EDUCAUSE has a great article on the differences between emergency remote teaching and online learning. The COVID-19 situation has caused a mass online migration for academic continuity. However, as argued in the article, this situation is emergency remote teaching, rather than online learning.
In ETEC524, everyone created a blended or fully online unit of learning within a course. As part of this project, we explored how to do this by using frameworks to select, design, and apply learning technologies and to examine evidence based strategies for technology enhanced learning. Although we only created part of the courses, we still had a large amount of time to work towards the section that we did design. This is not the current situation that is occurring in schools and post-secondary institutions.
In contrast to online learning, emergency remote teaching is a strategy for academic continuity that takes a face-to-face or blended course and fast forwards it into a fully online remote format. This strategy doesn’t necessarily take into account pedagogy as it’s about survival and getting through the semester.
Some considerations that we had to take into account were to:
- Manage expectations: communicating with students and other members of the teaching team to explain the changes.
- Modify remaining assessments for a remote format: we needed to take into consideration possible equity challenges coming from access to software and hardware.
- Select simple online tools: keeping in mind that students were also experiencing upheaval in all their courses and living situations, we were aware that it would be a lot to get students to learn a variety of new tools in a short amount of time. Sometimes we had to choose a simpler tool within our LMS’ constraints and compromise.
It was challenging to simply plug in pieces and run day by day. Everyday we would notice things we would change or resources that we would ideally leverage to support students. However, there just wasn’t time to locate such resources or such resources didn’t currently exist.
Given the uncertainty around the COVID-19 situation, the lessons learned from using emergency remote teaching will be helpful in planning for fully online iterations of our course in the event we need to continue with fully online distance teaching.