Title: Learner-centred studying in synchronous situations
Course: Digivisio - DEMO course template > Section: Activating learners

E-learning courses often contain synchronous learning situations, meaning learners are either with the teacher in the “same classroom” at the time, using for example Teams or Zoom. These are often called “online lectures,” but often other ways of teaching are more effective than lecturing, or at least lecturing must contain other activities as well.

Teacher-led learning situation

It is easy to share information, show PowerPoint slides and so on using a video conferencing tool. However, the learners can very easily feel like they are “participating” just by being “present,” logged in, and at the same time doing something else entirely. Teachers do not always see their learners during online meetings. Educational institutions often have their own rules regarding the use of cameras, but it is very difficult to force the learners to do it.

Learners must then be activated, almost all the time. This is also a great moment to find out if they are actually present at all.

Some examples of how to activate learners in synchronous online situations:

- right in the beginning, ask an icebreaker question, which everybody needs to answer either through microphone or using chat. For example: What did you have for breakfast today? What is your favourite movie and why? What skill would you like to learn? What are you especially good at? Have a file with a bunch of questions prepared, so you don’t have to think about them each time.
- using breakout rooms and working on a task together. Also, checking to see what was done using e.g. Flinga or Padlet. This requires giving the learners enough time! If the learners do not know each other at all, it takes them some time just to introduce themselves. They cannot get anything done in just five minutes, so give them plenty of time. You can also visit the rooms while the learners are working to make sure they actually are working: this of course varies a lot depending on the group.
- studying materials before the online session, and having a discussion based on the materials, either in small groups or all together. Some way of summarising the findings should be used here as well. Flipped classroom works well, but it does require the learners to absolutely study the materials before coming to the online session.
- learners work on a topic in groups and present it to others.
- using surveys and polls. Zoom has its own “poll” function, or you can use some other external tool, such as Kahoot or Socrative. The information security rules of the educational institution must be considered here, though – not all tools are allowed in all educational institutions.
- asking the learners questions during the learning session. Get answers either through microphone or in chat. In online learning sessions, it is vital to keep an eye on chat all the time, as learners often use it to ask questions, and it enables the more quiet learners to participate as well.
- asking rhetorical questions. “Think about this: have you ever encountered a situation where…?”
- asking the learners to react using Teams/Zooms reaction buttons or adding a suitable emoji/gif into the chat. This can be used to check if at least somebody, somewhere is still awake and listening.

In an ideal synchronous e-learning situation, there would be more than one teacher present. They could focus on different areas, for example one keeps track of the chat and answers questions there, or one can be in the “main room” to help learners there while the other goes into the breakout rooms and sees what is happening. In practice, this type of tandem teaching is sadly rare, but it its an alternative worth considering.

Sitting in an online classroom is tiring, and the term “Zoom fatigue” was coined in 2020. Having enough breaks is even more important than in a classroom. Many guidelines suggest having a break every 30 minutes, but an hour is an absolute maximum without a break. The breaks also need to be long enough: a 5 minute break for 4 hours of studying is not enough. The participants, yourself included, need to have time to get up properly and maybe even get a coffee.

For more information about Zoom fatigue, see the Standford article.

Recording lectures

Sometimes recording an online lecture is necessary and even useful. However, the aspects of accessibility and privacy of the people present must be considered.

Accessibility must be considered both in the (potentially used) PowerPoint slides as well as in the subtitling of the video. Moodle has the Panopto tool, which creates quite good automatic captions, but they still need to be checked manually. The font of any slides used must be large enough, and of course it is a good idea to also share the slides in an accessible format, perhaps as a PDF.

If you record the lecture with no learner present, privacy is not a problem. However, if there are learners present, you must tell them that you are recording the lecture and that they have the right not to be seen in the lecture. This may make the learners more hesitant to, for example, ask questions.

Instead of offering lecture videos, consider making short, 2-3 minute videos. Learners tend to watch these more and they are a great way to activate learners. You also need to focus on what is really important in a short video like this, and this also enables learners to focus on the essentials. For example: this is how this mathematic formula works/this is the structure of a good pitch/this is how you create the past perfect form in English.
Experience has shown that recording lectures might not be worth the time and effort. Although learners might say they will watch the recording instead of coming to class, they do not necessarily do so. In almost all video tools, it is possible to see how many views a video has got, and if there are only 1-2 views, you can be certain that the entire group has not listened to your materials. So instead, consider having activating learning sessions, which are not recorded. Activating the learners “in class” usually leads to better learning results and also saves you time.