Hints and tips for remote teaching
This month's top tip for encouraging student engagement:
Are you planning your synchronous teaching sessions for this semester? Are you wondering how to make them more engaging for students? Webex Meetings has a breakout room feature which allows you to break up your cohort into smaller groups for more in depth discussions or collaborative work. Use breakout rooms in Microsoft Teams meetings.
Below are some hints and tips to consider if you are teaching remotely.
Support for your wellbeing and mental health
Support for your wellbeing and mental health
- Look after yourself! Here are some links to articles about home working/working remotely:
- There is advice for students in this twitter feed:
- Remote working: set yourself up for success. Remember you have access to LinkedIn Learning (formerly Lynda.com), here’s a great collection to dip into:
- Ok is fantastic – don’t strive for perfection in your teaching during an emergency.
Motivation - keep your students engaged
Motivation - keep your students engaged
- Set up a discussion board and encourage students to post to it. Think about awarding a Brightspace badge for everyone’s first post.
- Challenge students to create a digital artefact e.g. PowerPoint video, based around a learning objective. Can be done individually or in pairs.
- Ask students to use household items e.g. Lego, utensils, recycling, to represent a concept, take a photo and post it to a discussion.
- Find some OERs, interesting articles, or websites, post them to the discussion board and ask students to find and post at least two more of their own.
- Set students a challenge, for example an informational treasure hunt with Brightspace badges as prizes. For more information and ideas, refer to our Brightspace Awards guidance.
- Encourage your students to support their peers. Here is some useful Peer Support information provided by the Student Engagement Team that you may consider directing your students to.
- Consider using ClickView television recordings. ClickView allows you to create interactive videos with quiz questions or annotations. For more general information about ClickView, refer to the UHI ClickView help pages.
- Work on making sure that students have a sense of belonging while they are learning online. For more information check out QAA Scotland's ‘Developing a Sense of Belonging in Online Distance Learning Toolkit’. The university, through the LTA, developed this open toolkit in conjunction with colleagues at University of Dundee, Edinburgh Napier University, Open University in Scotland and Queen Margaret University. It contains a range of activities, exemplars and guidelines for supporting cohorts of online and distance learners, including examples and a case study from UHI.
Asynchronous (teaching and learning not all at the same time)
Asynchronous (teaching and learning not all at the same time)
- Take full advantage of the University’s learning environment, Brightspace. If you have never used it, there should be a teaching space ready and waiting for you when you log in to Brightspace. See our Quick start guide to get started.
- Everyone doesn’t have to be online at the same time, remember to acknowledge and accommodate a range of personal circumstances and allow students to learn at times that suit them.
- Ask students to create a quiz or set an activity for their fellow students that will help them to get to grips with a key concept for example - give them a list to choose from.
- Ask your students to contribute to a Brightspace glossary.
- In addition to the activities mentioned above, please refer to the LTA's Benchmarks for the Use of Technology for Learning and Teaching. These benchmarks provide guidance and exemplars for the effective use of the university’s Virtual Learning Environment Brightspace and other technologies for learning and teaching in pedagogically sound and evidence-based ways. Download the Benchmarks document from the website to find a range of tried and tested activities for online learning and teaching.
The new UHI Learning and Teaching Enhancement Strategy 2022-27 was launched in autumn 2022. Learning and Teaching is currently working on updating the Benchmarks for the use of Technology in Learning and Teaching which are based on the Learning and Teaching Enhancement strategy. This guidance refers to the previous version of the Benchmarks and will be updated during the current academic year. Until this guidance is updated to reflect the new Benchmarks please feel confident to continue using it.
Synchronous (teaching and learning all at the same time)
Synchronous (teaching and learning all at the same time)
- Keep synchronous teaching to the minimum, check out the alternatives. Please also refer to the LTA's Benchmarks for the Use of Technology for Learning and Teaching. These benchmarks provide guidance and exemplars for the effective use of the university’s Virtual Learning Environment Brightspace and other technologies for learning and teaching in pedagogically sound and evidence-based ways. Download the Benchmarks document from the website to find a range of tried and tested activities for online learning and teaching.
The new UHI Learning and Teaching Enhancement Strategy 2022-27 was launched in autumn 2022. Learning and Teaching is currently working on updating the Benchmarks for the use of Technology in Learning and Teaching which are based on the Learning and Teaching Enhancement strategy. This guidance refers to the previous version of the Benchmarks and will be updated during the current academic year. Until this guidance is updated to reflect the new Benchmarks please feel confident to continue using it.
- Don’t try to replicate what you do face-to-face, long online lectures can be exhausting for both students and staff.
Additional tips
- Are you planning your synchronous teaching sessions for next semester? Have a look at the recommendations about format and class size provided on the Synchronous online teaching recommendations page.
- If you would like to learn more about MS Teams, check out Adoption of MS Teams Collaboration in the VLE (Brightspace) (sharepoint.com)
- Building your content for next semester? Try the Brightspace text editing, it can help you create nice looking pages to display your content directly in Brightspace. For more information, refer to the Brightspace HTML editor guide.
- Active engagement: Ask students to create discussion topics or quiz questions for their fellow learners. This writer outlines some benefits she has found.
- Do you find yourself giving different students the same information again and again? If you do, you might like the Brightspace FAQ tool, an ideal way to share information widely. See the guidance in the Brightspace FAQ tool: Staff guide (uhi.ac.uk)
- When you are putting together learning materials for your students, you might not have to start from scratch. You can find many useful Open Educational Resources (OER) on the internet. The LTA has put together a database which you can browse for resources. You can also suggest other OER which you are already using so they can be added to the LTA's list.
- Use discussion fora and topics as 'interactive spaces' where students can discuss activities you have set them and share presentations and links to videos they have created. You can have all students participate in the same discussion forum/topic, or you can let them work in groups by setting up group specific discussion fora/topics.
- Are your students having issues with Brightspace on iPhones or iPads? There are some known issues using certain Brightspace features on these devices which Unidesk can help with. Ask the student to raise a Unidesk ticket 'log a call'.
- When you are working in Brightspace, we recommend that you use Microsoft Edge, Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome or Safari as your browser.
- Post regular announcements- so your students know you're still there - you can do these as video notes too (Staff Quick Start guide > Content int Brightspace)! To make sure students get notified about announcements, tell them to have a look at the student quick start guide to find out how they can customise their notification settings (Student Quick Start guide > Brightspace basics).
- Keep a reflective log - think about what worked well and what didn't in your online teaching and you can tweak as you go.