Different types of teaching

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With the increasing need for flexibility, academics have a much greater choice in the types of teaching they wish to use to maximise student learning opportunities. The profile of students now enrolling at Southern Cross is such that many academics must embrace teaching at a distance, teaching online, running workshops, and sometimes letting go of the traditionally popular weekly lecture/tutorial combination. For some, the choice is liberating, for others it is threatening. Opportunities to develop skills, experiment, and remain in control of the pace of change are key to academics’ degree of comfort with the teaching process.

Also, students prefer to learn in different ways. One student might relish an excellent lecture and leave the room buzzing with ideas, while another might be unable to learn effectively from one-way communication. The latter student might prefer shorter amounts of lecturer input with individual or small-group activities that help him or her to learn concepts or skills. If you use a variety of activities in your face-to-face teaching, as well as in the development of activities for paper-based and online learning materials, you are more likely to cater for the different learning styles amongst your cohort of students.

a) Lectures

Lectures and other more teacher-controlled activities are suitable when depth of content needs to be presented. It is a way to present the ‘official view’ of the material being studied (Biggs, 1999). Lectures can help students focus on what you, the lecturer, consider is important. You can give information, explain the content, prioritise study material and motivate students to do their private study. A lecture is a demanding and challenging type of activity because it needs to be very well structured and interesting if students are to gain from it. Some lecturers love being ‘on stage’ giving a lecture, while for those who don’t, lecturing produces anxiety. If you choose lectures remember the following:

• Make yourself familiar with the equipment in the lecture theatre. Watch out for training sessions held the week before each semester starts – they will be advertised on the STAFF email. If you miss the training session, contact the Audio-Visual Unit for assistance.
• Stay calm. Concentrate on looking calm – it works. Breathe slowly and deeply.
• Structure the lecture:
  • choose about three points you want to make during the lecture
  • start with an introduction: tell them what you are going to tell them and why
  • break the session up so that you give the participants some activities to do
  • don’t talk for more than 20 minutes at a time as there is a rapid drop off in attention after 20 minutes or so
  • have an ending: summarise what you have covered
  • tell them what is expected in the tutorial and what next week’s lecture will be about.
• • Include activities such as:
  • give students a short article / paper to read and discuss
  • ask some questions
  • write questions from students
  • use ‘buzz’ groups to enliven the proceedings or to generate questions or responses, i.e. a short five-minute discussion break in pairs or triads
  • ask students to solve a problem
  • have students discuss why this issue is important.

Timing: don’t be afraid to finish a bit early if you have made the points you wanted; don’t finish late (lectures are expected to finish 10 minutes before the hour to allow for a smooth transition to the next class).

b) Face-to-face tutorials

Tutorials and workshops are traditionally held in relatively small groups to enable students to explore concepts in their disciplinary area more thoroughly than can be done in large class groups. Tutorials generally follow a lecture, giving students the opportunity to delve more deeply into the concepts raised in the lecture. Workshops can take the same form as tutorials, or replace the lecture/tutorial format. The activities used in tutorials can be applied to large and small groups.

Planning is the key to a well-run tutorial or workshop. Teachers need to think through how their activities will work in practice; whether they will lead to the desired learning; whether they support students towards the assessment tasks; what the pitfalls might be; how long each activity will take; how they will integrate together; and how they link throughout the whole unit.

David Jacques (1992) suggests that if the emphasis is placed on a task or tasks that students complete, the focus transfers from teacher to student without the teacher losing authority. There are many and varied possibilities in the design of tasks, each of which can be adapted for large or small groups in tutorials or workshops. The following is adapted from Jacques (1992, pp. 77–78):

c) Teaching online

Moving a unit and/or teaching to the online environment requires early strategic decision making, preferably in the Design stage of the cycle. By the beginning of a teaching period those of us choosing to teach online need to have made decisions about the following:

• our level of readiness and skill to embark online, and any staff development requirements
• the degree to which we want to integrate our teaching into the online environment
• the approach which underpins the online design – instructivist or constructivist? (See Section 7 ‘Notes from the literature: Learning theories’.)

There are different levels at which we might choose to teach and interact with our students online:

• simply establishing a supportive social presence
• engaging in informal teaching and learning interactions – guiding, prompting, reinforcing, challenging our students
• creating structured online activities which help our students to develop new cognitive strategies
• creating structured online opportunities for collaborative learning.

Most people teaching online for the first time teach at one of the first two levels in order to get acquainted with the environment.

For academics who are new to online teaching the following tips might be useful in relation to online discussions and interactions:

• Don’t lecture in discussion forums. A long sequence of comments (even if logical and correct) often produces silence, just as it does in face-to-face discussion. Use short comments that are open-ended and attract responses.
• Set up the discussion format first. Have everyone, including you, state your expectations. Explain the processes and ‘netiquette’ guidelines.
• Be flexible and patient. Guide the conversation but don’t dominate it.
• At the beginning of the discussion, when students are testing the water and may be unsure about the value of their contribution, make sure every comment has feedback. If no other student replies, you can send a message or refer to a student’s comment in one of your own.
• Include a guest/expert in the discussion at times. Plan how the discussion would work so that the guest’s contribution is maximised. Link student participation to a mark.
• Don’t participate too much. One long comment a day is enough; this won’t be necessary once students are actively contributing. Several short messages are better than a single long entry.
• Monitor and encourage participation. Send private messages to students who are falling behind, or who are reading but not contributing. Make some standards for yourself: for example, if students haven’t signed on for a week or more and don’t respond to your email, phone them.
• Write regular comments that synthesise the discussion; alternatively get students to summarise and focus the discussion at regular intervals.
• Do your electronic housekeeping: move or delete messages that are irrelevant to a particular conference.
• Teach: model the use of subject terminology, point out the relationships between different student postings, relate emerging and tentative ideas to the subject under discussion, encourage responses which show deep learning.
• Send private messages to correct errors which are not shared by others and where public correction might embarrass the student.
• Give marks for participation and state your expectations up front.
• Give individuals or small groups the role of teacher and discussion moderator at times.
• Close and delete past conferences after a time, forewarning students so they can save any messages they want.

Example from the field

At Appendix 14 you will find an example of a set of netiquette guidelines used by one School at SCU.

d) Teaching through print materials

Those lecturers who teach through print-based distance education have probably designed most of the activities for their units before they are ‘delivered’ to students. Many of the activities discussed in this section can be adapted for use in distance education. Students use the study guides, texts and readings in different ways according to their learning styles, their approach to the assessment tasks, the time they have available for study, and other individual learning needs. Activities are usually built into study guides to challenge and prompt students to interact with their learning materials in such a way as to produce deep learning. (See the ‘Design’ section of this Guide for more details.)

Although well-designed learning materials are crucial to effective distance education, it is equally important that distance learners get academic support during the semester/trimester. You need to think through how to support learners in distance education, and integrate your academic support with administrative support.

It is important to appreciate the intellectual, social and sometimes psychological isolation of distance learners. Students who study by paper-based distance education can feel isolated from their co-learners, their lecturers and tutors and from the University as a whole. Many visit the University campus for the first time when they attend their graduation ceremony. Some Schools at SCU prepare networking lists, arranged geographically, within Privacy Act guidelines to allow students to contact each other.

Interaction between lecturers and students is often one-to-one by email or telephone. The telephone can also be used for conferencing with groups of students. Residential schools or weekend workshops can provide an opportunity for students to meet co-learners and University academics. You can also enhance the quality of the learning experiences of distance education students through online discussion forums on MySCU.

e) One-to-one telephone or email teaching for distance students

• Contact each distance student by email or telephone in the first few weeks of the semester/trimester. Students need to be assured that they are welcome and encouraged to make contact with their lecturers and tutors. Their anxieties can be allayed early and questions about unit objectives and assessment tasks can be answered. Your School or Division policy on extensions of time for submission of assessment tasks should be made clear at this early stage.
• Monitor student progress and provide timely feedback throughout a unit or course.
• Be friendly and welcoming to students even when their calls interrupt you at a busy moment. It is a good idea to keep your student lists and notes about student progress close to the telephone.
• Always return student calls. One of the major criticisms expressed by distance education students is the frustration they feel when repeated calls are not returned.
• Remember that even though you might have had a similar discussion many times before with other students in the unit, the current student regards their call or email as a fresh query or concern.
• Although distance education students are often busy people who want quick answers when they call, guide them into finding their own solutions to academic problems by using questioning and prompting techniques or by suggesting enrichment tasks.
• Offer advice about approaches to learning to students who need help with how to learn from the materials you provided.
• Help students to get support from other people who might be able to help them with their studies, e.g. work colleagues, family, friends, community members, professional bodies.
• If you keep getting the same question from different students about your expectations for an assessment task, it might be worthwhile sending out a memo by mail or a group email to the whole cohort with clarification to prevent any further misunderstanding.
• Ask students about what further support they need. They might not tell you without prompting.
• Be aware of the University’s specialist services and refer students to them when it is appropriate.
• Finally, liaise with relevant administrative staff. The total distance education learning experience involves the administrative management of sending out materials, receiving, recording and returning assignments etc. in parallel with academic teaching and support.

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