E-learn Weblog of Willem van Valkenburg

Yesterday I wrote about the ambiguous times for online learning. I received a lot of positive feedback on it. During the day my former team of Teaching & Learning Services has been working on a quick guide for our TU Delft lecturers. The page offers suggestions for them on how to continue offering education in a remote setting including a list of all the tools.

Teaching & Learning Services

In 2018 this team was created as a merger of different support groups. It is a team of 30 staff members and many student assistants who support both campus as online education. That means that the team already has extensive knowledge about online education and the learning technology to support this. To give an idea about what we have:

• First-line support is manned by trained student assistants. Regular occupation is 4 per shift, but this can be scaled up.
• We have four Learning Technology Support Officers (1 on maternity leave) who are responsible for the support website, documentation, more advanced questions and digital exam creation in MapleTA. They make the connection with other experts of Functional Management, ICT and Learning Developers.
• We have two Instructional Designers who know everything about the platforms and the integrated tools we support. That is Brightspace for campus courses and (open)edX for our Extension School courses.
• We have 14 Learning Developers who are all pedagogical experts and experienced in designing and running blended and online courses.

And I shouldn't forget the two coordinators, who are doing a great job in organising and prioritising all the activities. Since 1st of March they also are acting managers of the team until there is a new me. They are definitely up to the task!

Creating this team, and integration support for both campus and online courses, seems to be a really good decision in the current situation. It makes me proud to see what they are doing in these challenging times and how they are helping our lecturers.

Extra support

We are aware that these are special times and that is why we prioritized the support of lecturers. They even opened up support this weekend:

Weekend Support: from campus to online teaching
As you may have noticed, the web page for teachers has been published yesterday: https://brightspace-support.tudelft.nl/remote-teaching-learning/.

This weekend, extra support for TU Delft lecturers is available. The helpdesk, learning developers, and functional admin are actively supporting teaching staff in moving campus education to online education. This includes email requests for online learning tools, technical queries, as well as didactical advice. All questions can be directed to brightspace@tudelft.nl.

What is really good here is that it is not just the first line support. It is both the technical and didactical second line support as well.

New to remote teaching

For many of our lecturers remote teaching is something completely new. We are working on additional content to help you through this process. The most important advice is that you have to accept that you can't do everything. No one is expecting you to directly replicate your course. You have to focus on what you teach and prioritise on the theoretical concepts. These are relatively easy to convert.
Also, keep the production simple, it is not about being perfect, it is about having something for the students. If you already have a powerpoint slidedeck, recording a voice talking over your powerpoint is simple and easy to do.

One of the challenging things to do online is assessment. Especially if you are coming from written exams. Focus on the alignment of the online assessment to the prioritised learning objectives. The team is working on more extensive information about assessment. We have another 4 weeks before the exam period starts. We can't do everything in a weekend.