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As an archaeologist of the Middle East, I interact in person with my research team only during fieldwork in the summers. For most of the year, we collaboratively work together on shared data while at our home universities around the globe. I also apply many of these strategies to my classroom teaching to engage with students outside of classtime – even during a normal semester.

Zoom is an excellent tool that allows you to participate in a video meeting anywhere, a classroom, your living room or your dining room. The downside of a video meeting from anywhere is that your physical space may be infiltrated by random people, maybe curious children as Robert E. Kelly of Pusan National University in South Korea famously experienced! 

As teachers, we know that collaborative, inquiry-based activities can promote students’ engagement and enhance problem-solving skills. Shifting our practice from facilitating f2f classroom collaboration to online collaboration may require some extra tools and strategies. Dr Susan Bridges shares her use of e-tools such as concept maps and mind maps for synchronous and asynchronous online collaboration and we have added some more options!

Professor Steve Walsh is one of the fastest creators of ‘teaching videos’ our team has ever seen, and yet his teaching videos are very high quality and engaging. So we ask him to share his video-making secrets.

Thank you for Dr TAI, Chung Pui’s sharing, of how to use Apowersoft to make a video for teaching purposes.

With suspension of classes, we can’t hold our regular classes in a tutorial room or a lecture theatre. Even though we can’t meet up in person, teachers and students can see each other by using remote meeting tools such as Zoom or Skype for Business. However, the dynamic of real-time online learning and teaching is very different from face-to-face classroom interactions, so it is essential to keep the online session productive, interactive, smooth and enjoyable. 

In the last post, we talked about online teaching and learning. When you decide to move your course online, there are many decisions to make. One of those decisions is to choose between asynchronous and synchronous teaching. What is the right combination of each mode of teaching? What are the advantages and disadvantages of each of these approaches?