Due to Corona, we all had to learn new ways. New ways of living, new ways of working, new ways of studying. And for lecturers, new ways of teaching. Everything online! That was, and still is, an enormous challenge. After a few months of ‘working with what we have’ and making the best out of the situation, and after the realization that this online teaching won’t be over soon, it’s time to look into ways of making teaching and studying online, better. In the below op-ed piece by lecturer Frans Willem Korsten, he shares his thoughts on what future online teaching should look like:

 

Online teaching: rethinking didactically, re-investing pedagogically

Metaphor: Suppose you would be used to go to a place by boat and within a week people would ask you to go to the same place by car. Would it not be strange if you would use your boat by putting some wheels underneath it, using the rudder as a steering wheel, and your own legs as propelling mechanism?

Shifting from in vivo teaching to online teaching is like shifting from going someplace by boat to going there by car. It means we have different propelling mechanisms, different vehicles, different routings. It implies we have to reschool and rethink. If we have to do this relatively fast, the wise thing to do is keep things as simple as possible. The most important matter is that things work. And it helps to put the boat in a boat hangar and get a car.

Didactics and pedagogy

Distinguishing between didactics and pedagogy is something we do on an everyday basis, yet when asked to describe the difference, many start to stutter. Basically, didacticism is about empowering our students by providing them with knowledge and scholarly tools. So, showing: How to do this?

And pedagogy is about helping them grow as human beings, scholars with the right attitude. Then it is more like: How to get there?

The shift towards going online teaching can best be thought through by asking a double question: what does the new medium (or rather, the set of new media) help or hinder us to act didactically and how does it help or hinder us to act pedagogically.

As for the first, didactics, one of the pivotal issues is a matter of time. People loose concentration when looking at a screen for longer than 10-15 minutes. So what to do with our live classes of two times 45 minutes? Scale them down. Yet scaling them down is much more than a matter of summarizing. It asks us to rethink what it was again that we wanted to do.

Another pivotal issue is a matter of flexibility. With people divided over 17 time zones, don’t ask them to come together to listen to lectures at one fixed moment in time. They can do that in their own time. Don’t ask them also to have to watch your lecturing. There are way more interesting ways of transferring knowledge than looking at a talking head. One way is to work more with podcasts, and a very simple one is to make a separate podcast by recording with your mobile phone what you wanted to say in relation to your (condensed) powerpoint presentation.

As for the second, pedagogy, one of the pivotal issues is how to work towards a sense of community, in the full awareness that all students will be living in radically different circumstances. Here, we can use the tools at hand to come together to talk, to discuss things in smaller circles, to come back with the entire group again etc. In this case, very simple ways of getting there is making prezi-movies or such things that ask them to work together to solve things and then come together via any kind of platform to discuss their outcomes. Another way of getting them more involved pedagogically is turning them into teachers. In all cases: get together to talk.

Lighten the burden

Finally: we, as teachers and staff, have to take care of ourselves. It is no problem to invest loads of energy in getting the students involved. It might even work, yet, this might cost you in the long run. Instead of thinking of teaching as a heavy and responsible task, it might also work to think through what it might mean to have fun together, didactically and pedagogically. Lighten their and your burden. Exams are less important than what we are doing together to learn.

 

• What do you think? Do you agree with Frans Willem Korsten? What do you think is going well now? How would you think that teaching and studying online in the future could be better? Let us know here:  stuco_urbanstudies@hum.leidenuniv.nl