top of page
Writer's pictureJo Szoke

Five Steps To Create an Organised Remote Lesson or Course

Updated: Oct 14, 2020

I had the chance to write a guest post on Martin's blog, ELT Experiences on a more methodical approach to lesson or course planning for remote/distance learning. I'm going to share the gist of the post here, so please visit his site as well for the complete content!


How to Plan a Remote Lesson or Course Jo Szoke Short and Simple English
 

Hands up if you’re also trying to make the best out of the current COVID-stricken situation! Even though I can’t see you now as you’re reading this post, I’m sure many of you have raised an imaginary hand, or at least smirked a little. Every country and every school seems to have a different approach to dealing with the second wave of the virus; some prefer face-to-face lessons with masks and social distancing, others went fully online, and some decided to pick hybrid teaching. In this post, I’d like to show you how you can make an online course work well!


0. You’ll need a place where everything comes together


I could say that any shared drive will do, but in these post-first wave times I think we can all agree that using a VLE (virtual learning environment) makes our lives much easier. Not only does it keep everything organised, it can also be used for day-to-day communication, assignment submission and feedback, so I would suggest setting up one as your step zero.


1. Rethinking your lesson plan


We want more than to simply survive this period – we’d like to thrive in it! And for that, we’ll need to rethink our complete lesson plan.


2. Categorising into remote and live


We basically need to start looking at our tasks with filtered glasses on. Which elements of the lesson do we want to keep live (if we want to keep any) and which can be done remotely?


3. Creating remote activities


Our aim is not to just put up a list of tasks in a pdf that students cannot interact with, but to create something that can be engaging and educational at the same time. So how do you go about it?

  • Revision: Online quizzes could be a good solution here.

  • Teaching: The actual teaching, lecturing or knowledge transfer stage could be the most difficult to turn into something engaging because it’s basically you talking most of the time on video. But try to keep two things in mind:

    • 1) keep it short

    • 2) use the same techniques you would in real life (supposing you do).

The second step is using classroom management techniques online as well. Insert questions into your video, and you will be able to activate their knowledge even if they are sitting at home by themselves.


4. Staging your sections and activities


This doesn’t have to be any different than the staging you’d do in your live class, just keep in mind which activity serves revision or prediction purposes, which is for teaching, and which is for checking. Also don’t forget when the live part of your lesson takes place. I normally work in a flipped format, which means that students do their remote tasks and listen to my videos before the live lesson, when they can put everything into practice.


5. Wrap up and follow up


Once both your remote and live parts are over, don’t forget to upload any materials that were created during the live session.

Think about follow up opportunities as well –what sort of productive tasks could your students do online?



És ha magyar nyelven szeretnél többet megtudni erről a témáról, meleg szívvel ajánlom a NYESZE Akadémia keretén belül tartott webinárom (október 9. 15:00) utólagos visszanézését:

Információs lap

Webinár megrendelése:

37 views0 comments

Comments


bottom of page