What does it mean to be an online teacher? How is a virtual classroom different from an in-person classroom? Are online teachers and in-person teachers the same people? Online teachers possess specific skills and competencies that allow their knowledge to translate effectively from a physical classroom to a digital one.
I spent my teenage years waiting for a letter that never came—an owl-delivered offer of admission from Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. At the muggle elementary school I attended, we brewed no potions and flew no brooms. We studied basic arithmetic and practiced forming cursive letters in longhand. We learned serious subjects from serious textbooks.
You’re in a Zoom meeting. Your posture is first-rate, and the forty-three muscles in your face are contracted to deliver an expression that’s saying, “There’s nowhere in the world I’d rather be.” We’ve all been there. And then, at the precise moment that your meeting ends, it’s as though a flip had been switched: your entire body relaxes back to its regular home-office slouch, and your facial expression returns to its neutral position. Maybe you even change back into your pyjamas.
Intelligent adaptive learning is the modern version of personalized learning whose first traces date back to the 19th century. Powered by artificial intelligence, this customized learning can tailor training to a learner's particular profile, needs and interests. Above all, it can generate in real-time the learning path that is most likely to enable the learner to achieve his or her objectives.
Occasionally, that’s what this pandemic-inspired solitude feels like: a punishment. And what’s more upsetting than a punishment for a crime you did not commit? Such are the conditions that many students and educators have endured for almost a year. It is easy to think of remote learning—specifically, remote learning that is not “voluntary”—as something of a relegation into unfamiliar educational territory.
Disruptive, challenging, or from some perspectives even terrifying are just a few of the labels that can easily be attached to last year's impact on our society. First and foremost, hit by what it still is a health crisis, 2020 has proven to be a problematic year with wide-ranging repercussions on many levels of our daily lives.
Flexibility is one of the greatest assets of eLearning. It allows the learners to choose the place and, in asynchronous mode, the time that suits them to advance in their learning path. That said, eLearning offers other forms of flexibility that are less known. Here is a mini glossary that might help you understand them better!
For most of us, empathy evokes the ability to put ourselves in the other person's shoes, to try to understand what the other is going through. This important component of interpersonal relationships is sometimes confused with sympathy, compassion or altruism, but it can also be related to these concepts.
Questions are essential for effective teaching, especially when they invite the learner to engage in high-level reflection. Well-formulated questions can also become a powerful tool for assessing teaching and learning. To guide you through this important exercise, here are some sample questions presented by level of difficulty and question type.
Learning is increasingly taking place in a technology-driven mode, whether or not it is combined with traditional classroom settings. Since this trend will become more prominent in the years to come, it is worthwhile to become familiar with these new realities. Here is a mini glossary of terms that will help you do just that.
