaluation of your use of technology in teaching.)
● The requirements or policies of the institution regarding the use of different online
technologies.
● Whether a centralised learning management system (LMS) or free, open web
technology is available or preferable.
● Cost, to yourself or your organisation, both directly in purchase costs and indirectly in
the amount of time needed to become competent in its usage.
If you would like to read more about technology and tools for online learning, JISC (2016)
have created a resource combining guidance with case studies, and including a useful
checklist.
5.1 Linking learning outcomes, activities and tools

The University of New South Wales Sydney (2017) provide a very useful table grouping
together common themes of learning outcomes, the kinds of activities often used with
learners to achieve those outcomes, and some potentially useful online technologies for
each. An edited version of this table forms the basis for Activity 5 below.
Activity 5 Identifying technologies that you might use

Read the activity tasks below and then examine the table that follows.

5 How to choose
1. Which tools and associated practices shown in the table do you or your learners
(as far as you know) currently use in a teaching and/or learning context? Spend
just a few minutes making a list.
2. As far as you know, outside of the teaching environment, which tools do your
learners use (or which would you presume that they use) to express themselves,
to reflect, to explore and to play? Again, make a list.
3. Which of the tools on your two lists above are social? Put an asterisk by each of
the tools that you would describe as social.
Comment
This activity should help you to develop further your responses from last week – now
you should be able to match possible tools to the tasks you wish your learners to
achieve online. In later weeks, you will build further upon these ideas.
Table 1 Learning outcomes and selecting technology tools

Desired learning Rationale (the ‘why?’) Relevant activities ( Potential technological
outcomes (the the ‘how?’) tools
‘what?’)
Information literacy. Exposure to, awareness of, contribute to Multi-dimensional RSS feeds/aggregators.
external: evaluation.
Global practice. Blogs.
● activity Sharing and reviewing
Digital literacy. online resources. Plagiarism prevention
● conversations (e.g. Turnitin).
Ethical practice. Connecting with out-
● resources side experts/commu- Presentation sharing
Preparation for suc- (e.g. SlideShare).
cess. ● techniques and approaches. nities.
Check for plagiarism. Video sharing
Appropriate referencing. (e.g. YouTube, Vimeo).
Media making/
Appropriate equipment of the 21st century mashups. Podcasting.
graduate.
Digital storytelling. Online/distance learning
Managing information load. platforms
Copyright/Creative (e.g. Blackboard Collabo-
commons discus- rate, Adobe Connect).
sions.
Screencasting.
Activities relevant and
authentic to discipline.
Embedded activities
for generic attributes.
Contextual prompts to
evaluate sources.

5 How to choose
Self-directed learning. Negotiate understanding. Problem/case-based Wikis.

learning.
Reflective practice. Feedback on the course. Quiz/survey.
Flexible access to
Engaged learning. Reflection on learning. material. Recorded lectures.
Co-learning. Global practice. Project planning and Video sharing
management. (e.g. YouTube, Vimeo).
Quality learning envir- Consistency of experience.
onment and experi- Student self-tests. Podcasting.
ence.
Teacher (and technol- Mobile learning
ogy) as facilitator of (e.g. smartphone, tablet).
learning. Online/distance learning
Choice of modes and platforms
activities. (e.g. Blackboard Collabo-
rate, Adobe Connect).
Access to technology
(e.g. mobile devices).
Agreed code of con-
duct.
Giving and receiving Multiple perspectives. Collaborative writing. Wikis.
feedback.
Feedback on performance. Group negotiation and Blogs.
planning.
Discussion forum.
Assessment of team-
work. Peer review (e.g. via
forum).
Review (e.g. group
work). Online/distance learning
platforms
Publishing. (e.g. Blackboard Collabo-
Reflection.
Screencasting.
Working in teams. Negotiate understanding. Collaborative writing. Wikis.
Collaborative practice. Multiple perspectives (for teacher). Group negotiation and Blogs.
planning.
Management of group work. Peer review (e.g. via
Project planning and forum).
Digital literacy. management.
Google Docs.
Inclusivity. Problem/case-based
learning. Online/distance learning
platforms
Assessing team con- (e.g. Blackboard Collabo-
tribution. rate, Adobe Connect).
Media-based projects. Moderated discussion.
Variety of communi-
cation styles sup-
ported.

5 How to choose
Critical reviewing. Negotiate understanding. Reflecting. Blogs.

Critical thinking. Multiple perspectives. Debating. Discussion forum.
Independent learning. Feedback. Reviewing. Online/distance learning
platforms
Practice of critical reviewing. Social knowledge (e.g. Blackboard Collabo-
building. rate, Adobe Connect).
Practice of critical thinking.
Review of / commen- Seminar replicators
tary on online mate- (e.g. VoiceThread).
rial.
Video sharing
Give and receive (e.g. YouTube, Vimeo).
feedback.
Podcasting.
RSS feeds/aggregators.
Peer review (e.g. via
forum).
Synthesis of learning. Able to solve new problems. Experience ‘authentic’ Authentic voice via video/
practice. audio.
Apply learning (at high Application of knowledge in inte-
level). grated way. Integrative (could be Online/distance learning
group) project. platforms
(e.g. Blackboard Collabo-
Problem/case-based rate, Adobe Connect).
learning activities.
Simulations e.g. virtual
experiments.
Animations.
Written Negotiate understanding. Reflecting. Blogs.
communication.
Contribute to external activity, conversa- Debating. Discussion forum.
tions, resources.
Reviewing. Plagiarism prevention
Appropriate referencing. (e.g. Turnitin).
Publishing.
Presentation sharing
Checking for plagi- (e.g. SlideShare).
arism.
Messaging (e.g. Twitter,
Yammer).
RSS feeds/aggregators.
Oral communication. Sharing audio/video Seminar replicators
material. (e.g. VoiceThread).
Presentation skills.
Presenting. Video sharing
Language proficiency. (e.g. YouTube, Vimeo).
Digital storytelling.
Podcasting.
Audio/video discus-
sion and feedback. Presentation sharing
(e.g. SlideShare).
Online/distance learning
platforms
(e.g. Blackboard Collabo-
Screencasting.

5 How to choose
Activity 6 Selecting tools

Think back to the activities in the previous two weeks, and retrieve your notes about
what you want to deliver online and what kinds of tools you would need to employ to
achieve this. Which tools from your lists already map across to some of your desired
objectives in teaching online? Which objectives do not have an already-used tool
mapped across to them? Have you discovered anything in this week’s materials that
might help you meet these objectives?
Your answers are saved within the course, and you are likely to revisit them later.
Comment
This activity should help you to develop further your responses from previous weeks –
now you should be able to match possible tools to the tasks you wish your learners to
achieve online.



Summary
Summary
This week you have learned about a lot of different tools and technologies, including
social media, that can be used in online teaching. You have learned how to choose the
right tool for each task, beginning with the learning outcomes you want learners to
achieve.
Next week we will be looking at another side to social media’s role in taking your teaching
online – the role of facilitating the creation and development of your own networks.
While you contemplate all of the tools and technologies that you’ve been made aware of
this week, let’s see how Rita’s been coping with all this useful information.

Summary

Week 4: The benefits of support networks and how to develop them
Introduction
Week 4: The benefits of

support networks and how to
develop them
Introduction
Figure 1 Technology gives us the opportunity to connect widely

One of the best ways to enhance your confidence and ability in teaching online is to reach
out to others. This may be to form a network of peers who are all at a similar stage and
can work through teaching ideas together and offer moral support and shared
experiences, or it may involve connecting to people who have already achieved the
objective you are trying to achieve and can pass on useful advice. The great advantage of
using online tools, and in particular social networking tools, to establish these
connections, is that you can decide what you want to discuss, how, when and with whom.
You can be passive and ‘lurk’, or be more active and join in with sharing or discussion.
The control lies in your hands, and you can choose to share only what you want to share,
or how much time you want to invest.
Concepts that we have introduced to help you understand online teaching, such as
synchronous and asynchronous communication, also apply to the variety of platforms and
tools you find here. Social networking tools include discussion or message boards, but
equally, can focus on ways of sharing and curating information such as social
bookmarking and micro-blogging. Much of what you do when you use the internet can be

Introduction
shared if you want it to be. In turn, you should be able to find people with similar interests
in using online learning to you, who share findings or resources that they think are useful.
In this week of the course you will find out about what advantages can be gained by
expanding your online networks, and will start to work on developing your own.
Teacher reflections
This week we have another clip from Sarah S., whom you have already encountered in a
previous week. Here she reflects on her experiences with online networks:
● understand the benefits of networks to the online teacher

● discuss the concepts of communities of practice and network weather
● develop useful online networks to augment your teaching practice.

1 Benefits of engaging with online networks
1 Benefits of engaging with online

networks
Figure 2 People come together for all sorts of reasons – social and professional – and
networks can help with this
We’ll start with a quote from an article about the connecting of computers together to form
networks:
‘Most of the benefits of networking can be divided into two generic categories:
connectivity and sharing. Networks allow computers, and hence their users, to
be connected together. They also allow for the easy sharing of information and
resources, and cooperation between the devices in other ways. Since modern
business depends so much on the intelligent flow and management of
information, this tells you a lot about why networking is so valuable.’
(Kozierok, 2005)
With just a few amendments, this quote can describe the benefits of social networking to
any educator:
Most of the benefits of networking can be divided into two generic categories:
connectivity and sharing. Networks allow teachers to be connected together.
They also allow for the easy sharing of information and resources, and
cooperation between the teachers in other ways. Since online education
depends so much on the intelligent flow and management of information, this
tells you a lot about why networking is so valuable.

As you will have seen in the previous weeks of this course, teaching online requires
thought, planning, and perhaps a little bravery in trying new technologies and techniques.
Any feelings of nervousness can be reduced by gaining support from networks of people
who are either in a similar position, or who have already done what you are starting to do.
Luckily, in today’s age there are a large number of mechanisms by which we can
participate in networks, helping each of us to start to develop a personal network around
ourselves (Ansmann et al., 2014).
It’s worth noting that networking is largely invisible to others and only partly visible to the
direct participants in any exchange. This is true whether networking occurs face to face or
online. It is not always clear (sometimes even to yourself) whether you are actively
networking, or just having a chat – and often one can become the other without anyone
formally recognising it. Networking can be something that obviously bears that name –
introducing yourself to a group at a face-to-face conference or posting in an ‘Online
teaching newcomers’ discussion forum, for example. But networking can also take place
much less formally, for example by following relevant Twitter accounts, or by chatting to
colleagues or peers.
There are a number of benefits to participating in networking activities and these will be
discussed on the following page.
1.1 Sharing ideas
Figure 3 Social networking allows you to interact however you wish, and so you can focus
more on certain networks and communities, and dip into others more occasionally
Teachers can readily use social networks to share teaching ideas, tips and tricks with
others in a similar position. You can join an online network and simply ‘lurk’ (observe
without contributing), or once you have a feel for the way things are done, you could
comment on other people’s ideas, and use them for your own inspiration. Eventually you
can run your own ideas past others, and by doing this you can obtain valuable feedback
and improve your materials before they go in front of learners. It is also wise when
considering partnerships, networks and communities, to be aware of potential
‘boundaries’ between different types of people, different roles, even different pay grades
(MacGillivray, 2017) – this is another good reason for initially ‘lurking’ to assess the
situation in each new network or community you join.
1.2 Developing partnerships and communities

Once you have established a presence in a particular network, you may start to find your
relationships with certain individuals are proving to be of particular value. You may start to
call on specific individuals for advice, or find yourself commenting more freely on their

materials. These developments can be channelled into the formation of a community of

practice (this will be explored further in Section 2 of this week).
1.3 Sharing information

Teachers can also use social networking to connect with peers who are more experienced
in online teaching (and some day you may be the more experienced teacher that others
are connecting with). Don’t be afraid to reach out to those who may have more experience
to ask for advice on how best to approach an element of online teaching. If someone
reaches out to you for guidance, return the favour.
1.4 Professional development

Whilst social networking can be done informally and outside of the regular work
environment, its value to your professional development can be marked (Davis, 2011). By
sharing with peers and experts via networks, you can advance your online teaching
skillset more rapidly than you would do alone, and solve issues that you may encounter by
asking for assistance from your network. In addition, beyond the subject matter of online
teaching, simply developing the skill of effective networking is a further asset to your
professional development. Many educational institutions now actively support their staff to
develop social networks and recognise the value of this.
1.5 Making contacts

Social networking can remove many of the barriers to engaging in dialogue with the
‘leading lights’ in your field. If you have a question for a particular expert who, a couple of
decades ago, would be largely reachable only by approaching them at a face-to-face
conference, now you can use your networks to pop them a quick question on Twitter, for
example. Social networking has made the education world much more accessible to its
constituent members than it has ever been before (Davis, 2011).
Activity 1 Identifying your existing roles in networks

Complete the following table. Which of the following networks do you already
participate in? In each case, consider the type of participation you have with each
network. (Participations described as ‘informal’ can be ad hoc, on any topic,
sometimes unrelated to your own teaching practice; participations described as
‘formal’ would be focused on improving your teaching or sharing resources.)

Table 1 Types of involvement in online networks
Type of participation > Observer (or ‘lurker’, Responder (answering Text contributor (posting Informa
reading other people’s questions or questions or starting (providi
Type of network input but not commenting on discussions) informa
contributing directly) discussions) your ow
˅
Informal online contact with Provide your answer... Provide your answer... Provide your answer... Provide
teachers in your organisation
that you interact with mostly
face to face.
teachers in your organisation
that you interact with mostly
online.
teachers in other
organisations that you have
met face to face at some
time.
teachers that have come
together informally via social
media.
Formal online contact with Provide your answer... Provide your answer... Provide your answer... Provide
teachers of the same subject
discipline or age group.
teachers of many
backgrounds focused
around particular teaching
topics (e.g. flipped
classrooms, online
teaching etc.)
other members of
organisations of teachers
(e.g. members of
professional bodies,
unions etc.)
Comment
When taking your teaching online it is important to consider not only your teaching
materials, but your own practice as a member of the wider teaching community. This
activity should help you to identify where you could make the most of your existing
connections, and how you might make new ones online.

2 Communities of practice and network weather
2 Communities of practice and network

weather
Figure 4 Communities and networks

When groups of people come together online around a particular topic or job role, they are
often referred to as communities. They are also a form of network.
Communities can be central to helping to develop your approach to teaching online.
Maybe you’re an educator seeking guidance about how to design an online version of a
particular learning activity, or wanting to find out who are the online teaching experts in
your area of practice. Whatever your reason for seeking contact with others in your field,
participating in a relevant community can be of great value, and can lead to your own
personal skill development, as well as allowing you to participate in discussions with
experts in the field and ultimately share the knowledge you have gained with others who
may be just starting out.
2.1 Communities of practice

Communities come in many forms. When we introduced the concept of ‘communities of
practice’ in Week 2, it was noted that communities can develop wherever a common
interest exists between individuals, such as a shared profession. Wenger’s (now Wenger-
Trayner) most recent definition is this:
‘Communities of practice are groups of people who share a concern or a

passion for something they do and learn how to do it better as they interact

regularly. Note that this definition allows for, but does not assume, intentionality:
learning can be the reason the community comes together or an incidental
outcome of member’s interactions.’ (Wenger-Trayner and Wenger-
Trayner, 2015)
What is a community of practice and what does one look like? The Wenger-Trayners
identify three characteristics of a community of practice:
● A shared domain of interest (a community of practice is not just a club of friends,

membership implies a commitment to the domain, and therefore a shared
competence that distinguishes members from other people).
● An active community, sharing and exploring the domain (members engage in joint
activities and discussions, help each other, and share information. They build
relationships that enable them to learn from each other; they care about their
standing with each other. But members of a community of practice do not necessarily
work together on a daily basis).
● An impact on the practice of those involved (members of a community of practice are
practitioners. They develop a shared repertoire of resources: experiences, stories,
tools, ways of addressing recurring problems – in short, a shared practice. This takes
time and sustained interaction).
They go on to say that ‘it is the combination of these three elements that constitutes a
community of practice. And it is by developing these three elements in parallel that one
cultivates such a community’. So this is what you need to achieve if you want to turn your
networking into the establishment of a community of practice.
You may find that this theory very accurately matches your experiences of professional
communities, or you may find you would prefer to modify it in some way. Whichever of
these views you take, the theory provides a framework through which you will be able to
compare and evaluate the communities that you become aware of.

2.2 Network weather
Figure 5 Network weather is so called because it refers to technologies that affect us

whether we use them or not, like the weather!
Weller (2011) summarises the concept of network weather (first coined by Green-
field, 2010). Looking at people in cities, they argue that your life is impacted by new
technologies, whether you use them or not – they are like the weather. Weller goes on to
describe a scenario that might be familiar to educators:
‘When you arrive you are disappointed to find out that someone who has
attended for the previous three years, and who you always have a meal with,
has stayed at home because they can attend remotely. In the opening session
the keynote speaker makes a claim that someone checks and passes around
via Twitter, and it seems they have misrepresented the research findings. There
is a noticeable change in atmosphere and the questions the speaker receives
are more challenging than you usually encounter. In another session the
speaker takes questions from the remote audience, which includes students
and this generates a very good discussion about the learner perspective.
That evening the conference bar seems rather empty, and seeing an old
colleague he informs you that there is an alternative conference Facebook
page, and they have arranged a meeting in a local bar, with a discussion
theme.
The next day the afternoon doesn't have any presentations; instead it has an
informal format where the participants seek to create a set of learning
resources and a link up with four remote hubs in different cities.’ (pg. 116)
This may at first glance seem like a negative summary of the technological developments
at the conference, but these changes to people’s behaviour represent real changes to an
activity at the core of scholarly practice and are therefore a good example of the type of
network weather that we may all experience in our day-to-day lives as educators.

Weller summarises the technological developments affected by network weather in that

scenario:
● Remote participation – streaming events allows people to attend remotely and often
put questions to the speakers.
● The backchannel – Twitter, in particular, has become a potent force for creating a
backchannel of conversation, with positive and negative results.
● Amplified events – many conferences now seek to draw in a wider audience using
remote participation, beyond the normal constituents.
● Socialisation – people will organise events before and during the conference using
social networks.
● Alternative session formats – in response to the impact of such technologies,
conference organisers are beginning to use the face-to-face element of conferences
to do more than just content delivery.
Using networked tools to live blog, tweet or otherwise capture conference interaction as
the event happens is becoming more common and is referred to as the conference
‘backchannel’ (you were introduced to this concept in Week 1 of this course). This allows
participants to discuss the conference activity while it is in progress, both with those at the
event, and other interested parties. Some conferences make this backchannel discussion
more visible, referring to queries posed online. Whether formally captured or not, one
effect of this networked activity is that it presents and preserves discussion and reactions
to the conference as these occur, in a way that can be searched after the event is over. It
is an addition to the usual recordings and is less tightly controlled.
Activity 2 Network weather and you

As a teacher who is venturing into the online world, you need to be aware of the
network weather around you. Jot down some brief thoughts in response to each of the
following questions:
● Where might you begin to look for easy networking opportunities that may be
available to you that you simply don’t yet know exist? In which of these would you
wish to begin as a ‘lurker’? Are there any that you might feel sufficiently confident
to actively participate in now?
● What networking activity do you already participate in that could be modified or
refocused to bring you networking benefits?
● How could you harness the power of the ‘weather’ that is already around you to
benefit your online teaching practice?
Comment
Networking is an activity that all teachers participate in, although often it is limited to
the colleagues who work in the same organisation. This activity is designed to help you
identify other avenues for networking, so that you may benefit from the ‘weather’
occurring around you if you choose to tap into it.


3 Developing your networks

Whether you’re looking to join a wider community, wanting to find out about best practice,
interested in the latest developments in online education, or seeking to share successful
techniques and technologies, you may find it valuable to connect with like-minded people
by establishing and developing networks.
Figure 6 Technology allows us to form networks globally, not just with those immediately
around us
If you are interested in expanding your work-related networks, this can be done by joining
an established community of practice (Krutka et al., 2014). Look around the internet for
communities or ‘teaching groups’ (Heinrich, 2015) relating to your own particular niche of
education – such as the level at which you teach, the subject you teach, any particular
objectives with respect to online learning. It might take some searching to find a few
communities that seem like a good fit for you. Join one or several of these and ‘lurk’ –
observe the kinds of discussions that happen and decide if they are the sort of thing that
would benefit you to ultimately take part in. One of these communities of practice may be
the ideal starting point for establishing, or further developing your own research identity,
skills and your sense of membership of a community.
For those working in education, there are several services that offer ways to find and
connect with academics. One of the most widely used is the social networking site
LinkedIn.com, which provides for all kinds of professionals and claims to be ‘the world’s
largest professional network on the Internet’ (LinkedIn, 2017). For those working in higher
education, more specialised academic-specific social networking services are also
available, such as Academia.edu and ResearchGate.net, which have been set up to help
academics and researchers engage with each other through sharing publications and
facilitating communication. For those working in a school environment,
EducatorsConnect.com might be a good place to start.
Another useful way to make contact with like-minded people is to use a microblogging site
such as Twitter (Carpenter and Krutka, 2014) or Weibo. These can be fast-flowing rivers
of information, much of it irrelevant to you, and, much like crossing that fast-flowing river, if
you do not go into it with a clear plan, you risk being swept away. So, when considering

using a microblogging site to develop your network, you should follow these steps to
ensure you maximise its usefulness to you:
Maximising usefuleness of microblogging

You'll need to identify the tasks you wish to perform:
● gathering information on a particular subject:

make a list of keywords or hashtags that you may wish to search for (hashtags
can include phrases and acronyms, but always without spaces, for example
#teachingonline, #OpenLearn or #cccotc18.
● following and learning from experts in a particular subject:
list the names of the experts you wish to search for.
● making connections with people in a similar position to yourself:
brainstorm how you might find those people – how will you search for them? You
may need to combine some keywords or hashtags into a single search, to enable
you to filter out information that is related but not precisely what you are
looking for.
● sharing your own work:
identify precisely which items you would like to share, list some keywords and
hashtags that might describe your work, and practise creating a short
microblogging message of the correct length that describes your work succinctly.
There are of course other tasks you may wish to do as well, such as following particular
celebrities or information sources unrelated to your work environment.
If you wish to use Twitter, these instructions could help you to maximise the benefits. If
you wish to use a different tool, the principles of the instructions will remain valid, but you
will need to alter the method and tools to suit your platform.
1. Create an account (on Twitter, or your preferred microblogging site).

2. Use your Twitter account to register with Tweetdeck. Tweetdeck is a very good way
to make sense of the vast amount of information rushing by on Twitter, and helps you
to arrange the information you need in easily managed columns.
3. Use the search function in Tweetdeck to generate new columns relating to your
keywords or hashtags of interest, or search for experts and follow them – all tweets
from accounts that you follow will appear in your Home column in Tweetdeck, in
chronological order.
4. If you are looking for peers, first find and follow likely individuals – with any luck they
will follow you back (it is good Twitter etiquette to follow individuals who follow you).
Once you are familiar with one another’s tweets you could then suggest forming a
List (a column in your Tweetdeck that gathers together the tweets from your selected
individuals, and that others can subscribe to).
5. If you want to share your own work, learn from how others do it, observe how they
use their tweets, how they ask for feedback or for others to retweet them. You need
to have built up a good number of followers before sharing your work, so that their
retweets will exponentially increase your reach.

Activity 3 How do you share information with others?

Think about any networks and communities you already belong to (formal and
informal). How do these communities share information? What tools do they use? How
could they use other channels or media to improve that flow of information?
How could you increase your connections and reach? How might tools like Twitter,
Weibo or other social networking sites help you?
Finally, think back to Activity 5 last week (your notes from that activity are displayed in
the box below), and build upon your objectives by adding notes about how you might
use networks and communities to help you achieve your online teaching objectives.
Again, keep your answers in a safe place, as you will revisit them.
Comment
This activity brings forward your plans for teaching online that you have been
developing over the previous weeks of this course, and weaves into them your role as
a networked teacher. It should help you to identify how you could utilise the networks
available to you to inform and improve your online teaching.


Now it’s time to complete the Session 4 badge quiz. It is similar to previous quizzes, but
this time, instead of answering 5 questions, there will be 15.
Remember, this quiz counts towards your badge. If you’re not successful the first time,
you can attempt the quiz again in 24 hours.
Week 4 compulsory badge quiz

Summary
Summary
This week’s material has presented you with a variety of possible paths you could take
towards joining, creating or developing networks. The benefits of being connected to other
teachers in this way have been highlighted. Hopefully, you now have some ideas about
where you want your networking to go next. Rita has certainly got a few ideas:
You are now half way through the course. The Open University would really appreciate
your feedback and suggestions for future improvement in our optional
end-of-course survey, which you will also have an opportunity to complete at the end of
Week 8. Participation will be completely confidential and we will not pass on your details
to others.

Summary

Week 5: Finding, using, and sharing educational materials online
Introduction
Week 5: Finding, using, and

sharing educational
materials online
Introduction
Figure 1 Open or not? Images on the internet may be subject to copyright

The internet contains an abundance of images, textbooks, videos, learning objects and
more, which teachers could take and use in their teaching. However, this creates
opportunities and challenges for online teachers. Not all of these resources can be readily
reused due to restrictions of copyright or intellectual property.
This week, we explore this topic and focus in particular on Open Educational Resources
(OER). These are online materials that have been shared with the intent that others can
reuse them. You will learn about Creative Commons licences, which underpin OER, and
which you can apply to share your own work. These make it clear exactly what
permissions there are to reuse the shared resources, and provide you with choices about
how your own shared resources can be reused by others. Finally in this week, you will

1 Open Education Resources
examine some repositories and other ways of finding OER to reuse and repurpose in your
own context.
Teacher reflections
This week we hear from Andy, who discusses his experiences with finding, using, and
sharing OER as part of teaching practice:
● define Open Educational Resources and list some examples of what this term
covers.
● understand Creative Commons licences and use these properly
● search OER Repositories and the wider internet for material that you can legally
reuse in your teaching.

Open Educational Resources (OER) are learning materials that are freely available in the
public domain and are specifically licensed for reuse without cost.
The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation have supported many OER initiatives. Their
definition of OER is:
‘Open Educational Resources are teaching, learning and research materials in

any medium – digital or otherwise – that reside in the public domain or have
been released under an open license that permits no-cost access, use,

adaptation and redistribution by others with no or limited restrictions.’ (William

and Flora Hewlett Foundation, 2018)
1.1 What are Open Education Resources?

The term can include: textbooks, course readings, and other learning content;
simulations, games, and other learning applications; syllabi, quizzes, and assessment
tools; and virtually any other material that can be used for educational purposes. OER
typically refers to electronic resources, including those in multimedia formats, and such
materials are generally released under a Creative Commons, or similar, licence that
supports open use of the content. OER can originate from colleges and universities,
libraries, archival organisations, government agencies, commercial organisations such as
publishers, or faculty or other individuals who develop educational resources they are
willing to share (Educause, 2010).
You might recall that we briefly talked about OER in Week 2 and how this has partly
evolved from the idea that educators could produce Reusable Learning Objects (RLO).
With some OER, the focus is more on sharing educational content with a licence, rather
than how applicable the materials are for reuse. Some can easily be reused, while others
could require editing to make them suitable for use with your learners. Some OER may
not meet accessibility or interoperability requirements (Baker, 2008), and quality and
accuracy must always be checked. However, repositories and search engines can help
you to find good OER for your purposes.
Activity 1 Why are Open Educational Resources important?

Watch this short video ‘OER Introduction II’ explaining why OERs are important, and
note down what users have permission to do with OERs (found in the
section 1:13–1:24).
Comment
OERs have a great deal of value to teachers and especially to those who teach online.
This activity is designed to illustrate why OERs may be important to you as you take
your teaching online.
1.2 Why should I be interested in OER?

Whilst the ideas had been discussed previously, the profile of OER was raised
dramatically in 2002 with the launch of Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s (MIT)
OpenCourseWare initiative. This bold move saw MIT make the materials from its entire
catalogue of courses freely available online (D’Oliveira et al., 2010). That same year,
UNESCO first adopted the term Open Educational Resources, and then in that

December, the first set of Creative Commons licences were produced (you will learn more
about Creative Commons later in this week’s materials).
Today, the open education space is occupied by both individual educators who reuse and
share materials, and large educational enterprises with varying interpretations of what
‘open’ means. The rapid growth of MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses) from the likes
of FutureLearn, edX, Coursera and Udacity are important in the story of open education.
Although these courses may be ‘open’ in terms of not restricting registration, the materials
used are not necessarily licensed as OER and may be subject to copyright. MOOCs and
other forms of online learning can be studied in detail through other course offerings from
The Open University. See the ‘next steps’ section on the course Conclusion page.
Figure 2 The OER logo

One form of OER that has rapidly gained popularity in recent years is Open Textbooks.
These can reduce the cost to learners of acquiring course texts, and could increase
access to education. Given the high costs of education and the challenges of providing
learning to all those who want it, many educators are excited by the idea of free, high-
quality texts, which can save money, be collaboratively produced and reviewed, and be
customised to the needs of a particular class (Ozdemir & Hendricks, 2017). There is also
the potential that open textbooks can increase student satisfaction (Pitt, 2015).

Figure 3 Open textbooks

2 Evaluating the licensing and quality of online resources
2 Evaluating the licensing and quality of

online resources
So, how best to know what material is available for use and what isn’t? In this section we
will look at some of the ways of deciding what you should use.
2.1 Copyright and the role for Creative Commons

licences
When a piece of creative work like an image, video, or textbook is produced, the creator of
the work may have certain legal rights that restrict the ability of others to use or reuse that
material without seeking permission from the author. This is known as copyright, and it
applies automatically to all works unless the author chooses otherwise. The copyright
notice © is a familiar symbol online. However, it is not necessarily helpful in determining
whether or not you can use a resource, as sometimes copyrights expire, and in some
cases it is no longer necessary to use it – in the USA, for example, the symbol is no longer
required for works published after March 1989. Absence of notice does not necessarily
mean the work is within the public domain – on the contrary, copyright must be assumed
to be in place unless stated otherwise. Intellectual property is a broader term that
incorporates copyright and other elements like patents. This is where Creative Commons
licensing has filled a potentially very confusing gap.
Activity 2 Interpreting Creative Commons licences

Figure 4 Creative Commons logos

This video ‘Creative Commons Kiwi’ explains the four different symbols you may find
on a Creative Commons licence, and the six possible combinations of these.
This page also provides explanations of each of the licences if you want to use a text
version. Make your own notes on the four symbols and six combinations, so that you
will be able to refer to them in the future to identify what you are permitted to do with
shared resources you find online.
Comment
Creative Commons licences are an essential part of sharing or reusing teaching
resources online. You need to be able to identify at a glance the reuse conditions
attached to any learning object, and you should of course apply licences to any work
you share more widely, too.
Now, thanks to Creative Commons licences, when you find materials on the web that you
would like to use in your online teaching, you will be quickly able to tell whether you can
reuse the item, whether you can modify it, whether you can use it to make money, and
whether you need to apply an identical licence onto your own resulting work.
2.2 Evaluating open resources
Figure 5 Do the materials fit the bill?

The next consideration you need to make regarding materials you have found on the web
is to evaluate the quality and relevance of the material.

In many cases, OER are as rigorous in their production as any other educational
resource. They may be shared by some of the best educators in the field, or they may
have been the product of collaboration or feedback from educators worldwide. But there
are, as yet, no common standards or guidelines for assessing the quality or accuracy of
OERs. A recent EU report concluded that, as yet, there are few national policies or
guidelines concerning the validation or certification of OER (Cedefop, 2016), let alone
multinational or global standards.
The first step in this process is to use your subject knowledge to check the accuracy of
knowledge claims made in the resource. In academic papers, for example, knowledge
claims are often found in a distinct ‘Findings’ section, and may be repeated in the
conclusion of a report. Are any items presented as facts, to the best of your knowledge,
true? Are attributions made to the kinds of experts whose names you would associate with
that field of work? Supporting evidence should usually accompany each knowledge claim
– a knowledge claim should be backed up with a response that can be used to answer the
question ‘How do we know that?’
In addition to checking the resource for its factual accuracy, you should also check for
accessibility. We will look at this in more detail next week, but for now, it suffices to say
that any OERs that you choose to use will need to be suitable for all of your learners (both
current and future learners) and whatever needs they may have. If the resource has not
been made accessibly, it must come with a CC licence that enables you to modify it, so
that you can add accessibility features. If the licence says no editing is allowed, then if it is
not accessible, it’s probably not going to be useful to you.
It could also be important to evaluate how the form and content of a resource fits with the
rest of the teaching. For example, an OER in the form of a web-based short course could
be combined with a weekly class to create an opportunity for blended learning. Equally, an
OER might use different terminology or introduce different concepts to the student from an
existing core text. It could be important to be aware of this and respond in order to ensure
a good experience for the learners.
The ability to modify resources, or combine them together with others, is central to OER,
so this is often supported by the licences used. However, it could take substantial time
and effort to make modifications in order that an existing OER becomes appropriate to a
new teaching use. These revisions may include removing any inappropriate content, or
creating additional content to introduce or add more detail to the existing resource
(Coughlan, Pitt, & McAndrew, 2013). Therefore, another aspect of evaluating OER is to
think about whether it's useful as is, which is an ideal situation, or whether it will need
revisions, and if so, how those will be achieved.

2.3 Licensing your own materials
Figure 6 Sharing your materials is an important part of OER

The other side of the OER story is to consider sharing some of your own online teaching
materials for others to reuse. For some people there are restrictions preventing this – your
employer may hold the intellectual property rights to everything you produce and may not
permit learning materials to be shared in this way, or it may even be illegal in your country
to upload to sites like YouTube. However, it can still be a valuable learning experience to
follow the procedure of adding a Creative Commons licence to an item of yours, even if
you just use a blank image to practise the process.
The Creative Commons website makes the process as simple as possible. You simply
respond to the questions about whether you want to permit others to adapt or potentially
profit from your work, and your licence is automatically generated. If you can, open the
‘Help others attribute you!’ section, which adds metadata to your item, telling other users
your name, the title and date of the work, and so on. If you wish to apply the licence to a
web page, the site provides code that you can copy and paste, otherwise simply right-click
on the image of the CC licence the site has generated, and save it to your computer,
uploading it alongside your work in whatever location you have made it available.
If you share your resources for reuse, you may wish to ensure you are always attributed
as the original author for the purpose of expanding your profile as an online teacher, or as
a means of expanding your networks (as you learned in Week 4 of this course). You may
even find ways of collaborating with others to refine your works, or to discuss your
teaching resources as part of the sharing community.

3 Finding resources online
Figure 7 Another logo for OER

There are millions of OERs to be found across the web. For an individual teacher the task
of finding them would be exceptionally laborious if it were not for the advent of OER
repositories. These can contain the output of one project or several projects gathered
together, one institution’s OERs, or a gathering of many. For example, the OpenLearn site
gathers all of the OU’s open education material.
3.1 OER repositories

There are many repositories of OERs publicly available on the internet. A large proportion
of these showcase OERs associated with particular educational institutions or projects,
but there are several repositories which aggregate material from a range of sources. Here
is a list of some of them – an internet search for ‘OER repositories’ will reveal more.
● Solvonauts – a search engine that searches across repositories (they also provide
open repository software for institutions wanting to set up their own repository
of OER).
● MERLOT – tens of thousands of discipline-specific learning materials, learning
exercises, and content builder webpages, together with associated comments, and
bookmark collections, all intended to enhance the teaching experience of using a
learning material. All of these items have been contributed by the MERLOT member
community, who have either authored the materials themselves, or who have
discovered the materials, found them useful, and wished to share their enthusiasm
for the materials with others in the teaching and learning community.
● MIT OpenCourseWare – a web-based publication of virtually all MIT course content.
OpenCourseWare (OCW) is open and available to the world and is a permanent MIT
activity.
● OpenLearn – a repository of open materials produced by The Open University, who
also work with other organisations by providing free courses and resources that
support their mission of opening up educational opportunities to more people in more
places.

● OpenStax – tens of thousands of learning objects, organised into thousands of

textbook-style books in a host of disciplines, all easily accessible online and
downloadable (note: this resource was formerly known as Rice Connexions).
● Saylor – nearly 100 full-length courses at the college and professional levels, each of
which is available right now – at your pace, on your schedule, and free of cost.
● AMSER: Applied Math and Science Education Repository – a portal of educational
resources and services built specifically for use by those in Community and
Technical Colleges, but free for anyone to use.
● Internet Archive – a library that contains hundreds of free courses, video lectures,
and supplemental materials from universities in the United States and China.
● OER Commons – free-to-use learning and teaching content from around the world.
● Open Course Library – a collection of shareable course materials, including syllabi,
course activities, readings, and assessments designed by teams of college faculty,
instructional designers, librarians, and other experts.
Google Image Search

Within the settings on a Google Image Search results page, you can search for images
that have been labelled for reuse. First perform your search, and when your results page
shows, click on the Tools drop-down. This brings up a new toolbar of options, one of which
is ‘Usage rights’ - if you click on this you can select either ‘Labelled for reuse’ or ‘Labelled
for reuse with modification’ according to your preferences. (You can also select images
according to size, colour and time of publication, if you wish). Your results window should
refresh. Now, in theory, the images showing should be reusable. However, this does not
mean that you can simply copy and paste without attribution. When you find an image in
your Google results that you would like to use, click on it, and a black bar will appear,
featuring the option to visit the originating site. Click this link – hopefully the hosting site
will make clear what reuse licensing options apply to the image. If it does not, then you
should not use that image, as simply attributing it may not be sufficient to protect you from
breach of copyright.
YouTube
Beneath every video on YouTube is a ‘Show More’ link. When clicked, the licence
attached to the video is revealed. Some videos have a Creative Commons licence
attached (this is an option the uploader can select when putting their video onto YouTube).
However, most have the default Standard YouTube Licence, which says you ‘shall not
copy, reproduce, distribute, transmit, broadcast, display, sell, license, or otherwise exploit
any Content for any other purposes without the prior written consent of YouTube or the
respective licensors of the Content’. So if you wish to reuse Youtube videos that have the
Standard YouTube Licence, your only course of action is to attempt to contact the
uploader to gain permission.
YouTube does provide a setting to filter your search results to only show videos bearing a
CC licence. First perform a search for videos on the theme of your choice, then select the
‘Filter’ option. Under the heading ‘Features’ there is the option ‘Creative Commons’, which
reduces your results list to only videos that have a CC licence attached.
100 Thursday 12 September 2019

of 164
Vimeo
Beneath every video on Vimeo is a ‘More’ link. If the uploader has attached a licence to
their video, the type of licence that applies will be listed here. If no licence is stated, you
must assume that the work cannot be reused without express permission from the
uploader, and you should try to contact them if you wish to reuse the material. You can
narrow down a search within the Vimeo site to show only CC-licenced videos. First
perform your search using the main search box. When you have a results page, under
‘Refine By’ in the left hand column, click ‘More’. Scrolling down should reveal a Licence
section where you can filter your search results according to which CC licences apply to
your planned usage of the video.
Flickr
Flickr makes it very clear which images you can reuse and which you cannot. When you
perform a search in the Flickr website, the most prominent drop-down filter option on the
results page is ‘Any License’ which, by means of a drop-down menu, can be changed to
filter results for a variety of Creative Commons options. Every image on Flickr has
beneath it either a © symbol or a CC symbol, and clicking this will bring up the precise
terms of use for that image.
If you wish to keep in touch with developments regarding OER and become part of the
community, sign up for the OpenLearn newsletter. Several courses are available from The
Open University that go into greater detail about this area. More information on these
courses will be provided in the course conclusion at the end of Week 8.
Activity 3 Using OER repositories

Pick a topic of interest to you and spend some time searching for resources on this. Try
to make use of both an OER repository from the bulleted list at the top of this page, as
well as one of the other sites explored above.
Try to find one or two resources from your search, then take a few minutes to consider:
1. The quality of this resource:

○ Who created it?
○ Does it look to be accurate and well presented?
○ Are there any reviews or information from educators who have used it?
2. The appropriateness of this resource to your audience:
○ Does it need editing or introducing?
○ Would it combine well with any other materials that are used?
3. The licence:
○ Is it clear how the resource is licensed?
○ What does this allow you to do with it?
○ Do you need to attribute or ask for any permissions?

of 164
Comment
Hopefully you have found something that you think could be useful, but you might also
have realised that for some subjects, there is a lot out there and it takes time to find the
most suitable resources.
Considering quality, appropriateness, and licensing issues as you search for resources
will help you save time, and increase the benefit of drawing on resources created by
others.

of 164


of 164
Summary
Summary
This week you have been introduced to Open Educational Resources and the wide variety
of forms they can take. You have looked at some OER repositories and started to consider
how Creative Commons licensing works. One further consideration that needs to be made
when utilising shared resources is their accessibility and whether it suits your learners’
needs. Accessibility is the topic of next week’s materials.
Meanwhile, what has Rita made of the wealth of possibilities OER can offer her?

of 164
Summary

of 164
Week 6: Supporting learners with different needs – accessibility in online teaching
Introduction
Week 6: Supporting learners

with different needs –
accessibility in online
teaching
Introduction
Figure 1 Accessibility
It is important to ensure that your learning materials are suitable for as wide a range of
learners as possible, whether they are materials you create yourself, or resources that
you find online and reuse. Accessibility, usability, inclusion and universal design are all
commonly used terms for ensuring that your learning materials can be used by a wide
range of potential learners, including those with disabilities who may be using assistive
technologies. For the purposes of this week’s materials, we use ‘accessibility’ as a
shorthand. Note that this is not necessarily advocating a one-size-fits-all approach to
every learning object, and that it can be perfectly appropriate to provide alternative
materials or activities for some situations, as long as the overall learning objectives are
met for all learners. However, effort and understanding applied to this area can save a

of 164
1 What is assistive technology?
greater amount of effort and difficulties later on, and make the learning experience better
for everyone.
To understand some key themes in accessibility, you will first learn about assistive
technologies and the impact they have upon the way learners interact with learning
materials. You will then learn how to make the materials you use more accessible, and
finally some guidance on alternative formats.
Teacher reflections
We join Sarah H. again this week for her experiences of considering accessibility. She
focuses on ways of working with PowerPoint to make use of its full potential for inclusive
teaching:
● define assistive technology and list a variety of examples

● understand how to make most of your online teaching materials accessible
● assess the accessibility of OERs
● understand what alternative formats may be needed in online teaching.

The term ‘assistive technology’ is used in this course to refer to any technology that:
● makes it possible for a disabled person to use a computer

● makes their use of that computer more efficient

of 164
● enables them to access online information such as online learning materials.
Assistive technology, or enabling technology, can also be used in a wider sense to refer to
any technology used by disabled people to enable them to carry out a task. For example,
a definition from Doyle and Robson (2002) describes it as ‘equipment and software that
are used to maintain or improve the functional capabilities of a person with a disability’
(p. 44).
Figure 2 This word cloud, produced for Electronic Information for Libraries (EIFL),
symbolises the freedom given through libraries in developing countries that enable
access to assistive technologies (Ball, 2012)
Assistive technologies can facilitate access to teaching material by bridging the ‘access
gap’ between the teaching material and the learner. The materials may not have to be
altered if it has been designed appropriately, and if the learner can access them using
suitable assistive technologies. There is often a learning curve associated with becoming
skilled in their usage, and this should always be borne in mind. Whilst assistive
technologies may make the difference between a learner having access to learning
materials or having none, they may not completely remove all barriers or provide the
same experience that other learners are getting.
For learners to interact with online learning materials, the kinds of assistive technology
they may need to use include technology that facilitates:
● access to a computer and the internet

● access to and manipulation of text
● access to and manipulation of sounds and images.
Assistive technology includes hardware such as scanners, adapted keyboards or hearing

aids, and software such as text-to-speech or thought organisation software. Assistive
technology is often associated with high-tech systems such as speech recognition

of 164
software, but it can include low-tech solutions such as arm rests or wrist guards (adapted
from Banes and Seale, 2002).
1.1 Types of assistive technology

There are many types of assistive technology. Some common tools that you may
encounter include:
● Display enhancement tools. These might be used to adjust colour combinations on

screen, or to magnify text or particular areas of the screen, or to make the mouse
cursor more obvious, amongst other things.
● Audio tools. These might be used by learners to read text from the screen aloud (also
known as text-to-speech), to translate or define key words, or to record contributions
or feedback. It is important to note the distinction between text-to-speech tools,
which require the learner to select the text to be read and are commonly used by
people with dyslexia or a degree of vision impairment, and the much more complex
screen readers.
● Screen readers. These tools read everything presented on screen, as well as
navigation options and menus, and are used by people who are blind or severely
vision impaired to operate their computer, as well as to read on-screen text. They can
take a long time to learn to use, but when a user is expert they can often listen to
items being read out at a much greater speed than regular speech.
● Writing tools. These may help learners with spelling or sentence construction, or may
help students who cannot use a keyboard to enter text by other means. On-screen
keyboards can help learners to enter text by using a switch or pressing the space
bar, alternative entry tools can help learners to enter text by nudging a mouse or
even using their tongue to open or close an airpipe, and speech recognition tools can
help learners to enter text by speech.
● Planning tools. These can include tools that create thought maps (and convert these
to nested lists, or vice versa), as well as tools for annotating the screen, as reminders
or planning aids.
Assistive technologies are not always separate items to be purchased by the user. Often
mainstream technologies have assistive technology features built in. Operating systems
such as Microsoft Windows and Apple Mac OS contain built-in assistive technologies,
such as display enhancement tools and audio tools. Word processing software often
includes tools such as magnification controls, navigation via headings, or readability
checkers, and modern internet browsers also contain a range of assistive features.
Because these are readily available, you can try some of these tools yourself to get a
sense of how they work.
Activity 1 Discovering assistive technology built into internet browsers

Watch the video on Accessibility and web browsers to see an overview of browser-
based assistive aids. Make a note of any that you were previously unaware of.

of 164
Comment
Whilst it is not necessary for every teacher to become an expert in assistive aids, it is a
valuable exercise to familiarise yourself with the range of tools available, particularly
those available at no cost in browsers and operating systems. This activity helps to
highlight some features that you may not have been aware of.
It is important to be aware of the kinds of assistive technologies learners may have

available to help them to access online education. However, this is only one part of the
story. In order to minimise barriers to disabled learners, you must also deliver learning
materials that are accessible. Often, assistive technologies will only function optimally if
learning materials have been designed with accessibility in mind. This is what we will
consider in the next section.

of 164
2 Making your online materials accessible
Figure 3 It is important that course material is accessible to all learners

There are many types of disability, and many ways in which people with disabilities
interact with learning materials. Therefore, generalising about all the considerations that
need to be made for learners with particular impairments or conditions is tricky. However,
there are common aspects of achieving accessibility in learning materials. You should
ensure that:
● materials are clear, consistently organised and explanatory

● information contained in visual elements (e.g. images, video, and text) can be
accessed without needing vision
● information contained in auditory elements (e.g. video or sound clips) can be
accessed without needing hearing
● display elements can be modified to suit the users needs (e.g. magnification, colour
contrast)
● tasks can be performed without needing rapid text input skills, manual dexterity, or
visual acuity.
Meeting these requirements does not mean that you have to avoid using elements that
some people cannot access (such as video, for example), but rather that you should
ensure that the information that you are conveying can be accessed by everyone, albeit in
different ways or through different media.
2.1 Ensuring clarity of navigation and appearance

of 164
Colour
Do not use colour alone to convey meaning. For example, if a completed task in your
course has a green dot beside it, and uncompleted tasks have red dots, that is going to be
problematic for a colour-blind learner. Changing this to a green tick and a red cross may
resolve this issue.
Headings and structure

Structure headings using style features built into the tools you use. These exist in
Learning Management Systems, Word, PowerPoint, and other common tools for creating
content. Using heading styles when creating text documents enables screen reader users
and dyslexic learners to navigate the document more easily (for further guidance see the
following ‘Applying headings’ clip).
Presentation slides
Using the built-in slide designs in PowerPoint ensures that all text content is accessible to
screen readers. Text that is displayed in the ‘Outline View’ of the presentation is normally
accessible to screen readers, but text added via additional text boxes is generally not
accessible. Hence it is good practice to copy all text from each slide into the Notes field
(which can be accessed by screen readers) and to add into the Notes field descriptions of
any visual elements of the slide as well. PowerPoint slides read by a screen reader are
read in the order the content was added to a slide, which sometimes is not the proper
reading order. The reading order can be changed in PowerPoint to fix this issue.
Text alignment
Where possible, ensure text is left-aligned (meaning the right edge is uneven) rather than
justified (where both left and right edges are uniform). If text is left-aligned, the letter and
word spacing is optimal for readability. However, if text is justified, uneven spacing
between letters and words can significantly reduce readability, especially for some people
with dyslexia, who can find they ‘slip’ up and down in the ‘rivers of white space’ that
appear in justified text.
PDFs
Avoid using PDFs in which the text is saved as an image – this cannot be read by screen
reading software. You can test whether the text is saved as an image by trying to select a
few words with the cursor – if words are not individually selectable, then the text is
probably an image. Screen reading software therefore cannot detect any words, and
therefore will not read the PDF contents. Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software
can be used to attempt to extract text from an image, but the process is rarely completely
accurate and so you need to examine the output of the OCR software and correct any
errors. PDFs generated from accessibly structured Word or PowerPoint documents (see
‘Headings and structure’ and ‘Presentation slides’ above) are usually also fairly

of 164
accessible (Devine et al., 2011). The University of Washington has produced some useful
guidance on creating accessible PDFs from Word documents.
Figure 4 Clarity of navigation enhances user experience
Layout and organisation

Use clear, consistent layouts and organisation schemes for presenting content. Initially
post regular announcements on how to get started, and orient students to the course.
Direct students to key areas – contents/overview sections, schedules/timetables,
assessment guidance. Organise your course in a linear fashion so a student knows that if
they navigate from the first page in the course content to the last, they will have covered
all of the required course materials, assignments and assessments.
In text documents (Word, PDF, etc.) content needs to be laid out in a very linear fashion to
be accessible, so don't use textboxes (in MS Word, Insert > Textbox) or tables to lay out a
document. Tables should only be used for tabular data.
Tables
If tables do not have an approximately equal number of rows and columns, they should be
oriented ‘tall and thin’ and not ‘short and wide’. This is because screen readers read a
table linearly, row by row.
If your table has more than two columns and more than ten rows, it’s good practice to
repeat the column headers every 10–12 rows, just to remind the screen reader user what
they are listening to.
To see a few more examples and guidelines, have a look at this page produced by
WebAIM, which gives some more information about ‘accessible table design’ for web
pages.

of 164
Web links
Use descriptive wording for link text to make each link distinct and the destination clear.
So avoid the meaningless ‘Click here’, or having several links called ‘Read more’. This is
because many screen reader tools offer the user an option to quickly scan all of the links
on a page, so that the user can rapidly navigate through to the page they seek – however,
this functionality becomes useless if all the links have generic names or if there are
several with the same name.
2.2 Making visual elements accessible

Provide concise alternative text descriptions of content presented within images. This
should focus upon the purpose of the image in relation to the teaching points, rather than
a description of every visual feature. The alternative text could therefore be different for
the same image used in two different ways. For example, Figure 5 below shows the
locations of principal cities and rivers of France. It might carry two quite different
alternative text descriptions depending on the purpose of its usage:
Figure 5 Consideration of the teaching point is important when writing alternative text
descriptions

of 164
● (in a lesson on rivers) A map of France, showing that the catchments of four large
rivers (the Seine, Loire, Garonne and Rhône) drain more than three quarters of
France’s mainland. The Seine drains largely north-westward into the English
Channel, the Rhône southward into the Mediterranean, and the Loire and Garonne
largely westward into the Atlantic Ocean. The Garonne’s headwaters are to be found
in the foothills of the Pyrenées, the Rhône has its source in the Alps, the Loire
originates in the Massif Centrale and the Seine rises in the Langres plateau in the
north-east of the country.
● (in a lesson on settlements) A map of France, showing that five of France’s twenty
largest cities by population are seaports. Le Havre, Brest, Marseille, Toulon and Nice
are all seaport cities, while Paris and Bordeaux are principal inland ports. All the rest
of the twenty largest cities are situated on or near rivers, but are not considered
major port cities.
Note that the first description makes no mention of the cities shown, whilst the second
makes no mention of specific rivers. When creating alternative text it is important to focus
only on the information the learners need to know about the image, and to not clutter your
description with unnecessary information. By doing this, the alternative text also becomes
a valuable learning aid for all learners, as you are distilling for them the key elements of
the image.
It is not always necessary to add alt text for an image – if the image is purely decorative
and serves no educational purpose, you do not need to add alt text. However, if you are
creating a web page you must still give it a ‘null alt tag’ (alt=””) to ensure screen readers
know they should skip it, otherwise they will say ‘image’ and the learner will be left
wondering what it was.
It is also necessary to make the content of video or animations accessible for those who
cannot see it. Usually this is done by the provision of a transcript. Depending on the
nature of the video content, it may be appropriate for the transcript to simply replicate any
spoken words in the video (dialogue, commentary and so on). However, sometimes it will
also be necessary to add descriptive detail of a similar nature to the alternative text for
images. This is especially vital when the spoken element does not cover key visual
information (for example if someone is demonstrating a technique and does not describe
every step they make because they believe the audience can see what they are doing).
Ensure that the playback of visual elements can be controlled by the user – you can
imagine how difficult it is to listen to your screen reader interpreting what is on a web page
at the same time as a video begins automatically playing and you cannot stop it.
Activity 2 Describing images for those who cannot see them

Please note that, because of the intended learning outcome, this activity itself is
inaccessible to screen reader users. However, we expect that they are already familiar
with the concept of alt text which is explored here.

of 164
Figure 6 Describing images
The image shows a section of a typical city centre street in Kandy, Sri Lanka. The
vehicles with the black soft roofs are known as ‘tuk-tuks’. Draft some alternative
text that might be suitable for the following uses of the image:
ii. In a discussion of the modes of transport commonly used in Kandy.
iii. In a discussion of the kinds of businesses one may find together on a typical
Kandy street.
iv. In a discussion of the state of repair of buildings on a typical Kandy street.
Comment
Your alternative text should contain similar elements to these:
i. This is a photograph of a typical city centre street in Kandy. Vehicles are parked
outside a variety of shops along the street. Visible are two motorcycles, one small
car, one multi-passenger vehicle and four brightly coloured tuk-tuks. This may be
an indication that small vehicles that can weave in and out of traffic are popular in
Kandy.
ii. This is a photograph of a typical city centre street in Kandy. Buildings are packed
together with no spaces in between, each only one room wide. A shop selling
glass for pictures, doors and windows sits next to a shop selling leather and floor
coverings. Beside this is a shop with a brightly-coloured array of children’s toys
and balls hanging above the window and doorway. Next to this is a retailer of
window blinds, with the neighbouring shop specialising in motorcycle parts.
Finally, at the edge of the photograph is a jewellery shop.
iii. This is a photograph of a typical city centre street in Kandy. Buildings are packed
together with no spaces in between, each only one room wide, and two or three

of 164
storeys high. Whilst the street-level shop fronts are mostly in a good state of
repair, the upper levels of many of the buildings are shabbier and in need of
repair. Rainwater goods are commonly dilapidated, and missing in places, and
the tiled roofs that are visible are uneven and have been patched with corrugated
fibreboard. Where window frames and shutters are wooden, these are starting to
warp and fit poorly. The building on the right edge of the picture appears to be
covered with scaffolding and blue netting.
It is evident that the alternative text can be written in many different ways, so as to
deliver to the learner only the details relevant to the context of its use. Describing all of
the possible details to all of the learners could waste their time and create for them a
difficult task of trying to separate the relevant details from the irrelevant ones.
2.3 Making auditory elements accessible

There are two common ways to make audio elements accessible to those who cannot or
who do not wish to listen to them. With videos, the most common technique is to add
subtitles or closed captions.
In some cases it may be more appropriate to provide a separate text transcript. This can
work very well for audio, or for some videos such as interviews where the visual element
isn’t essential to understanding the content. If the video content is more complex,
remember that it may be difficult to read a transcript and watch a video at the same time.
In either a transcript or subtitles, it can be important to describe any meaningful sounds,
not only the spoken words.
Be aware that if you use an automatic captioning tool, such as the one provided by
YouTube, you must check and edit the captions it has provided to ensure accuracy. The
output created by these tools is often inaccurate but can be improved manually.
2.4 Making display elements adjustable

Learners may view your content through a range of different devices, screens and
browsers. However, there are some common features that you can control that help to
make sure the materials display in a form that is accessible to a wide audience. The first is
to use as default an accessible combination of settings. So it is good practice to use a font
type that has good readability (sans serif fonts are often recommended for printed
materials, but online some serif fonts can be suitable if they are not cursive or uneven)
and a font size of at least 12 point in text documents (and 20 point on presentation slides).
Colour combinations should give good contrast (there is a free colour contrast checker
which helps you assess the contrast of colour combinations – you should aim for a
minimum ratio of 4.5 to 1 throughout – and for large amounts of text you should aim for a
contrast ratio of 7 to 1).
Avoid using flashing or moving elements unless there is a means for users to stop the
movement. Also, avoid putting text over background images – this decreases readability
dramatically.

of 164
Figure 7 The Firefox, Chrome, Internet Explorer and Safari logos

The second element of ensuring the accessibility of the display of your materials is to put
control into the hands of the learner. If you provide documents created accessibly, the
learner will be able to apply their own preference of font, colour and so on. If you are
presenting materials to be viewed in a web browser, provide links to guidance on how to
use your browser to meet some of your accessibility needs and preferences (such as
these resources for Firefox, Chrome, and Safari). If you are using another kind of platform
to deliver your online teaching (web conferencing, LMS, etc.), try to find out what
accessibility features it has, and give guidance to your learners on how to find and use
them.

of 164
2.5 Ensuring tasks can be completed without

needing manual dexterity or visual acuity
Figure 8 Using key functions instead of a mouse can be easier for some learners
Many people use assistive technology that replicates the functions of a keyboard rather
than a mouse. Others cannot use a mouse accurately. Therefore, you should make sure
that all content and navigation is accessible using the keyboard alone. This means that if
you wish to use elements that require manual dexterity (such as drag-and-drop exercises
or crossword puzzles) or visual acuity (such as wordsearch games or ‘spot the difference’
images), then it should be possible to complete these using the keyboard alone, and the
mouse alone (perhaps in combination with the on-screen keyboard built into most
operating systems), or you should provide alternative activities for those who may not be
able to undertake the original tasks. To test this, move your mouse out of reach, and try
performing the activity using the Tab, Space, Arrow and Enter keys. If it can be achieved,
add instructions for your learners advising how to do it. If it cannot be achieved, think
about how to provide an alternative activity. Similarly, trial your resource using the mouse
alone.

of 164
3 Checking the accessibility of materials
3 Checking the accessibility of materials

When you are creating the learning materials that you will use online, it is a relatively
simple process to ensure they are as accessible as possible (see Section 2 of this week’s
materials). However, you also need to be able to assess, and if necessary adjust, the
accessibility of other people’s materials that you want to reuse in your own teaching.
Whilst there are automated tools available that give some indication of a resource’s
accessibility (such as MS Office’s Accessibility Checker feature,
PowerPoint’s Accessibility Checker feature) or web page accessibility checking tools
(such as AChecker or WAVE), you must always apply your own judgement and common
sense to the outputs of these tools, and use them as just a part of a more holistic
assessment of the resources.
There are surprisingly few guidelines available covering how to evaluate OERs for
accessibility, but you might find it useful to take a look at this document
‘Rubrics for Evaluating Open Education Resource Objects’ (Achieve, 2011) which
contains a variety of guidance, with Rubric VIII (pages 10 and 11 of the document) giving
some useful suggestions as to what to look out for. However, this document is very USA-
centric, with references to legislation and organisations that may not be applicable if you
are based elsewhere in the world.
OpenWashington (2017) suggest six key accessibility questions to ask when considering
reusing learning materials:
● Is all written content presented as text, so students using assistive technologies can
read it?
● If the materials include images, is the important information from the images
adequately communicated with accompanying alt text?
● If the materials include audio or video content, is it captioned or transcribed?
● If the materials have a clear visual structure including headings, sub-headings, lists,
and tables, is this structure properly coded so it’s accessible to blind students using
screen readers?
● If the materials include buttons, controls, drag-and-drop, or other interactive features
that are operable with a mouse, can they also be operated with keyboard alone for
students who are physically unable to use a mouse?
● Do the materials avoid communicating information using colour alone (e.g. the red
line means X, the green line means Y)?
It is usually fairly straightforward to adjust features like font size or colour combinations in
OERs, and to add or amend alternative text for images. If you wish to use a video that
does not have captions (or is not in your language), you have several options:
● For YouTube videos, contribute captions of your own: look on this YouTube Help
page for advice (remember the advice in Section 2.3 regarding the quality of
automated captions).
● For TED talks, contact the community of voluntary caption providers.
● Use a free software tool (such as Amara or Dotsub) to create your own captions.

of 164
4 Alternative formats
As you have already seen in this week, some students might have difficulties with any
type of media used in online learning materials. If content can be provided in a variety of
alternative formats, students will not have to do their own work to transform this into
something suitable for themselves before they can engage with their learning.
For printed materials or inaccessible text formats, some work may be needed to create an
alternative resource. This might be, for example, if the text is actually an image such as a
photograph or scan – to check this, try ‘highlighting’ or ‘selecting’ the text. If it is not
possible, the text is probably an image. It may be possible to use Optical Character
Recognition (OCR) software to automatically turn text in an image into a more usable
format. Always check the results of any OCR conversion for accuracy. In some cases
where the text is not clear (such as with handwriting), it can be more efficient to type in the
text rather than use OCR. Headings and other useful styles may also need to be added
manually.
If there are images or diagrams in the original resource, someone with some
understanding of the subject can determine which of these need describing and can
provide the descriptions. In the case of complex images, it may be necessary to produce a
tactile diagram for blind students. Tactile diagrams require technical skills and some
specialist knowledge. See the video ‘How to make a tactile diagram’ (Art Beyond
Sight, 2009), which provides an overview of the requirements and production of this
alternative format.
Figure 9 Reading mathematical symbols can be problematic for a screen reader

In some subjects, such as mathematics, music and chemistry, there are substantial
difficulties in providing an accessible format that includes the symbolic notation. Most of
the guidelines for accessibility skip over this, or assume that the amount of notation is

of 164
small and can be dealt with by supplying descriptions. In fact, communicating these kinds
of complex notations to people without vision is a highly specialised area and beyond the
scope of this course.
Figure 10 EPUB documents can aid accessibility in a number of ways

Some online materials are offered in e-book formats such as EPUB and MOBI (for
Kindle). These formats are not aimed specifically at disabled learners, but have included
accessibility considerations where appropriate, so may be beneficial to some disabled
students who choose to use e-book readers.
Human voice recordings of text are often preferred by learners to the kind of computer-
generated speech produced by screen reader software. Computer-generated voices may
also have difficulty in reading out complex notations correctly. This includes subjects such
as mathematics, music and chemistry, as well as those with a high number of technical
terms. Recordings may be delivered in a variety of formats but MP3 is likely to be the most
satisfactory to obtain a balance of sound quality with a manageable file size. If you do not
have time to make the recordings yourself, or if you do not wish to do so, there are tools
available that will convert a text document into a computerised spoken-word audio file.
The free web resource Robobraille will permit you to upload a text document and have it
converted into a computerised voice recording, or an e-book.
For audio, a transcript is the standard alternative format, and these can be beneficial to all
learners, not only those who are deaf or hard of hearing. It is, however, very difficult to
follow a visual medium like video and attend to a transcript at the same time. It is not the
same task for a deaf person as it is for a hearing person who can at least listen and read
at the same time. Students often need to make notes while watching a video, which

of 164
increases the difficulty. So be aware that this alternative may not provide equity of
experience for the learners.
Activity 3 Accessibility in your online teaching

You have already made notes in previous activities on what you want to achieve in
online teaching, and what the role of OERs might be in achieving these objectives.
Now consider accessibility – what will you need to do with your existing materials or
reused OERs, in order to deliver optimally accessible teaching online?
Make a list of six initial steps you could take fairly easily (for example ‘review my
PowerPoints for added text boxes and explanation of images’, or ‘check colour
contrast in reused OERs’).
Again, keep your answers in a safe place, as you will revisit them.
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
Comment
This activity is designed to help you to think about the needs of your audience, and
how your learning objects or online teaching materials might work for them.
Accessibility should not be viewed as an additional burden for the teacher, but as an
element of quality control, ensuring your online teaching is fit for purpose, by not
excluding learners with particular impairments.

of 164


of 164
Summary
Summary
This week you have learned about assistive technologies and how users with impairments
interact with online teaching materials. You have learned how to make your online
materials more accessible, how to produce alternative versions where necessary, and
how to consider accessibility requirements when searching for Open Educational
Resources. Next you will look at the factors affecting the way you might make a change in
your teaching, and you will start planning to move an element of your teaching online.
Rita certainly has something to say about this week’s materials – let’s see how she’s
getting on:

of 164
Summary

of 164
Week 7: Making a change in your teaching
Introduction
Week 7: Making a change in

your teaching
Introduction
Figure 1 Planning and understanding changes connected with online learning

We hope that this course might make you think of ideas for changes in your work
practices. Or perhaps you are taking this course because you are already experiencing
change! This week focuses on some concepts that can help you to plan or understand
changes connected with online learning. You need to consider the needs of your learners
with respect to their approach to technology, and how the technology and pedagogy
interrelate. Understanding debates around how people use digital technology and the
effects it has on them should help you to think about how you can effectively combine
technology and pedagogy. We then focus on designing new or revised learning activities,
and identify some tips to use when trying to make a change.
Teacher reflections
This week we hear from Sarah S. about how she made a change in her teaching:

of 164
1 Changing the technology or the pedagogy?
● explain the concept of technological determinism

● use the Visitors and Residents model to assess your students’ approach to
technology in learning
● make changes to teaching with technologies in a systematic and informed way.
1 Changing the technology or the

pedagogy?
Figure 2 How does the use of technology shape your teaching?

How much difference does any technology make to how people teach or learn? There is
often a tension between the significance of technology and pedagogy in online teaching.
For some, the technology is merely a conduit and their focus is on pedagogy. Others
prefer to utilise the possibilities that technology offers us and wait for theory to catch up. It

of 164
is probably more useful to think of the two as being involved in an iterative dialogue.
Technology opens up new possibilities and is used in ways that its designers never
intended, which in turn drives theoretic development, which feeds back into technology
development, and so on.
This view of technology, and particularly how it relates to education, is addressed by
Weller (2011) in Chapter 1 of The Digital Scholar.
This tension between the role of technology and pedagogy is particularly acute in online
education. Many of the topics we have looked at in this course would simply not have
been possible without internet technology. However we also have to consider the roles of
learners and educators, and what they bring to each online education context.
1.1 Visitors and Residents

The different ways in which people interact with, and perceive, digital technology are the
subject of ongoing research and debate. For example, Prensky (2001) coined a distinction
between ‘digital natives’ and ‘digital immigrants’. He argued that younger generations are
immersed in technology when entering education and they have a different understanding
and relationship with technology than the ‘digital immigrants’ who have to learn it. This
idea was appealing and gained much coverage. However, its claims did not withstand
scrutiny, for example Bennett et al. (2008) found as much difference within the technology
use of the younger generations that were deemed to be ‘digital natives’ as there was
between them and the older generations of ‘digital immigrants’. Importantly, the
technology skills of the digital natives were often limited. So it looks like we shouldn’t
assume that someone is confident or proficient in using technology based on their age.
David White has rephrased this idea as ‘Digital Residents’ and ‘Digital Visitors’. This
describes a range of online behaviours, and the same person can operate in Resident or
Visitor mode for different tasks. White and Le Cornu (2011) define them as:
‘Visitors understand the web as akin to an untidy garden tool shed. They have
defined a goal or task and go into the shed to select an appropriate tool which
they use to attain their goal. Task over, the tool is returned to the shed.
Residents, on the other hand, see the web as a place, perhaps like a park or a
building, in which there are clusters of friends and colleagues whom they can
approach and with whom they can share information about their life and work. A
proportion of their lives is actually lived out online.’
When making changes to your practice in terms of online teaching, be aware of how much
the technology is shaping your advances, and try to analyse whether you are acting as a
Resident or a Visitor, or whether you expect learners to be one or the other.
You should also reflect on any assumptions you make about who will be capable of
engaging with online learning, and the importance of assessing and, where necessary,
developing the skills of learners and teaching to properly engage with online learning.
Activity 1 Thinking about your learners as ‘Visitors and Residents’

David White explains the Visitors and Residents model in this video entitled
Visitors and Residents.

of 164
As you watch the video make notes on which elements you feel might apply to your
learners – for which activities do you think they would identify as Residents and for
which Visitors? Do you have a mix in your class – and if so in what approximate
proportions?
Comment
This activity is designed to help you to think about the technological skills (and needs)
of your learners. The models described might help you to categorise the learners with
respect to different tasks or technologies, and this in turn should help you identify how
to meet their needs with your online teaching. For example, you may find that some of
your learners are always present, and could be very comfortable with merging online
learning activities into social media practices that are a part of their everyday life.
Others may go online to do a specific task that is set for them, but will not think that
they need to always be connected. You need to examine your expectations of their
behaviours and be flexible to their approaches.
The video places importance on not oversimplifying assumptions about the need to
teach digital skills for any audience. Instead, it is important to recognise that all
learners and teachers may need to develop their skills in order to fully engage with
online learning.

of 164
2 Learning design
2 Learning design
You will have seen throughout this course that the ways in which we can design an
experience for learners online differ somewhat from other forms of teaching. But can we
think about this more systematically? Mor and Craft (2012) define learning design as ‘the
act of devising new practices, plans of activity, resources and tools aimed at achieving
particular educational aims in a given situation’ (pg. 86).
Figure 3 How we design our teaching influences how we learn

Learning design is an inherent part of any educator’s practice (i.e. preparing for teaching/
training sessions or creating learning materials, activities and assessments). Indeed, it is
so core to what educators do, that it’s often taken for granted; it’s assumed that it ‘just
happens’. In other words, ‘design’ is so embedded in a practitioner’s practice that it tends
to be implicit – not formally articulated or externalised for others, apart from at a relatively
superficial level in the module syllabus or lesson plan.
In recent years, there has been a growing interest in trying to better understand educators’
design processes and to make them more explicit. There are a number of reasons for this,
but three are particularly worth noting.
1. In order to ensure the quality and robustness of educational innovations, they need
to be reviewed from various perspectives – technological, pedagogical, and others.
The sooner the innovations are reviewed, the easier it is to make any necessary
adjustments. By sharing and discussing innovations at the design phase, we can
avoid costly mistakes at later stages of production.
2. By making the design process explicit, it can be easily shared with others, which
means good practice can be transferred.
3. The variety and complexity of resources and technologies that are currently available
means that teachers and trainers need clearer guidance to help them find relevant

of 164
2 Learning design
tools and resources, as well as support in incorporating these into the learning
activities they are creating.
However, it should be noted that the term ‘learning design’ is not without controversy and
overlaps to some extent with other terms, such as ‘instructional design’, ‘curriculum
design’ and ‘module design’. Mor and Craft's definition represents one possible
interpretation, and indeed their paper discusses alternative definitions proposed by
others.
Activity 2 Employing a Learning Design approach

1. Visit The Open University’s Learning Design resources site.

2. Read the home page, and then browse the Downloads list to see if there are any
resources there that may be of interest to you.
3. Make some notes about which tools you could apply, and how you think you might
do this to create or redesign some teaching for online learning. For example, you
could plan a workshop activity with others, or use the resources as a guide to your
own design work.
Comment
Many ‘good ideas’ or ‘best practice’ resources are available online for teachers to use.
This activity helps you to start thinking about the kinds of resources you might look for,
and how they could be altered to fit your teaching needs.

of 164
3 Making the change
3 Making the change

This week you have looked at a way to view your learners (the Residents and Visitors
model) and the role of technology and learning design in your plans to move your teaching
online. The final section of this week’s materials will focus on tips for making changes in
your teaching practice.
In their ‘Beyond Prototypes’ report, Scanlon et al. (2013) offer four ‘recommendations for
researchers’ which might be relevant to you when designing your move into online
teaching:
● Research teams should identify, at an early stage, the steps required to enable
scalable and sustainable implementation beyond prototypes, so as to enhance
learning.
● Researchers need to engage fully with the individuals and communities that will play
a role in the implementation process.
● Research teams should consider adopting Design-Based Research (DBR) as a
systematic but flexible methodology for research-led innovation, based on
collaboration among researchers and practitioners in real-world settings.
● The interim and final results from design-based studies should be systematically
shared with other researchers so that the process of innovation can be compared,
expanded, and continued over time. They should also be widely disseminated to
policy makers and practitioners, through events such as ‘what research says’
meetings.
DBR, mentioned in the above recommendations, is a methodology that may be of

particular interest when designing changes into education practice. Some of the core
characteristics of design-based research in education are that it implements iterative
changes in real-life practice, testing out new pedagogical theories or frameworks for
conceptualising learning.
If you would like to learn more about DBR, this video ‘Design-Based Research’gives a
short introduction.
3.1 Hints and tips

From our experiences as practitioners and researchers in educational technology, we
think the following guidance could also be useful when embarking on or managing
change:
● Start small and start now.

The reason for this is that over time you may start to overthink your planned
change, the objectives may become lost in potential issues or you may start to
vacillate between various potential changes as to which one to focus on first.
Pick something small that you can pilot and see the results from, plan it, and
do it!
● Plan.
Set out all of the details. What new online teaching technique will you try? With
which group of learners? Covering which topic? By which date must you be

of 164
3 Making the change
ready? What will be your fallback plan to ensure the learning objectives are met
if your trial fails to deliver? How will you evaluate the successes and failures of
your attempt? (See next week’s materials for further coverage of evaluation). As
time goes by and you gain confidence in trying new teaching ideas online, you
can be more flexible and formulate less rigid plans, but at the start of your
journey, planning will make you feel more secure in your actions.
● Get permission.
If you work for an education provider, you may need to get approval for your
proposed change. Take time to prepare, give the approver all the information
they may need, explain the benefits as well as the risks, and show that you have
thought long and hard about the change and its potential benefits for you and
your learners. If permission is not granted, demand feedback, and adjust your
proposal before seeking approval again.
● Don’t be a perfectionist.
With any changes to your teaching, adjustments will need to be made. Observe
what works and what doesn’t work, modify, and try again.
● Reflect honestly.
Reflect on what you've learned, reflect after further reading, reflect after
discussing it with students or colleagues, then reflect after giving it a try. This will
be covered further in next week’s materials.
● Collaborate.
Share your initial attempt, and your reflections upon it, with colleagues or
networks. They may spot additional adjustments that you can make, and will be
better placed to identify objectively the positives in a change that you feel did not
go well.
● Listen to your learners.
Ask the learners for their impressions of what you tried. Often they will see the
positives of ‘trying something different’ even if it didn’t go as you'd hoped.
● Learn from failures.
Some changes work, some don’t. Sometimes the technology fails, sometimes
the pedagogy is not a good fit, sometimes external factors have an influence.
But just because something goes wrong, don’t lose your enthusiasm and
curiosity in online teaching. Instead, think about what you have learnt and how
that will make your next steps better.
● Celebrate success.
It may be a small change, but if it works, allow yourself to enjoy the success.
Share your story with colleagues and your networks. Build upon your success to
try something else or to repeat the first change in a different context.
If you are still struggling to pin down exactly what actions to take to begin your online
teaching journey, this blog post by Mooney et al. (2012) might offer some useful
suggestions, as might this article by Sharrar and Bigatel (2014).

of 164
4 Analysing your practice and scope for change
4 Analysing your practice and scope for

change
It is now time to focus on your own practice.
Activity 3 Analysing change in teaching practices

1. Think about the teaching practices that you are familiar with (i.e. not just your own
practice) in your organisation over the last five to ten years.
2. Make some notes in response to the following questions:
c. How do you think teaching practice has changed?
d. How significant have the changes been?
e. Which technological developments do you consider to have been the most
important? Why?
f. Which aspects of practice haven't been impacted strongly by technology?
Why might this be?
7. Now think about your own practice, relative to the general teaching practices you
thought about in questions 1 and 2 above. How has your practice changed?
Which technological developments have been the most important?
8. Finally, think about what you want to change in your own teaching practice with
respect to online teaching (refer to your relevant notes from previous weeks).
How will technology play a role in your online teaching in the near future? What
technological developments would you like to happen to support your online
teaching even further?
Comment
As we approach the final week of this course, your plans for taking your teaching
online should be starting to become more detailed. The questions in this activity should
help you to incorporate technologies appropriately into your plans.

of 164


of 164
Summary
Summary
This week you have been introduced to the concept of technological determinism and the
Visitors and Residents model of technology familiarity. You have investigated learning
design, and have started to plan your move into online teaching. In the final week of the
course, you will explore the evaluation of online teaching and how to assess the
effectiveness of changes to your practice.
Let’s check in with Rita and see if she’s ready to move into online teaching now:

of 164
Summary

of 164
Week 8: Evaluating changes and enhancing practice
Introduction
Week 8: Evaluating changes

and enhancing practice
Introduction
Figure 1 Licence to try!

In this final week, we will explore ways to monitor, evaluate and analyse your teaching
online.
Whereas face-to-face teaching often relies on direct observation of students to evaluate
their behaviour, some of the ‘action’ in online teaching is not as readily visible. However,
teaching online offers opportunities to use data and to engage with learners in ways that
are more easily embedded than they could be in a classroom context. For example, online
teaching can harness the teacher’s and learners’ ‘footprints’, which are captured as data
in the online realm. This provides opportunities to make greater use of data about the

of 164
Introduction
learner’s behaviour and performance. Learning management systems can log data such
as attendance in tutorials, quiz responses, views of material, time spent on particular
activities and more. The field known as ‘learning analytics’ has been built around
understanding the potential of working with such data, including its challenges and risks. It
is a complex field that is still developing, but you will start this week with an insight into
how learning analytics can be a valuable tool for you.
Gaining feedback and reflecting on practice is important for both teachers and learners,
and this is another area where teaching online offers its own opportunities. We will
therefore describe some common mechanisms for feedback and look at some strategies
to encourage reflection through activities embedded into the learning.
You should also develop the ability to enhance your practice of online teaching. To help
you with this, we will explore the notion of conducting ‘action research’ as a practitioner.
Teacher reflections
Let’s see what Sarah H. has to say about evaluating her own online teaching:
● understand how learning analytics can be used to evaluate learners’ behaviour

● be able to gather and understand student feedback
● apply some strategies for embedding reflection in your online teaching
● plan an action research project for scholarship that seeks to improve your online
teaching.

of 164
1 Learning analytics
Figure 2 It’s important to analyse and reflect on your teaching practice

There are a number of different methods that we can adopt to evaluate online teaching.
Oliver (2000) provides a detailed overview of some of these methods, including:
● online synchronous focus groups (Cousin and Deepwell, 1998)

● web-based questionnaires (Phelps and Reynolds, 1998; Taylor et al., 2000)
● creation of an online feedback discussion area (Taylor et al., 2000).
Oliver goes on to summarise the general difficulties with the above methods, which can be
grouped into two main themes: the processes are largely ‘uncontrolled’ and feedback can
be unfocused or anonymous; and methods for evaluating this kind of data are still
developing, with different approaches leading to different conclusions.
Learning analytics offers an alternative to these methods of gathering feedback and
reports from learners. These approaches instead make use of the data left by learners
and teachers as they act: their ‘trace data’. These can tell us when learners join courses,
when and how they engage with online activities, view pages, borrow resources from the
library, set or complete activities or assessments, and so on. Any interaction with a web-
based system can be tracked, and this data could be used to better understand what
learners and teachers do. The widespread use of virtual learning environments (VLEs) –
also known as learning management systems (LMSs) – has meant that educational
institutions now deal with increasingly large sets of data. Each day their systems gather
more personal data, systems information and academic records.
Learning analytics is a field of innovative research, but it is increasingly something that
many educators and institutions make use of through new tools, dashboards and reports,
using online data to investigate user activity. It helps to answer questions such as:
● How many people visit the website / online learning materials?

● When do they visit / interact?

of 164
● Which links are popular?

● How many people complete the activities?
Answering the questions posed above could involve analysing large data sets from VLEs
and other technologies used for learning. Learning analytics can go one step further by
providing actionable insights – they take trace data from educational settings and
suggest, prompt or initiate actions to improve learning and teaching. You may have heard
the term ‘big data’ used in discussions of technology. It is used in a lot of different ways,
but essentially means that the dataset is very large and also very complex. Because of
this, it may not be possible to use a simple, traditional approach to data processing and
analysis. Learning analytics of the behaviours of large numbers of students can easily fall
into the category of big data. But equally, you might look at the behaviour of one class of
students over a course and find that useful insights can be gained without advanced
techniques and tools.
For example, in an online forum discussion associated with a particular online module or
course, a VLE could capture a range of forum data, including:
● who accessed the forum

● when they did this
● how long they stayed
● what operating system they were using
● how many words they added.
Any of these data could be used to create analytics. However, only some of these
analytics would be useful to teachers. It is not possible to identify which analytics will be
most useful without knowing something about how the forum is being used. The presence
of a learning design should identify the purpose of the forum in relation to learning
outcomes. This makes it easier to decide which analytics to use.
Activity 1 What can we learn from learning analytics?

Professor Bart Rienties of the Institute of Educational Technology at The Open

University has played a leading role in research and practice around learning
analytics. Here he is giving his inaugural lecture on the subject in January 2018. His
talk introduces some of the findings from learning analytics research at the OU, and
some of the ways in which this provides insights for our teaching.
Watch the video, and as you do so, make notes about what kinds of learning analytics
you would like access to regarding your own teaching. When moving your teaching
online, are there any of these kinds of learning analytics that you could begin to
collect? How might you do this?
Comment
For some teachers, working in an organisation may provide them with access to
certain data from learning analytics. Conversely, this kind of data may not be routinely
collected, or not routinely shared with teachers. This activity should help you to think
about what you currently have available, and what you could gather when teaching

of 164
online. The video shows some of what is possible, but also that there is a lot more
potential to use learning analytics than is currently mainstream practice, particularly if
we improve our abilities for data collection and analysis.
If you are interested in finding our more about learning analytics, you may like to read
Ferguson (2012) and Long and Siemens (2011) as well as Jisc’s Code of Practice for
Learning Analytics (Sclater and Bailey, 2015).

of 164
2 Feedback and reflection
Figure 3 Listening to the feedback from your learners is an important part of the teaching
process
Student feedback is often collected in both online and face-to-face education settings. In
online learning, you may embed a feedback survey into the learning management system.
You may also want to use forums or email to provide a different means for feedback to be
received, or to direct students to fill in your survey.
2.1 Eliciting feedback

This feedback can be valuable and insightful, however, be aware that a small proportion
of it may be unhelpful or even abusive. Tucker (2014) studied the proportion of abusive or
unprofessional feedback in a single Australian university and concluded that just 0.04% of
the sample comments could be classified as abusive or unprofessional. Most feedback
should at least be informative. Hopefully, some can be turned into actions. It may be worth
explaining at the start of the survey that the most valuable feedback is direct, honest and
specific, critiquing only actions or materials and not personal traits.
2.2 Understanding feedback

Research has explored the data received as feedback from students in various ways. The
findings have not always been consistent, but they do provide some useful considerations
for practice.

of 164
Johnson (2003), in a summary of several studies, concluded that teachers who mark
more leniently are routinely rated higher in student evaluations, and that students who
receive higher grades also give more favourable feedback. Centra (2003) found that more
rigorous courses received lower ratings than ‘easier’ courses. Given these factors, Parker
(2013) goes on to consider three means of assessing teaching effectiveness and course
quality which are less likely to fall victim to these biases:
● evidence-based teacher self-reviews.

● peer observations.
● external reviews.
If you watched the video of Professor Bart Rienties discussing learning analytics in the
previous section, you might recall that research using data from The Open University
does not show a correlation between attainment and satisfaction. This satisfaction data is
collected through a survey delivered to students near the end of the course, but prior to
the student finding out their final grade. It may be that this earlier timing of the survey
removes a direct impact of grades on satisfaction. So perhaps we need to think carefully
about when and how we ask for feedback.
Students perceive online courses differently from traditional courses. In comparisons of
online and face-to-face MBA courses, Cao and Sakchutchawan (2011) found that whilst
there was no difference in success rates between students of online courses and students
of face-to-face courses, the online MBA students reported lower satisfaction with their
courses. Song et al. (2004) examined feedback from online graduate students and
concluded that course design and time management were crucial components to
successful online learning, while lack of community and technical problems were most
challenging for online learners.
The design of online courses, and the ways in which instructors act, impact on the
perceptions of students towards them. Kauffman (2015) gathers together a range of
studies examining the success of online learning in various contexts and concludes that
‘courses should be structured around reading materials, lectures and assignments
organised into units with clear learning goals in mind’. In other words, course instructors
need to ensure that there is alignment of objectives with instructional methods, learning
activities and assessment methods (Blumberg, 2009). Instructors should provide timely
feedback and serve as facilitators of discussion and interaction just as they do in
traditional courses. Courses should provide opportunities for peer collaboration and
sharing of ideas in order to develop an online community of learners, rather than feelings
of isolation (Song et al., 2004). Otter et al. (2013) used questionnaires to determine
differences in perception between online and face-to-face courses, among students and
staff. Findings showed that students perceive online courses to be more self-directed than
staff do, and that students online must be more willing to teach themselves. Students in
online courses felt more disconnected from staff and fellow students than staff perceived
they would feel. Students also have a lower perception of the role of the teacher in online
courses than staff do.
Activity 2 Effective use of questionnaires

Create up to five questions that you think would provide useful feedback for you from
your students. While doing this, think about the following:

of 164
● How would you make sure the questionnaire is not leading students to respond in
a particular way?
● Does your institution have a standard feedback questionnaire that is given to
students? If so, are there questions that you can take from this? Is it appropriate
to online teaching?
● What type of responses would you like? (For example, closed questions on a
scale, or open comments, or a mixture of both?)
● How would you analyse the results?
Comment
This activity helps you to think about one specific set of data that you would like to
obtain, and how you might go about it. The questions asked need to be considered
very carefully in order to ensure that the data generated is useful to you.
Figure 4 Reflecting on your teaching practice is important
2.3 Reflection
It is important to reflect on your own practice as a teacher in order to develop. This means
continually considering and questioning how you teach. Schön (1987) argues that it is
useful to think about this in two ways:
Reflection-in-action – thinking and responding quickly to events as you teach. In online
learning this might mean, for example, checking with students if you notice that they are
not responding in an online tutorial session. In order to be able to reflect-in-action, you
need to maintain awareness of the situation. This might require you to regularly check on
student behaviours, like whether they are contributing on forums or in tutorials.
Reflection-on-action – considering what happened afterwards in a deeper fashion. For
online learning, reviewing student feedback and analytics can be a good prompt for
reflection-on-action.
In addition, it can be valuable to consider how to include activities in your online learning
that ask students to reflect on their learning. A review by Means et al. (2009) identified that
‘the available research evidence suggests that promoting self-reflection, self-regulation,
and self-monitoring leads to more positive online learning outcomes’ (pg. 45). An example
of this would be a short questionnaire that learners can take to represent their own view of
their understanding of the subject, and how well they think they are learning. If you make it

of 164
clear to the learners that you will check their responses, this can also provide you with
some data, as well as being a useful part of the learning experience for them.

of 164
3 Action research
3 Action research
Figure 5 There are many advantages to ‘action research’

Action research (sometimes known interchangeably as practitioner research) can be a
great process to help you make informed choices about pedagogy and technology in
online learning. This type of research is focused on solving particular problems and
enhancing your practice. It is focused on doing research that is relevant to you as a
teacher. It might seem daunting to undertake a research project but action research is an
easy approach to get you started, particularly because it helps you to focus on
understanding and changing your practice. If you already do other forms of research, you
might find that this requires some adjustment to how you think.
Some key concepts of this type of research are:
● Teacher-initiated – it really is about using a research process to enhance and

develop teaching in your context.
● Empowering – it supports you to be responsible for your practice and potentially to
inform policies or principles used more widely in your institution.
● Small-scale – it is manageable and something you can fit into your schedule.

of 164
3 Action research
Activity 3 Making use of practitioner research

Read this article at EdFutures (2012) to understand more about practitioner research.
As you read, think about the following questions. Afterwards, write a short response for
each one:
● Can you think of a key issue or question that you would like to research around
the potential for you to use online learning in your work?
● What sort of data collection method do you think you should use and why?
● Is there anyone you want to work with to create a community around your project?
● How would you design the research so that the results would be useful to you and
others in a similar position?
Comment
This activity is designed to help you to combine several of the elements covered in this
course. You should consider learning analytics, action research, networking and
sharing, and how they could all be brought together to enable you to effectively
evaluate your own online teaching practice.

of 164
4 Review, modify, repeat!
4 Review, modify, repeat!

Summarising what you have learned this week, here is a guide to aid your thought
processes as you work on your own evaluations of online teaching:
● Using your responses to Activity 2 earlier this week, identify exactly which aspect(s)
of your online teaching you want to evaluate.
● Identify from where or whom you will obtain the information you need.
● If using analytics, what kinds of data are particularly relevant to your objectives? How
can you get hold of these, or make sure they are being recorded? How will you use
the data to draw conclusions?
● If using feedback, which method(s) will you use? Synchronous or asynchronous
forums dedicated to feedback? Dedicated questionnaires? Peer observation?
● If using a questionnaire, use your responses from Activity 2 earlier this week to draft
some questions you might wish to use.
● Using your responses from Activity 1 earlier this week, identify any other relevant
people with whom you might wish to work to create a community around your
evaluation activity.
● As well as analysing the feedback received regarding your online teaching, review
the value of the data you have obtained. Would any modifications to the evaluation
process provide more valuable data?

of 164
5 Week 8 Quiz
5 Week 8 Quiz
You can now proceed to complete your end-of-course badge quiz. This is similar to
previous quizzes, but this time you will have to answer 15 questions.
Remember, this quiz counts towards your badge. If you're not successful the first time,
you can attempt the quiz again in 24 hours.
Week 8 compulsory badge quiz

of 164
Conclusion
Conclusion
It seems fitting to end this course by talking about evaluation, but it is almost certain that
any evaluation you undertake will lead you to more ideas, changes and new
developments in your teaching.
Well done for making it through. We hope you have found both the content and the
experience of this course useful. Taking your teaching online can be daunting, but
completing this course will have given you insights that enable you to take on the
challenge and create exciting new opportunities for your learners.
If you wish to explore Open Education further, take a look at The Open University’s
MA in Online and Distance Education.
Before you move on, let’s pay one final visit to Rita. Time has moved on since she
completed this module, and she has now had four months to try taking her teaching
online:
Next steps
If you would like to take your study of this subject area further, you may be interested in the
following courses:
H880 Technology-enhanced learning: foundations and futures
The Online Educator: People and Pedagogy

of 164
Tell us what you think
Tell us what you think

Now you've come to the end of the course, we would appreciate a few minutes of your
time to complete this short end-of-course survey (you may have already completed this
survey at the end of Week 4). We’d like to find out a bit about your experience of studying
the course and what you plan to do next. We will use this information to provide better
online experiences for all our learners and to share our findings with others. Participation
will be completely confidential and we will not pass on your details to others.

of 164
Your notes
Your notes
Week 1
Week 2
Week 3

of 164
Your notes
Week 4
Week 5
Week 6
Week 7
Week 8

of 164
References
References
Fiester, H. and Green, T. (2016) ‘Student use of Backchannels’, TechTrends, vol. 60, no.
4, pp. 404–408.
Gikandi, J.W. and Morrow, D. (2016) ‘Designing and implementing peer formative
feedback within online learning environments’, Technology, Pedagogy and Education,
vol. 25, no. 2, pp. 153–70.
Murphy, E., Rodriguez-Manzanares, M.A. and Barbour, M. (2011) ‘Asynchronous and
synchronous online teaching: Perspectives of Canadian high school distance education
teachers’, British Journal of Educational Technology, vol. 42, no. 4, pp. 583–91.
Price, L., Richardson, J.T.E. and Jelfs, A. (2007) ‘Face-to-face versus online tutoring
support in distance education’, Studies in Higher Education, vol. 32, pp. 1–20.
Richardson, J.T.E. (2009) ‘Face-to-face versus online tutoring support in humanities
courses in distance education’, Arts and Humanities in Higher Education, vol. 8, no. 1,
pp. 69–85.
Ausubel, D.P. (1960) ‘Use of advance organisers in the learning and retention of
meaningful material’, Journal of Educational Psychology, vol. 51, no. 5, pp. 267–72.
Beasley, J.G. and Beck, D.E. (2017) ‘Defining Differentiation in Cyber Schools: What
Online Teachers Say’, TechTrends, vol. 61, no. 6, pp. 550–59.
Beetham, H. (2007) ‘An approach to learning activity design’, in: Beetham, H. and Sharpe,
R. (eds) Rethinking Pedagogy for a Digital Age, Oxford, RoutledgeFalmer, pp. 26–40.
Bruner, J.S. (1966) Toward a Theory of Instruction, Cambridge, MA, Harvard University
Press.
Chaos theory: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaos_theory
Churchill, D. (2007) ‘Towards a useful classification of learning objects’, Educational
Technology Research and Development, vol. 55, no. 5, pp. 479–97.
Cooper, S. (2016) 10 Best Practices To Be An Effective Online Teacher [Online]. Available
at https://elearningindustry.com/10-best-practices-effective-online-teacher (Accessed 6
November 2017).
Donovan, J., Mader, C.E. and Shinsky, J. (2006) ‘Constructive student feedback: Online
vs. traditional course evaluations’, Journal of Interactive Online Learning, vol. 5, no. 3,
pp. 283–96.
Hill, C. (ed.) (2009) 10 Principles of Effective Online Teaching: Best Practices in Distance
Education [Online]. Available at https://www.mnsu.edu/cetl/teachingwithtechnology/
tech_resources_pdf/Ten%20Principles%20of%20Effective%20Online%20Teaching.pdf
(Accessed 26 June 2018).
Jones, M.H. and Gallen, A-M. (2016) ‘Peer observation, feedback and reflection for
development of practice in synchronous online teaching’, Innovations in Education and
Teaching International, vol. 53, no. 6, pp. 616–26.
Love, C. (2015) SAMR: A model without evidence [Online]. Available at https://
charlielove.org/?p=10025 (Accessed 9 November 2017).

of 164
References
Piaget, J. (1957) ‘The Child and Modern Physics’, Scientific American, vol. 196, no. 3,
pp. 46–51.
Puentedura, R.R. (2017) A SAMR Ladder for Teacher Professional Development [Online].
Available at http://hippasus.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/SAMRLadderForTea-
cherPD.pdf (Accessed 2 November 2017).
Siemens, G. (2005) ‘Connectivism: A Learning Theory for the Digital Age’, International
Journal of Instructional Technology and Distance Learning, vol. 2, no. 1 [Online]. Available
at http://www.itdl.org/journal/jan_05/article01.htm (Accessed 6 November 2017).
Skinner, B.F. (1968) The Technology of Teaching, New York, NY, Appleton-Century-
Crofts.
Thorndike, E.L., Bregman, E.O., Tilton, J.W. and Woodyard, E. (1928) Adult Learning,
New York, NY, Macmillan.
Vygotsky, L.S. (1986) Thought and Language (trans. from Russian and revised and edited
by A. Kozulin), Cambridge, MA, MIT Press.
Wenger, E. (1998) Communities of Practice: learning, meaning and identity, Cambridge,
Cambridge University Press.
Arbour, M., Kaspar, R.W. and Teall, A.M. (2015) ‘Strategies to Promote Cultural
Competence in Distance Education’, Journal of Transcultural Nursing, vol. 26, no. 4,
pp. 436–40.
Çakiroglu, Ü., Kokoç, M., Kol, E. and Turan, E. (2016) ‘Exploring Teaching Programming
Online through Web Conferencing System: The Lens of Activity Theory’, Educational
Technology & Society, vol. 19, no. 4, pp. 126–39.
Coughlan, T. and Perryman, L-A. (2015) ‘Are student-led Facebook groups open
educational practices?’, OER15 Conference Presentation [Online]. Available at https://
oro.open.ac.uk/42541/4/OER15.pdf (Accessed 17 May 2018).
Ernest, P., Catasus, M.G., Hampel, R., Heiser, S., Hopkins, J., Murphy, L. and Stickler, U.
(2013) ‘Online teacher development: collaborating in a virtual learning environment’,
Computer Assisted Language Learning, vol. 26, no. 4, pp. 311–33.
Fidaldo, P. and Thormann, J. (2017) ‘Reaching Students in Online Courses Using
Alternative Formats’, The International Review of Research in Open and Distributed
Learning, vol. 18, no. 2 [Online]. Available at www.irrodl.org/index.php/irrodl/article/view/
2601 (Accessed 26 September 2018).
Guo, S. and Möllering, M. (2016) ‘The implementation of task-based teaching in an online
Chinese class through web conferencing’, System, vol. 62, pp. 26–38.
Haylett, C. (2016) ‘Use of Social Media for Teaching Online Courses and Enhancing
Business Communication Skills at the University Level: Can This Really Be Done?’,
International Journal of Online Pedagogy and Course Design, vol. 6, no. 4, pp. 75–81.
JISC (2016) Technology and tools for online learning [Online]. Available at https://www.
jisc.ac.uk/full-guide/technology-and-tools-for-online-learning (Accessed 9 No-
vember 2017).
Jones, M.H. and Gallen, A-M. (2016) ‘Peer observation, feedback and reflection for
development of practice in synchronous online teaching’, Innovations in Education and
Teaching International, vol. 53, no. 6, pp. 616–26.
Kear, K., Chetwynd, F., Williams, J. and Donelan, H. (2012) ‘Web conferencing for
synchronous online tutorials: Perspectives of tutors using a new medium’ Computers &
Education, vol. 58, no. 3, pp. 953–63.

of 164
References
Peterson, E. (2007) ‘Incorporating Screencasts In Online Teaching’, The International

Review of Research in Open and Distributed Learning, vol. 8, no. 3 [Online]. Available at
www.irrodl.org/index.php/irrodl/article/view/495/935 (Accessed 28 September 2018).
University of New South Wales Sydney (2017) Selecting Technologies [Online]. Available
at https://teaching.unsw.edu.au/selecting-technologies (Accessed 8 November 2017).
Veletsianos, G. (2016) Social Media in Academia, Routledge, New York.
Watson, K. (2011) ‘Learning to teach online: considerations for choosing technology for
teaching’ [Online]. Available at http://www.academia.edu/610394/Considerations_-
for_choosing_technology_for_teaching (Accessed 08 November 2017).
Ansmann, L., Flickinger, T.E., Barello, S., Kunneman, M., Mantwill, S., Quilligan, S.,
Zanini, C. and Aelbrecht, K. (2014) ‘Career development for early career academics:
Benefits of networking and the role of professional societies’, Patient Education and
Counseling, vol. 97, pp. 132–34.
Carpenter, J.P. and Krutka, D.G. (2014) ‘How and Why Educators Use Twitter: A Survey
of the Field’, Journal of Research on Technology in Education, vol. 46, no. 4, pp .414–34.
Davis, M.R. (2011) ‘Social Media Feeds Freewheeling Professional Development’,
Education Week, vol. 31, no. 9 [Online]. Available at https://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/
2011/10/26/09edtech-social.h31.html (Accessed 27 September 2018).
Greenfield, A. (2010) Don’t get me wrong [Online]. Available at https://speedbird.
wordpress.com/2010/05/04/dont-get-me-wrong/ (Accessed 10 November 2017).
Heinrich, E. (2015) ‘Identifying teaching groups as a basis for academic development’,
Higher Education Research & Development, vol. 34, no. 5, pp. 899–913.
Kozierok, C. (2005) The TCP/IP Guide [Online]. Available at www.tcpipguide.com/free/
t_TheAdvantagesBenefitsofNetworking.htm (Accessed 10 Nov 2017).
Krutka, D.G., Bergman, D.J., Flores, R., Mason, K. and Jack, A.R. (2014) ‘Microblogging
about teaching: Nurturing participatory cultures through collaborative online reflection with
pre-service teachers’, Teaching and Teacher Education, vol. 40, pp. 83–93.
LinkedIn (2017) About Us [Online]. Available at https://www.linkedin.com/company/
linkedin/ (Accessed 11 Nov 2017).
MacGillivray, A.E. (2017) ‘Social Learning in Higher Education: A Clash of Cultures?’, in
McDonald, J. and Cater-Steel, A. (eds) Communities of Practice: Facilitating Social
Learning in Higher Education, Springer, Singapore, pp.27–46.
Weller, M. (2011) The Digital Scholar: How Technology Is Transforming Scholarly Practice
[Online], London, Bloomsbury Academic. Available at https://www.bloomsburycollections.
com/book/the-digital-scholar-how-technology-is-transforming-scholarly-practice/ (Ac-
cessed 26 June 2018).
Wenger-Trayner, E. and Wenger-Trayner, B. (2015) Introduction to communities of
practice [Online]. Available at www.wenger-trayner.com/introduction-to-communities-of-
practice/ (Accessed 10 Nov 2017).
Baker, J. (2008) ‘Introduction to Open Educational Resources’, Connexions [Online].
Available at https://oerknowledgecloud.org/sites/oerknowledgecloud.org/files/OpenRe-
sources.pdf (Accessed 13 November 2017).
Cedefop (2016) ‘Validation and open educational resources (OER): Thematic report for
the 2016 update of the European inventory on validation’, Luxembourg: Publications
Office [Online]. Available at http://www.nki-latvija.lv/content/files/Validation%20and%
20open%20educational%20resources.pdf (Accessed 19 May 2018).

of 164
References
Coughlan, T., Pitt, R. and McAndrew, P. (2013) ‘Building open bridges: collaborative
remixing and reuse of open educational resources across organisations’, Proceedings of
the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, ACM, pp. 991–1000.
D’Oliviera, C., Carson, S., James, K. and Lazarus, J. (2010) ‘MIT OpenCourseWare:
unlocking knowledge, empowering minds’, Science, vol. 329, pp. 525–6.
Educause (2010) 7 Things You Should Know About Open Educational Resources
[Online]. Available at https://library.educause.edu/~/media/files/library/2010/5/eli7061-pdf.
pdf (Accessed 14 November 2017).
Ozdemir, O. and Hendricks, C. (2017) ‘Instructor and student experiences with open
textbooks, from the California open online library for education (Cool4Ed)’, Journal of
Computing in Higher Education, vol. 29, no. 1, pp. 98–113.
Pitt, R. (2015) ‘Mainstreaming Open Textbooks: Educator Perspectives on the Impact of
OpenStax College Open Textbooks’, International Review of Research in Open and
Distributed Learning, vol. 16, no. 4 [Online]. Available at http://www.irrodl.org/index.php/
irrodl/article/view/2381/3497 (Accessed 08 Feb 2018).
William and Flora Hewlett Foundation (2018) Open Educational Resources [Online].
Available at https://www.hewlett.org/strategy/open-educational-resources/ (Accessed 26
June 2018).
Achieve (2011) Rubrics for Evaluating Open Education Resource Objects [Online].
Available at https://www.achieve.org/files/AchieveOERRubrics.pdf (Accessed 17 No-
vember 2017).
Art Beyond Sight: How to Make a Tactile Diagram (2009) Youtube video, added by
artbeyondsight [Online]. Available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p8P7X7KYN5w
(Accessed 17 November 2017).
Ball, S. (2012) FOSS Accessibility Tools for Libraries: Step By Step Guide [Online].
Available at http://www.eifl.net/resources/foss-disability-tools-libraries-step-step-guide
(Accessed 17 November 2017).
Banes, D. and Seale, J. (2002) ‘Accessibility and inclusivity in further and higher
education: an overview’ in Phipps, L., Sutherland, A. and Seale, J. (eds) Access All Areas:
Disability, Technology and Learning, pp. 1–5 [Online]. Available at http://www.alt.ac.uk/
docs/accessallareaslow.pdf (Accessed 16 November 2017).
Devine, H., Gonzalez, A. and Hardy, M. (2011) ‘Making accessible PDF documents’,
DocEng '11 Proceedings of the 11th ACM symposium on Document engineering,
pp. 275–76.
Doyle, C. and Robson, K. (2002) Accessible Curricula: Good Practice for All [Online],
Cardiff, University of Wales Institute. Previously available at http://www.jisctechdis.ac.uk/
techdis/resources/detail/investinyou/Accessible_Curricula. No longer available but ar-
chived by the Wayback Machine at https://web.archive.org/web/20070418114542/http://
www.techdis.ac.uk/resources/files/curricula.pdf (Accessed 16 November 2017).
OpenWashington (2017) How to use Open Educational Resources – Module 9:
Accessibility [Online]. Available at www.openwa.org/module-9/ (Accessed 17 No-
vember 2017).
Bennett, S., Maton, K. and Kervin, L. (2008) ‘The “digital natives” debate: A critical review
of the evidence’, British Journal of Educational Technology, vol. 39, no. 5, pp. 775–86.
Clayton, N. (2002) ‘SCOT’, Technology and Culture, vol. 43, no. 2, pp. 351–60.

of 164
References
Graham, J. (2006) ‘Flickr of idea on a gaming project led to photo website’, USA Today, 27
February [Online]. Available at www.usatodayeducation.com/k12/wp-content/uploads/
2012/09/FlickrofIdea.pdf (Accessed 26 June 2018).
Kling, R., McKim, G. and King, A. (2003) ‘A bit more to IT: Scholarly communication
forums as socio-technical interaction networks’, Journal of the American Society for
Information Science and Technology, vol. 54, no. 1, pp. 46–67.
Mooney, H., Johnson, S., Hawes, W. and Hoffman, D. (2012) Moving Your Course Toward
the Online Environment [Online]. Available at https://blog.cengage.com/top_blog/moving-
your-course-toward-the-online-environment/ (Accessed 26 June 2018).
Mor, Y. and Craft, B. (2012) ‘Learning design: reflections upon the current landscape’,
Research in Learning Technology, vol. 20 [Online]. Available at http://www.researchin-
learningtechnology.net/index.php/rlt/article/view/19196 (Accessed 22 November 2017).
Pinch, T.J. and Bijker, W.E. (1984) ‘The social construction of facts and artefacts’, Social
Studies of Science, vol. 14, no. 3, pp. 399–441.
Prensky, M. (2001) ‘Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants Part 1’, On the Horizon, vol. 9, no.
5, pp. 1–6.
Scanlon, E., Sharples, M., Fenton-O’Creevy, M., Fleck, J., Cooban, C., Ferguson, R.,
Cross, S. and Waterhouse, P. (2013) Beyond Prototypes: Enabling innovation in
technology-enhanced learning [Online]. Available at www.beyondprototypes.com/ (Ac-
cessed 21 December 2017).
Sharrar, L. and Bigatel, P. (2014) Moving a Face-to-Face Course Online without Losing
Student Engagement [Online]. Available at https://www.facultyfocus.com/articles/online-
education/moving-face-face-course-online-without-losing-engagement/ (Accessed 26
June 2018).
Weller, M. (2011) The Digital Scholar: How Technology Is Transforming Scholarly
Practice, London, Bloomsbury Academic [Online]. Available at https://www.bloomsbur-
ycollections.com/book/the-digital-scholar-how-technology-is-transforming-scholarly-prac-
tice/ (Accessed 22 November 2017).
White, D. and Le Cornu, A. (2011) ‘Visitors and Residents: A new typology for online
engagement’, First Monday, vol. 16, no. 9 [Online]. vailable at http://firstmonday.org/ojs/
index.php/fm/article/view/3171/3049 (Accessed 22 November 2017).
Blumberg, P. (2009) ‘Maximizing Learning Through Course Alignment and Experience
with Different Types of Knowledge’, Innovative Higher Education, vol. 34, no. 2,
pp. 93–103.
Cao, Y. and Sakchutchawan, S. (2011) ‘Online vs. Traditional MBA: An Empirical Study of
Students’ Characteristics, Course Satisfaction, and Overall Success’, Journal of Human
Resources and Adult Learning, vol. 7, no. 2, pp. 112.
Centra, J.A. (2003) ‘Will Teachers Receive Higher Student Evaluations by Giving Higher
Grades and Less Course Work?’, Research in Higher Education, vol. 44, no. 5,
pp. 495–518.
Cousin, G. and Deepwell, F. (1998) ‘Virtual focus group techniques in the evaluation of an
electronic learning environment’, in Oliver, M. (ed.) Innovation in the Evaluation of
Learning Technology, University of North London Press, pp. 4–7.
EdFutures (2012) Practitioner Research [Online]. Available at http://www.edfutures.net/
Practitioner_Research (Accessed 24 May 2018).
Ferguson, R. (2012) ‘Learning analytics: drivers, developments and challenges’,
International Journal of Technology Enhanced Learning (IJTEL), vol. 4, nos. 5/6,

of 164
Acknowledgements
pp. 304–17 [Online]. Available at http://oro.open.ac.uk/36374/ (Accessed 09 Jan-

uary 2018).
Johnson, V.E. (2003) Grade Inflation: A Crisis in College Education, New York, NY,
Springer.
Kauffman, H. (2015) ‘A review of predictive factors of student success in and satisfaction
with online learning’, Research in Learning Technology, vol. 23 [Online]. Available at
http://dx.doi.org/10.3402/rlt.v23.26507 (Accessed 23 November 2017).
Long, P. and Siemens, G. (2011) ‘Penetrating the Fog: Analytics in Learning and
Education’, Educause Review, vol. 46, no. 5, pp. 31–40 [Online]. Available at https://er.
educause.edu/articles/2011/9/penetrating-the-fog-analytics-in-learning-and-education
(Accessed 09 January 2018).
Means, B., Toyama, Y., Murphy, R., Bakia, M. and Jones, K. (2009) Evaluation of
Evidence-Based Practices in Online Learning: A Meta-Analysis and Review of Online
Learning Studies, US Department of Education [Online]. Available at https://www2.ed.
gov/rschstat/eval/tech/evidence-based-practices/finalreport.pdf (Accessed 27 Sep-
tember 2018).
Oliver, M. (2000) ‘Evaluating online learning and teaching’, Information Systems and Use,
vol. 20, nos. 2/3, pp. 83–94.
Otter, R.R., Seipel, S., Graeff, T., Alexander, B., Boraiko, C., Gray, J., Petersen, K. and
Sadler, K. (2013) ‘Comparing student and faculty perceptions of online and traditional
courses’, Internet and Higher Education, vol. 19, pp. 27–35.
Parker, R.E. (2013) Redesigning Courses for Online Delivery: Design, Interaction, Media
& Evaluation, Bingley, Emerald Group Publishing.
Phelps, J. and Reynolds, R. (1998) ‘Summative evaluation of a web-based course in
meteorology’ in Oliver, M. (ed.) Innovation in the Evaluation of Learning Technology,
University of North London Press, pp. 135–50.
Schön, D. (1987) Educating the Reflective Practitioner: Toward a New Design for
Teaching and Learning in the Professions, New Jersey, Jossey-Bass.
Sclater, N. and Bailey, P. (2015) Code of Practice for Learning Analytics [Online].
Available at https://www.jisc.ac.uk/guides/code-of-practice-for-learning-analytics (Ac-
cessed 9 January 2018).
Song, L., Singleton, E.S., Hill, J.R. and Koh, M.H. (2004) ‘Improving online learning:
Student perceptions of useful and challenging characteristics’, Internet and Higher
Education, vol. 7, no. 1, pp. 59–70.
Taylor, J., Woodman, M., Sumner, T. and Blake, C. (2000) ‘Peering Through a Glass
Darkly: Integrative evaluation of an online course’, Journal of Educational Technology &
Society, vol. 3, no. 4 [Online]. Available at https://www.j-ets.net/ETS/journals/3_4/taylor.
html (Accessed 23 November 2017).
Tucker, B. (2014) ‘Student evaluation surveys: anonymous comments that offend or are
unprofessional’, Higher Education, vol. 68, no. 3, pp. 347–58.
Acknowledgements
This free course was written by Tim Coughlan, Simon Ball and Leigh-Anne Perryman.

of 164
Acknowledgements
Except for third party materials and otherwise stated (see terms and conditions), this
content is made available under a
Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 Licence.
The material acknowledged below is Proprietary and used under licence (not subject to
Creative Commons Licence). Grateful acknowledgement is made to the following sources
for permission to reproduce material in this free course:
Course image: © @bryanMMathers
Week 1
Figure 1: © @bryanMMathers
Figure 2: © Maksym Kozlenko https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/deed.en
Figure 3: Tumisu/404 images, https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/
deed.en
Figure 4: Soniachat8, https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/deed.en
Figure 5: Denise Krebs, https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/
Activity 2 Video: Engaging and motivating students; Australian Learning and Teaching
Council, https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/
Activity 3 Video: Flipped classrooms © MADdraw Productions
Week 2
Figure 1: taken from: https://www.flickr.com/photos/yaccesslab/15569376326; https://
creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/
Figure 2: CDC/Amanda Mills, from Public Health Image Library (Website), https://
creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/deed.en
Figure 4: © R. R. Puentedura, The SAMR Model, image file by Lefflerd, https://
creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/deed.en
Video: Learning Objects: © learnIT2teach
Week 3
Figure 1: @bryanMMathers
Figure 3: Jami (Wiki Ed), https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/deed.en
Figure 5: geralt, https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/deed.en
Figure 7: mohamed_hassan, https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/
deed.en
Figure 8: tiffanytlcbm, https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/deed.en
Figure 9: Nick Youngson, Alpha Stock Images, https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-
sa/3.0/
Video: Activity 2: Flipped Teacher Training / Youtube.com
Actitivy 1: Video: Aligning Text; © JISC; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5a_VZ-
VOEQDc
Activity 2: Video: Flipped Teacher Training; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GuA8fP-
CHu9c

of 164
Acknowledgements
Activity 4: Infographc: taken from: http://www.edudemic.com/a-teachers-guide-to-social-

media; diagram provided by Online Colleges
Week 4
Figure 3: maxpixel, https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/deed.en
Figure 4: geralt, Pixabay, https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/deed.en
Figure 5: geralt, Pixabay, https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/deed.en
Figure 6: Figure 6: OpenClipart-Vectors, Pixabay, https://creativecommons.org/publicdo-
main/zero/1.0/deed.en
Week 5
Figure 2: 2012, Jonathas Mello ; Licensed under Creative Commons CC-BY; United
Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization
Figure 3: Libby Levi for opensource.com;https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/
Figure 4: (Activity 2): progressor; Pixabay; https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/
zero/1.0/deed.en
Figure 5: 472301; Pixabay, https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/deed.en
Figure 7: Public domain; taken from: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:OER_-
Logo.svg
Activity 1: Video: OER Introduction 11: Brendan Walsh; https://creativecommons.org/
licenses/by/3.0/
Activity 2: Video: Creative Commons Kiwi; Creative Commons Aotearoa New Zealand,
The video was made with support from InternetNZ and is a project of the Royal Society of
New Zealand. Produced by Mohawk Media
Week 6
Figure 1: © @bryanMMathers
Figure 3: ©University of the Fraser Valley via Flickr; https://creativecommons.org/
licenses/by/3.0/
Figure 4: taken from https://pixnio.com
Figure 5: Produced by David Monniaux using GMT from data by USGS, IGN and INSEE
Figure 6: Activity 2: Can’t locate in the Portal?
Figure 7: http://logos.wikia.com/wiki/Safari; https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:
Google_Chrome_icon_(September_2014).svg; https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:
Internet_Explorer_9_icon.svg; http://logos.wikia.com/wiki/Mozilla_Firefox
Figure 9: Bill Burris; https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/
Figure 10: Bill Burris; https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/
Figure 11: Gellinger/Pixabay

of 164
Acknowledgements
Week 7
Figure 2: Carla Gomez Monroy; https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/
Figure 3: Nick Youngson / Alpha Stock Imageshttps://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-
sa/3.0/
Activity 1: Video: Visitors and residents; University of Oxford; JISC; https://creativecom-
mons.org/licenses/by/2.0/
Week 8
Figure 2: Timur Saglambilek; https://creativecommons.org/choose/zero/
Figure 3: Gerd Altmann;https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/
Figure 4: Figure 4: The Photographer; https://creativecommons.org/licenses/publicdo-
main/
Activity 3: Practitioner research: assuming this will be a link and not embedded?
Every effort has been made to contact copyright owners. If any have been inadvertently
overlooked, the publishers will be pleased to make the necessary arrangements at the
first opportunity.
Don't miss out
If reading this text has inspired you to learn more, you may be interested in joining the
millions of people who discover our free learning resources and qualifications by visiting
The Open University – www.open.edu/openlearn/free-courses.

of 164

Take Your Teaching Online Printable

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

Take Your Teaching Online Printable

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

Take your teaching online

2 of 164 Thursday 12 September 2019

3 of 164 Thursday 12 September 2019

Week 1: Teaching online is different 13

Week 2: Discovering the connections: principles and theories

4 of 164 Thursday 12 September 2019

Week 3: Selecting technologies: what to look for and how to

Week 4: The benefits of support networks and how to develop

5 of 164 Thursday 12 September 2019

Week 6: Supporting learners with different needs – accessibility

Week 7: Making a change in your teaching 127

Week 8: Evaluating changes and enhancing practice 139

6 of 164 Thursday 12 September 2019

7 of 164 Thursday 12 September 2019

Introduction and guidance

● Identify the differences between teaching online and teaching in a face-to-face

Moving around the course

8 of 164 Thursday 12 September 2019

Activities and storing your answers

9 of 164 Thursday 12 September 2019

What is a badged course?

10 of 164 Thursday 12 September 2019

How to get a badge

● read each week of the course

11 of 164 Thursday 12 September 2019

12 of 164 Thursday 12 September 2019

Week 1: Teaching online is

Figure 1 Same teacher, different tools

Video content is not available in this format.

13 of 164 Thursday 12 September 2019

By the end of this week, you should be able to:

1 Synchronous and asynchronous modes

14 of 164 Thursday 12 September 2019

Asynchronous online teaching

15 of 164 Thursday 12 September 2019

The importance of collaboration

1.1 Teacher reflections

Video content is not available in this format.

16 of 164 Thursday 12 September 2019

1.2 Making use of asynchronous and synchronous

● The teachers used different combinations of synchronous and asynchronous online

Activity 1 Thinking about synchronous and asynchronous online teaching

1. A situation where synchronous learning is appropriate and beneficial in

Provide your answer...

17 of 164 Thursday 12 September 2019

1.3 Interacting with students

18 of 164 Thursday 12 September 2019

1.4 Motivation, support and discipline

19 of 164 Thursday 12 September 2019

Figure 4 Learning online provides different challenges from learning in a face-to-face

20 of 164 Thursday 12 September 2019

1.5 Developing skills and confidence

Activity 2 Motivating and engaging students online

Provide your answer...

21 of 164 Thursday 12 September 2019

22 of 164 Thursday 12 September 2019

Figure 5 There are many facets to online learning

It can combine these with the main advantages of asynchronous learning:

23 of 164 Thursday 12 September 2019

It can help to avoid the pitfalls of asynchronous learning:

2.1 Flipped classrooms

Activity 3 Thinking about the flipped classroom

This video synthesises the benefit of a flipped classroom approach.