6 Ideas to Help Keep Lessons Fresh and Facilitate Online Learning

Teaching university-level classes in the current COVID-19 environment can be tricky. In a great many universities, students are confined to dorm rooms or learning from their home computers except in rare instances when they’re allowed to venture into classrooms. With teaching and learning now following an online or hybrid model, professors are challenged to teach material in an entirely new way.

For instructors, the transition to mostly online learning requires adapting lessons, lectures and materials to be consumed by students learning remotely. Some of these materials can be easily tweaked, while others may need to be completely overhauled. While adapting lessons might seem like a Herculean effort, you might want to think of it as an opportunity to up your teaching game with new strategies and by incorporating new materials.  

Infusing online lesson delivery with new energy doesn’t need to be difficult or labor-intensive. The Center for Teaching Innovation at Cornell University suggests some ideas that can help professors transition from a classroom learning model to online course delivery while keeping lessons fresh, collaborative and compelling.

1. Audio: Simply using audio in creative ways can enliven lessons. Try including audio to provide feedback, narrate a PowerPoint presentation or an expert interview. Audio can also humanize an asynchronous discussion so it’s less robotic.
2. Blogs and Wikis: Use blogs to publish content and allow users to content and spark conversation. Wikis provide a collaborative space where content can be added, edited and removed.
3. Citation management and social bookmarking: Organize the content for your course using citation management and social bookmarking. You can also use these tools to give learners a way to share and create resources for the course.
4. Synchronous sessions: Develop a sense of community and increase student engagement with synchronous sessions. Invite an outside speaker, do role playing, analyze a case study or demonstrate on a white board, for instance.
5. Share photos: Photo sharing can be a great icebreaker activity. Ask students to share photos of favorite places, use photos to create a virtual field trip or use photos with a prompt and ask students to collaboratively write a story.  
6. Video: You can incorporate video in online lessons in myriad ways. For instance, you can use web conferencing for lectures, holding office hours or for student group work. Lecture capture tools such as Panopto, for instance, can help you capture and share videos to supplement lectures and spark student interest.