RRTTTSL

I'm currently taking a course about teaching students online. As an exercise, I tried adapting an in-person class activity to be online asynchronous. My layout utilizes a conceptual structure developed by Martha Ramirez (2020).

There were two major changes I made to the original format of this activity. First, in the original, in-person activity, the instructor provided students with a single worksheet to complete as a group. The intent was for students to hand-write their notes into the worksheet as they discussed in person. Adapting this to an asynchronous session required implementing a straightforward way for each student to share their thinking with the rest of the group. Building a collaborative document together seemed like an effective way to do this, as it would allow everyone to see what the other group members were thinking and could also be reviewed by the instructor as an artifact at the completion of the activity. Thus, the assignment shifted to using Google Drive to host a collaborative cloud document. However, this adaptation also required that someone be be assigned the role of creating and sharing a single collaborative document with the group. I included this detail in the “Roles” section of the assignment document.

Second, in the original activity format, students were asked to formulate questions they would want to ask the patient to gather more information to help confirm or invalidate their differential diagnoses, and then ask them to their group to practice as if they were the actual patient. Because this was done in-person, the other groupmates could supply at-the-moment feedback to the question asker. This prompt feedback was not possible in an asynchronous activity, but I wanted to make sure to provide the peer-to-peer feedback in some way. For this I selected an easy-to-use video recording tool called Flip, which would allow students to easily record themselves asking the questions and then receive written feedback from the group. However, I again needed to address the question of who would be assigned the responsibility of setting up the Flip group. I decided to address this again by assigning the setup of the Flip group as a role.

Third, I would note a couple of areas that experienced minor changes in comparison to the original assignment. One minor change was that the estimated time for completion of the asynchronous activity was much longer than the synchronous session. This was partly because each student had certain amounts of prep work to account for, such as opening a separate Google Doc or recording in Flip; however the main reason is because the synchronous activity was part of a larger event which required a quicker turnaround. The flexibility of asynchronous activities might be a consideration if you’re planning an activity that promotes more deliberative work and reflection.

Another minor change between the two activities is that the number of roles was reduced for the asynchronous activity. This is because most of everyone in the asynchronous activity needed to do all the steps of the activity. However, the asynchronous activity also required creation of two new roles to facilitate use of certain technologies, as noted earlier.

Finally, I would note a few areas that didn’t change. First, the big picture Task of each event was essentially the same – the goals of the activity did not change. Second, the language we wanted students to focus on did not change either; again, though the medium for the activity shifted, the learning objectives did not. I would like to note that in my activity graphics, the language is sparse due to my lack of subject-matter expertise. A subject matter expert (SME) would have a better sense of what academic language would be the focus of the session, and as an ID I would reach out to my SMEs to clarify what language should be the focus of the activity.

You may note that my layout design is relatively simple in structure. The intent of this design was to be easy to read for students, conform to university branding styles, and work in a platform that is well known by faculty, e.g. PowerPoint or Google Slides, to facilitate adoption during activity creation. If you would like to use this slide layout for your own activity overviews, you can download a copy of this one. I would suggest that you adjust the colors based on your school’s branding standards, and of course replace the logo with your own!

References:

TESOL CALL-IS. (2020, December 8). Tech tips webinar: Flipped instruction in the virtual English classroom with Martha Ramirez [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NpIiSVYoIl8