Distance Education Tips and Tricks During COVID-19

Stephen Schneiter

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  • Nov 26, 2018
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    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!
     
    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.

     
    @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:

     
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    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!
     
    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
     
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