Running an online lesson that is not forty minutes of silence

Teaching online is not teaching with a technical inconvenience attached. You have lost the two channels you unconsciously rely on: the faces that tell you when to slow down, and the ambient sound of a room that tells you whether anyone is working. Teach as though they are still there and you will discover at the exam that they were not.

Replace the signals deliberately

Since you cannot read the room, the room has to report. Every few minutes, something must come back from every student, not from a volunteer:

• A poll or a number in the chat. Everyone answers, you see the distribution in five seconds.
• A photo of the working. Solve it, photograph it, send it. Slower, but it shows you the reasoning rather than the answer.
• Named questions in rotation. Announced as normal practice, from a list, so the sample is the class rather than the confident.

The rule is simple: if more than about seven minutes have passed with no evidence coming back, you are broadcasting, not teaching.

Cameras: ask for the work instead

Insisting on cameras is a fight you will partly lose and it does not deliver what you wanted. Many students have a genuine reason (a shared room, a poor connection, family in the background), and a black square with a student answering every check is a student who is working. Judge participation by responses, not by faces.

Shorter, and with a mid-point break

Sustained attention to a screen falls off faster than attention in a room, and there is no social pressure holding a student in place. Sixty minutes online is not sixty minutes in a room. Either shorten the session or break it in the middle, and put the hardest explanation in the first half, where the attention actually is.

Decide what belongs online at all

Explanation transfers well. Drilling, correction and diagnosis transfer poorly. If you teach both online and in person, put the explanation online and keep the room for the parts where you need to see a student thinking. If you only teach online, build the reporting habits above, because they are the substitute.

Sources

• UNESCO — Education
• OECD — Education and Skills