Does Synchronous Teaching Really Encourage More Active Learning and Engagement?

When I heard the team said that research found out that online learning encouraged more active learning and engagement, I was skeptical toward that statement. For me, it was a bit of over-generalized and idealistic. Despite of this, I benefited a lot from last week's tech talk about synchronous teaching.

I was fascinated by the creative idea of using Second Life as a teaching tool. For a long time, I viewed Second Life as a pure virtual video game. It was against the reality and allured people to lead an imagined life which could be a waste of time.  Yet after listening to the team tech talk, I changed my attitude toward this kind of social video game. This is actually a game that can help a instructor construct a visual classroom online. With avatars and instant interaction between instructor and classmates, Second life becomes a very funny teaching and learning platform. It is especially suitable for visual person who mainly learns through viewing and pictures (I am that type of person and that's why I like Second Life more than those two-way audio web-based synchronous teaching tools).

Therefore, in the future, I would consider to integrate Second Life in my online courses.  But I still have several concerns here. First of all, how to prevent distraction? To use this video game to teach, all my students have to create an individual account for it. Then is it possible that I actively lead my students into temptation that can discourage their learning by consuming lots of their time? Second, how about those students who are auditory and have difficulties to learn in virtual world? Is it possible that this kind of virtual teaching environment can adversely affect their learning process...?

Flipping the Classroom

Ah....... I don't know what it means....I even need to look up the dictionary to understand the word "flip"...

Well, maybe it's about changing the relationship between the students and the lecturer...????

Okay, I got the idea after the Tech Talk, and I think I am an "expert" on flipping the class. I create lots of Group Project Work Days for students to do their group assignments in class. Both students and I like this class management strategy very much. For example, they developed more interest to the research after having hands-on experiences and I have more time to relax. >.<

 But the challenge is that most of the students didn't read the material before coming to the class. Yet that's a possiblity that I have already expected. For example, I wanted my students to know how to conduct a focus group so I gave them three group project work days for doing it. Yet students didn't put enough effort on reading the example of moderator's guide before attending the class to create questions with their group members. I knew that it would adversely affect their conducting the focus group research later but I was not worried about it. Why? because students would take the lesson later after they finished conducting the focus group research. Without a well-prepared moderator's guide, they came up with many unexpected problems: no enough probes; conversation always went off the track... Timing problem.... etc. In such way, students would finally learn the disadvantages of treating the Moderator's guide too casual. Then I achieved my teaching goal at the end.