Wildflowers, Pichincha Volcano - Ecuador

Picture taken by Jonathan Acuña (2023)

What does it Mean to Teach Online?

Comprehending concepts

The tail end of December 2019 brought the pandemic to the teaching scene
and a few months later, we found ourselves teaching in a virtualized context that
was new for many a teacher. Now, do pay attention to the word ‘virtualized’ that
I used instead of the term ‘virtual’. Here it is where we need to grapple with the
meaning of ‘virtual’ rather than ‘virtualized’. Why don’t we explore what it really
means to teach online as a synonym for ‘virtual’ and not for ‘virtualized.’
 In my home country, Costa Rica, fellow educators do only use ‘virtual’ for
the kind of teaching they found themselves doing from home—some kind of
remote teaching. Filling in our students’ blank slates through this type of teaching
is not what must be labeled as virtual teaching. What happened in Costa Rica and
in many other countries around the globe was that remote teaching was just the
virtualization of whatever we were doing in a F2F classroom, including all our bad
teaching practices. For sure, many teachers wholeheartedly prepared their lessons
to discover that their ‘empty vessel’ learners were not assimilating the course
content satisfactorily. In the farther reaches of their minds, these educators could
not comprehend why the learning process was not happening as planned. Could
it have been possible that they had not really understood the difference between
teaching F2F and in a virtual classroom?

Because the confused mind of an educator is in enmity against online

learning and teaching, educators could not really assimilate the quintessential idea
of what online teaching is. To start with, remote learning or a virtualized curriculum
is not online or virtual learning; we are talking about two very different teaching
scenarios. My simple but compelling argument here is actually coming from
Cambridge Dictionary ("virtualize.", 2023) that defines ‘virtualize’ as changing
“something that exists in a real form into a virtual version (= one that is created
using a computer).” In other words, when teachers were sent home to continue
with their school year, university term, etc., they were simply asked to ‘virtualize’
what they were doing in the classroom by means of their laptop or desktop
computers, which were probably connected to a sort of Learning Management
System (LMS) to help them with homework, assignments, tests, handouts, etc.
Mistakenly all sorts of instructors are using ‘virtual’ as a catch-all term for anything
they were doing online with their students. Priming the pump of knowledge here,
it can be concluded that these teachers never taught an online class.
 Virtualizing one’s curricula is, was, and has been a solitary sport. When
educators were told by their employers, many of these professionals had not
received a diploma accrediting them as ‘virtual educators.’ When the coronavirus
began its global rampage early in 2020, in Costa Rica the Ministry of Education
might have considered that the pandemic was meant to be short and allowing
teachers to virtualize academic programs was a relatively low-risk activity. I’m not
going to criticize what was or was not done by the Ministry of Education in my
country, but it seems to me that it happened in many other places around the
world.

What does it mean to teach online but in a virtual setting then? Based on
Bluestone (2022), there are certain characteristics that a virtual classroom must
have. If these elements are present, we have an educator working in a true virtual
environment.

Concerns about Virtualized

Bluestone’s Virtual Classroom
A simple layout that’s easy to follow
Learner-centered content and features How were activities and course
Teachers
Did these educators create a simple
layout for their learners to follow while
the pandemic was going on? How
were their institutions coaching them
to create this simple layout for virtual
courses?
content reshaped to make it learner-
centered especially when the teacher
was not around to pinch in?
Self-paced classes with modules and How did the educators transformed
flexibility their usual classroom activities to
become self-paced modules with
flexibility if learners wanted to work
on them at different hours?
Socially connected student groups How did teachers help students
connect with one another to create a
sense of being socially connected and
not pure isolation?
A secure foundation to protect student How were instructors protecting any
data kind of sensitive information regarding
their students? Who else had access
to this information if their computers
were part of an intranet?
Courses measured with quizzes and How was the evaluation of each
completion certificates course changed be measured with
quizzes and other kinds of summative
assessment? What was the role of
formative assessment in their lessons?
Mobile-friendly interfaces for on-the- What kind of platform, such as Google
go learning Classroom, was used by the teacher to
make all course content available for
learners to have access 24/7
anywhere?
Teaching online or virtually does imply the usage of a suite of online tools that
may or may not have been fully present while educators were in remote, virtualized
teaching; it was not virtual because the program was not born as an online
curriculum.

Albeit a false assumption of what online, virtual teaching is, learners also
drew upon their background knowledge on how to behave while in school. A virtual
curriculum also prepares students to face the new challenge. Though I like the
idea of working hard in short, focused bursts in classroom activities, I bet that the
constant complaints teachers had in regard to assignment submissions, homework
delivery, and so on were truer than true because students barely put in their
learning milage. And all this happened because a virtual, online course is not
created in one go. Virtual, online programs do require that teachers don’t stifle
their creativity in lesson planning and objective achievement.

References
"virtualize". (2023, August 18). Retrieved from Dictionary.Cambridge.Org:
https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/virtualize
Bluestone, Z. (2022, November 16). 7 Characteristics of a Virtual Classroom.
Retrieved from MemberPress.Com: https://memberpress.com/blog/5-
characteristics-virtual-classroom/

Suggested Reading Comprehension Exercise.

Now that you have read the blog entry, read the following statements, and decide
if they are true or false. The answers are provided below.

True/False: The term 'virtualized' is used in the text to highlight the distinction
between different types of online teaching.
True/False: In Costa Rica and many other countries, remote teaching was a
direct transformation of traditional classroom teaching into an online format.
True/False: Some educators struggled to understand why their remote
teaching methods were not yielding the expected learning outcomes.
True/False: According to Cambridge Dictionary, the term 'virtualize' refers to
converting something physical into a computer-generated version.
True/False: The author believes that many instructors use the term 'virtual'
inaccurately to describe their online teaching practices.
True/False: The text suggests that virtualizing a curriculum was a collaborative
effort among educators.
True/False: The Ministry of Education in Costa Rica took significant steps to
accredit teachers as virtual educators during the pandemic.
True/False: Bluestone's characteristics of a virtual classroom provide a
framework to differentiate between virtual and virtualized teaching.
True/False: One of Bluestone's criteria for a virtual classroom is having socially
connected student groups.
True/False: The text implies that the creation of an online curriculum happens
all at once and doesn't require ongoing development by teachers.

Answers:
True
True
True
True
True
False
False
True
True
False

Published at https://reflective-online-teaching.blogspot.com/2023/08/what-does-
it-mean-to-teach-online.html