Due to the policies established to prevent the spread of Covid-19, traditional brick-and-mortar teaching were forced to pivot to online teaching models. The majority of teachers had to cope with digitizing their resources and learning how to navigate learning management systems (LMS). Teachers teaching at schools that already offer blended or online learning, like myself, continued to utilize pre-built online courses on established LMS, thus can focus on other aspects of online teaching. The direction I decided upon was towards how I could enhance studentsā participation in active learning in online environments.
Along with my fellow teachers at our high school, Iāve noticed that students across all subject areas and grade levels were more engaged with the courses during in-person attendance when compared to learning online at home. This issue was further highlighted when we saw students who performed strongly before Covid-19 mandates, begin to slip both in terms of class engagement and academic performance. This discrepancy can be explained using Aokiās (1993) idea of ācurriculum-as-plannedā which does not incorporate the āliving-curriculumā. While the pre-built courses I use are created by BC Teachers and reflect the new BC Curriculum, they were still designed for āfaceless people in a homogenous realmā (Aoki, 1993). When implemented as-is into the classroom, some students would find it difficult to digest the information either due to abstract language or concept, or find it demotivating as they are unable to see how it connects to their lives. Students possess their own living-curriculumā according to Aoki, which is based on their individualities and interests. Previous face-to-face instruction time were successful because I was able to act as the bridge between the two curricula, in order to keep students engaged and motivated. When things moved to being fully online, this connection was disrupted and rarely did the latter curricula present itself. My management of the digital classroom started with good intentions, but ultimately exacerbated the issue of disengagement when students were learning at home.
One of the biggest perceived advantages of online courses is the flexibility of learning anytime and anyplace. Sheail (2018) and Kirkwood (2000) argues against that notion as students have limits in both time and space for which they can participate in online learning. Some challenges include having proper hardware like laptops and a stable internet connection to participate in digital classrooms. Students need to parley with their family on when and who has the highest priority in terms of accessing those resources. With these barriers in mind, I created optional drop-in times for synchronous meetings to avoid conflicting schedules for students and their families. They would interact with course readings and activities asynchronously as before and could ask me through video chat if they needed individual support. Yet this resulted in students becoming isolated in the online classroom. The First Nationās perspective of societies is that its members see themselves as being āsynecdochic rather than moreā¦ metonymic (Weaver, 2000)ā (Donald, 2009); individual identity is driven by how a person see themselves contribute to community. My methods had accomplished the opposite where students only see and interact with the course content. They were simply another person in a course, like a replaceable cog in a machine. Lack of motivation to engage in the course becomes understandable as they continue to treat the concepts as being abstract, with no cause or effect in their daily lives. If I were to work backwards from the end goal of having students actively engaged in online learning, I need elicit a sense of curiosity or interest in the topic at hand. To do this, I need students to see how the topic connects to our daily lives in some form. Lastly, I can draw upon the collective class community to help students feel connected and share their living-curriculum as a starting point to guide discussions towards course topics.
Reflecting upon my failure in the past school year, my shortcomings have been rationalized through perspectives shown from the literature. Offering freedom to engage in the class asynchronously and the lack of promoting shared community spaces for class use were the most likely reasons for why students did not succeed online. The latter factor will require exploring meaningful, easy-to-use, district-approved tools that allow for both synchronous and asynchronous discussion; and promote its use in the course. The former point will require scaling back the freedom by designating short, but mandatory, meetings times to ensure students are not being isolated in the online classroom. I strongly believe that these two changes will be beneficial in engaging students in active learning online, both during and after this period uncertainty what education will look like going forward.
References:
Aoki, T. (1993). Legitimating lived curriculum: Towards a curricular landscape of multiplicity. Journal of Curriculum and Supervision, Spring 1993, Vol. 8, No. 3, 255-268
Donald, D. (2009). “The Curricular Problem of Indigenousness: Colonial Frontier Logics, Teacher Resistances, and The Acknowledgment of Ethical Space”. In Beyond āPresentismā. Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill | Sense. doi: https://doi.org/10.1163/9789460910012_004
Kirkwood, A. (2000). Learning at Home with Information and Communication Technologies. Distance Education, 21(2), 248ā259. https://doi.org/10.1080/0158791000210204
Sheail, P. (2018). The Digital University and the Shifting TimeāSpace of the Campus. Learning, Media and Technology, 43(1), 56ā69. https://doi.org/10.1080/17439884.2017.1387139