Distance Education Tips and Tricks During COVID-19

[Stephen Schneiter]

We are experiencing crazy times! So many schools are closing down and many schools are having Spring Break this week uncertain or knowing they will not return to the classroom next week. This may be a challenge to many face-to-face instructors having to switch to a virtual platform for teaching with zero prep time.

We have a great blend of teachers in this community. It would be great if our virtual instructors would share some tips and tricks for getting course up and running quickly. Thanks to @Steve Linthicum for sharing the resources he found for special offers of virtual training services. This is a great start. What other advice can we offer to support teachers facing this task. Suggestions for best practices, tools to use, advice for student engagement, how to for creating screen-casts, or over all suggestions to help students provide guidance to their students.

I know this is a great community! Let's stand together and help each other out!

 

[Stephen Schneiter]

In addition to virual platforms that @Steve Linthicum shared you can add Zoom to thelist as well. This is a very easy tool to get set up and running as well. Provides a chance for teachers and students to meet virtually and teachers go through lessons or demos with screen sharing.

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In an exclusive interview, the billionaire CEO of the world's most popular video conferencing tool discusses working from home, meeting increased demand and what Zoom is doing to help people cope with COVID-19.

www.forbes.com

 

[Rick Butler]

@Stephen Schneiter - Great kickoff post here. This problem is going to require a LOT of out of the box thinking. In the interest of centralizing these things, would you be willing to create a new category under Resources called Virtual Learning (or something like that)? In there, we can place a number of sticky articles and papers to assist folks in sharing how-to's and ideas.

So, for any classroom environment to be viable, we need to to look at this in two dimensions: Didactic Content Delivery and Hands-On Training. Didactic is easy, really. Hands-On simulation tools would be a fair bit trickier, but if we go through each set of objectives, maybe craft labs and simulations, we might be able to make this work well.

To start, here are a couple of resources to harvest ideas - thanks that came up in meetings we had today. I haven't completely vetted these but they are good compilations that have surfaced out there:

Free Online Resources for Schools

Here are free online resources for schools, educators and administrators that can be used anywhere to ensure students keep learning.

schoolchoiceweek.com

Remote Teaching Resources for Business Continuity - Google Drive

docs.google.com

 

[Stephen Schneiter]

Many of you remember the Linux+ TTT last year. Jason Eckert, the instructor who taught that series and eventually won the coveted CIN Outstanding Instructor 2019 award shared a blog post about surviving virtual instruction. There are some good pointers here so be sure to check it out and share some of your own!

https://triosdevelopers.com/jason.eckert/blog/Entries/2020/3/16_Online_teaching_advice_from_a_veteran.html

 

[Scott.Hooper]

A+ Core1 Certmaster Remove Hands on Labs

If the hands-on-labs in the Certmaster could be changed to video links showing the skills exercised in the hands-on-labs, students would not feel they are missing out on so much of the material.

 

[Stephen Schneiter]

Kind of like just walking through the labs via video. Good suggestion. Will pass along.

 

[Vic Phares]

Many of you remember the Linux+ TTT last year. Jason Eckert, the instructor who taught that series and eventually won the coveted CIN Outstanding Instructor 2019 award shared a blog post about surviving virtual instruction. There are some good pointers here so be sure to check it out and share some of your own!

https://triosdevelopers.com/jason.eckert/blog/Entries/2020/3/16_Online_teaching_advice_from_a_veteran.html

That link is dead.

 

[Stephen Schneiter]

That link is dead.

Thanks Vic for catching that. Looks like the article was moved. Here is an updated link. https://jasoneckert.github.io/myblog/getting-the-most-out-of-your-online-course/

 

[Cyber Russ]

We are experiencing crazy times! So many schools are closing down and many schools are having Spring Break this week uncertain or knowing they will not return to the classroom next week. This may be a challenge to many face-to-face instructors having to switch to a virtual platform for teaching with zero prep time.

We have a great blend of teachers in this community. It would be great if our virtual instructors would share some tips and tricks for getting course up and running quickly. Thanks to @Steve Linthicum for sharing the resources he found for special offers of virtual training services. This is a great start. What other advice can we offer to support teachers facing this task. Suggestions for best practices, tools to use, advice for student engagement, how to for creating screen-casts, or over all suggestions to help students provide guidance to their students.

I know this is a great community! Let's stand together and help each other out!

Looks good. Thank you for sharing!

 

[David Pfaehler]

Virtual Teen Tech Boot Camps
This year we were awarded money to train interested high school students in the A+ curriculum. Previous years we did this F2F but Covid changed all that this year. For the first time we had to quickly go virtual and we leveraged CompTIA's instructor lead e-learning bundles. We have so far enrolled almost 100 students since June. I'm happy to answer any questions about the program and how we did our "instructor led" part but the one thing I did want to mention is a hands on component that we used. Typically in the classroom the students are putting together a kit computer they will take home at the end of class. Because this was all virtual we decided not to do that but we did replace it with something. As students progressed thru the 1001 material when they reached the 80% completion i dropped shipped a Raspberry PI 4 desktop computer with a 7" monitor. These devices are fun, easy to use and come with great instructions while giving the students a Linux environment to learn in. It was just one way to entice continued participation in class and enhance their hands on learning in this virtual world of instruction.

David
Academic Program Director
Midlands Technical College
Columbia SC