Five top learning experiences about remote teaching

Remote teaching is at the core of Winc Academy. Due to the Corona crisis, many educational institutions will have to integrate online teaching into their business operations.

Remote teaching is different from classroom teaching. This new form of education therefore poses many questions. How do you ensure that students remain fascinated, or how do you create a sense of group? Online teaching should be as enjoyable as possible for everyone. We shared our five top learning experiences to make remote teaching as smooth as possible. Read the article at computable.nl or continue reading below!

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Due to the current lockdown, remote education has quickly become part of our lives. And it's here to stay. Learning will change dramatically, as the experts expect from remote trainer Winc Academy. And that's good, because e-learning can mean so much in our society where “lifelong learning” plays an increasingly important role. At Winc Academy, all lessons are remote, because everyone in the Netherlands should have the opportunity to follow a course.

What can the world learn from Winc Academy about remote learning?

Remote teaching is fundamentally different from simply “teaching in a classroom with a camera on it”. That's why we find new answers to key questions such as “how do you get students to actively participate?” , “how do you keep students engaged?” , “how do you work on a sense of group?” , “how do we make sure people don't get tired of spending a whole day behind a screen?” , “how do you build up a week?” and “how do you organize a day?” How to do that is partly about what technical tools you use, but even more about how to build the course and best guide the group.

We have a few practical solutions that are worth sharing.

• Good idea: Stay in constant contact. Create a chat channel alongside the video channel, for example via Slack. Here, people can continuously ask questions and post other responses to the content, even outside of class times. You can create a separate chat channel for each theme. Help people ask questions in a good way and make sure they ask dare to ask.
• Indispensable: Silent feedback in video call. A call with a large group of participants can quickly become chaotic. You can prevent this chaos with “One microphone open at a time” combined with sign language for those who have been muted. Recognizable gestures work faster than un-muting and the result is quieter (for the speaker and other participants). Make gesture agreements for, for example, “I don't hear you” or “completely agree”. An additional advantage: More agility leads to greater involvement. Set up your video session so that everyone can see each other at the same time, which is called “Grid view” in many video calling software.
• Smart: See in no time if the whole class has understood you. One advantage of remote teaching is that you can quickly see if everyone understands it. At Winc, we regularly ask for “thumbs up” feedback in Slack. Or we ask control questions that everyone in the chat or poll answers. This way, we quickly see how many students understood and how many did not. Moreover, it is socially safer for students to give a thumbs down than to raise your finger and express your misunderstanding in front of the group.
• Good to know: Long videos are boring. In addition to live remote teaching, you can also pre-record the course material and possibly reuse it. Don't make these videos too long. A video of a “talking head” or “static image” loses most viewers' attention. Cutting them into shorter fragments that you alternate with assignments or other interactive elements works better. Or combine speaking and screen viewing.
• Note: E-learning works better in small groups. E-learning does not just mean that the lecturer explains and supervises. At Winc Academy, we see that students can easily help each other remotely, and want to help each other easily. What helps with this is the fact that we pre-determine that everyone has a buddy they are in direct contact with and that we divide people into small groups of 4-5 people. Mutual engagement does not always come naturally; as a teacher, you should sometimes encourage that by, for example, designating buddies.

We are at the beginning of a revolution.

E-learning is going to radically change education, we're just getting started. Remote education offers teachers extra opportunities to streamline the learning process. And this way, students can easily learn or make a switch in their career. Lifelong learning is possible with individual learning paths that are different for everyone. Measuring is knowing, and the computer can measure much more than offline. Based on this, we can make truly personal learning and future plans in the future.

In addition to its full-time remote programming course of six weeks, Winc Academy now also offers flexible training, in subscription form.