Melanie Kyle’s best practice suggestions for online teaching

Melanie understands that need for clarity in training and assessments as she teaches both the Certificate IV in EAL (English as an Additional Language) and Certificate IV in Tertiary Preparation which has four streams: Engineering, Science, Business, Legal.

Melanie has given us some notes on what has worked for her when online teaching.

Before class

In preparation for class Melanie regularly checks and updates content in Canvas modules providing a class outline for each weekly session.

An announcement is sent with a link to the upcoming Collaborate Ultra session with pre-work which could require students to watch a video or read a short text giving students an overview of the topic before starting the class.

This is reinforced at the beginning of class with brainstorming on the topic on the Collaborate Whiteboard or sometimes Melanie will use a Kahoot quiz for students to work through reinforcing their knowledge.

In class

For the first class of the semester, Melanie will encourage all students to turn their cameras on and say hello. She also asks them to sign into Collaborate Ultra sessions with their full name and a nickname and aims to get to know each student by name (typical class size is 20-30 students).

She greets each student, helping them to feel engaged and valued. This also helps in tracking attendance, results and each student’s progression.

Melanie often uses breakout groups in Collaborate, these are non-assessed and can be spontaneous. She can jump in and out of the groups and observe how things are going. She uses Microsoft Teams for assessment task preparation, group project work, small group discussions and for students to work together to complete activities.

Melanie checks and responds to questions in the chat box regularly throughout the session and aims to spend the last 15-20 mins of class time answering questions and providing feedback.

Students can submit draft work via the chat box for immediate feedback, similar to the feedback she would give when walking around the classroom reviewing and speaking to individual students. Melanie has also set up non-assessed work submissions in Canvas assignments for students to post draft work for feedback.