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Three Questions about the Chaos of "Paid Lessons" (Part Three)
Say goodbye to the coping style, how to take online courses in college
"Paying for lessons" or "I would rather not learn"... Nowadays, there are more and more discussions about online classes for college students.
Behind some college students’ “coping-style brushing”, there are many “low-quality online courses” with long time, boring content, and rigid assessments that are rampant on campus. Many university teachers and professionals are also discussing and reflecting on online courses in universities. What went wrong.
Can online classes replace the teacher's normal teaching?
How should university teachers set and arrange the proportion of online and offline courses?
How should online courses guarantee the quality of teaching?
Recently, a reporter from China Youth Daily and China Youth Daily interviewed a number of university teachers and experts to discuss the correct way to open online courses.
Online class is not to throw a library for students, let students watch it casually
Today, the number of online MOOCs on relevant platforms in my country has increased to 32,000, with 490 million learners and 140 million students receiving MOOC credits.
The volume of online teaching is huge, and it is becoming more and more present in daily teaching.
What role should online courses play?
Guo Wenge, an associate professor at the School of Education of Peking University, has long studied online education. She told China Youth Daily and China Youth Daily that people usually regard online courses and face-to-face courses as two major types of courses. Online courses are also divided into many different forms. Large-scale online courses based on recorded videos are actually more like a "video reading" behavior rather than a course teaching behavior.
Guo Wenge said that the main task of developing and designing common online courses is to record "video teaching resources", and there is no or only a small number of interactive teaching activities.
This kind of course is essentially a kind of digital "reading material".
Without the management of the teaching process and timely inspection, feedback and evaluation, just providing "reading materials" will not automatically bring about an effective teaching process.
"We can't throw a library to the students and tell them'you can watch it'." Guo Wenge said.
In her opinion, because of this, most of the online courses that are "based on teaching resources" have relatively low student participation and the quality of online teaching is not high.
Guo Wenge stated that under the premise that “teaching video” is only a kind of digital “reading material”, university teachers need to consider a reasonable learning burden when arranging online course learning tasks for students, just like pointing out the key chapters of reading. Specify which part of the video you want to watch, and design a series of "digital writing" activities such as video reading reports and use mind maps to refine the content structure, so that you can personally check the effects of the "video" that students watch. Evaluation, thereby constructing a dynamic and continuous learning process, this is what an excellent online course should look like.
In addition, Guo Wenge pointed out that there is actually a type of online courses that "focus on learning activities". In this type of online courses, the teacher basically does not record videos, but chooses excellent textbooks in the same way as in classroom teaching. , Cut out the excellent video resources on the Internet, and then rely on the teaching platform and network communication tools to carefully design a series of teacher-student/student-student interaction "teaching activities" and teaching evaluation programs.
This type of online course requires teachers to design a learning route for students from the perspective of students, arrange online learning tasks, and rely on timely evaluation and feedback of each teaching activity to guide learners to read and use various "teaching resources" , Complete various learning tasks.
Studies abroad have shown that such small-class, highly interactive online courses have a high student completion rate, and the quality of learning is sometimes even higher than that of ordinary face-to-face courses.
"Of course, this requires teachers to invest a lot of energy in curriculum design and preparation, and use evaluation as a management tool in the teaching process to provide timely feedback to students. A high-quality online course requires teachers to invest more work than traditional classroom teaching. It is much larger. This is a kind of online course that is difficult to'brush'." Guo Wenge said.
Today, when online and offline mixed teaching is gradually becoming common, a successful mixed classroom is inseparable from a lot of thinking, practice and exploration by teachers.
Zhang Heng (pseudonym) is a teacher at a university in Beijing. This year is his third year to offer online and offline mixed teaching.
For 3 years, he has been monitoring students' academic performance and learning feedback.
"In the first year of blended teaching, my understanding of blended teaching was rather one-sided. After one semester, the students in the class were not very comfortable. In terms of grades alone, the academic performance of the students in the first semester dropped slightly. "Zhang Heng said frankly.
In the second year, Zhang Heng redesigned the syllabus and teaching plans in accordance with the teaching characteristics and laws of mixed teaching.
As a result, the teaching effect began to appear, and the students' performance in the second year was better than any previous year. After that, he continued to follow this model.
"Our school rewards teachers with a double workload for mixed teaching. To be honest, the workload of the school is really not for nothing. I found that I really do double the work. I have already done this course. After more than ten years of speaking, in order to do mixed teaching, all the things accumulated for more than ten years have been subverted." Zhang Heng said.
How to manage online classes? Control in quantity and credits
Nowadays, massive online courses are flooding the study life of college students. How to screen, plan, and design courses for students has become an important part of the teaching management work of many colleges and universities.
In November 2020, the Ministry of Education launched the first batch of national first-class undergraduate courses, totaling 5,118, including 1,875 online first-class courses, 728 virtual simulation experiment teaching first-class courses, 1463 offline first-class courses, and 868 online and offline courses. Mixed first-class courses and 184 first-class social practice courses.
Among the five "golden courses", the first-class online courses open to colleges and social learners, namely the fine MOOC, are the most well-known.
This move promoted the progress and development of online courses in terms of quality.
However, only high-quality courses are not enough. Good teaching arrangements and strict management measures can truly make these "golden courses" shine.
Gao Qi (pseudonym) is a teacher of the Academic Affairs Office of a university in Beijing. She said that in order to ensure the quality of courses, most of the courses introduced by the school are courses from several well-known online MOOC platforms in terms of the selection of online courses.
Secondly, after introducing courses, schools will classify them according to their own teachers and subject characteristics.
Gao Qi said, “One type of online course is for teachers with relevant subject backgrounds, and the school will be equipped with offline tutors to answer questions and expand lectures on the basis of the course, and set up hybrid classrooms. There is also a pure online course, which We strictly control the number of courses offered and the number of courses selected. Students who choose pure online courses cannot exceed one credit at most."
"There are still some courses. It is not necessary to set up special courses through school assessment, but they are worth learning. We will open them to students as learning resources. Students can watch them voluntarily, but they are not public elective courses." Gao Qi said.
In order to prevent college students from brushing their courses, Gao Qi said that as the educational department, she and her colleagues will not only make efforts to introduce courses carefully, strictly manage credits, and equip offline teachers, but also conduct online and offline mixed teaching. Teachers of China carry out a strict approval system.
"Even if a blended course has been set up, it still needs to be reassessed every semester. This will prevent some teachers from being'lazy' through online courses." Gao Qi said.
Nowadays, more and more colleges and universities have started to work hard on the management of online courses.
Cui Guanglei, deputy director of the Academic Affairs Office of Anhui Normal University, said in an interview with a reporter from China Youth Daily and China Youth Daily that with the development of online education, in recent years the school has also continuously improved the methods of managing online courses.
In addition to using technical means to monitor students’ abnormal behaviors in online courses around the clock and severely penalize them through technical means, the school is also gradually improving the online courses, especially the access system for online general education courses.
"After class, the school also develops a corresponding supervision and evaluation system. In the course evaluation, if there are students with prominent negative evaluations or courses with various problems in the evaluation, we will immediately stop it." Cui Guanglei said.
Facing the future, online courses cannot replace offline teaching
Nowadays, the problem of college students' brushing courses has become the focus of attention of the Internet and many media.
This new problem spawned by online education has also led many teachers to think about the relationship between online and offline courses.
In Cui Guanglei's view, whether it is online or offline classes, teaching content and teaching methods are still the eternal king.
"The problem of class brushing seems to be the fault of'online', but in fact, if the quality of a course is not good, there will be a phenomenon of'class brushing' whether it is online or offline." Cui Guanglei said.
Since the outbreak of the new crown pneumonia epidemic in 2020, online education has made great contributions to ensuring the normal teaching order, and it has accelerated many schools into the era of informationized teaching.
So, how should schools and teachers view online education and deal with the opportunities and challenges brought about by education informatization?
Cui Guanglei said that online courses should give full play to the strengths of online courses, but they cannot replace offline teaching.
"Online is not limited by time and space, and can be watched repeatedly, which bridges the gap between ordinary students and students from prestigious schools to a certain extent, but the online lack of personalized interaction between teachers and classmates. In addition to the university Teaching also needs to educate people, and the soul of the classroom can only be established when teachers and students face-to-face."
At a meeting at the end of 2020, Zhong Binglin, the former president of the Chinese Education Association and a member of the Academic Degrees Committee of the State Council, said that in the post-epidemic era, online and offline hybrid teaching may become the new normal of school education.
In this context, "We must build a new normal education and teaching quality assurance system that integrates online and offline teaching, adhere to student-centered, result-oriented, and reverse design of our training based on the tracking of student learning effects. Programs, curriculum systems and teaching methods. Relevant teaching research work, teaching evaluation work and school teaching supervision work must keep pace with the times and be able to adapt to such a development trend." Zhong Binglin said.
In addition, Zhong Binglin emphasized that the educating function of teachers must be strengthened.
"Some people speculate that some traditional schools will die out in a few years, and some teachers may lose their jobs. Our information technology, such as artificial intelligence, has far surpassed humans in solving certain problems. In this context, should we teachers Are you unemployed? I think this is hype." Zhong Binglin said.
Zhong Binglin said that the more in this context, the more teachers must improve their teaching ability.
"For example, organizing students to conduct inquiry-based learning, such as conducting interactive education with students, these can only improve, not weaken."
China Youth Daily·China Youth Daily reporter Ye Yuting Source: China Youth Daily
Version 08 on August 30, 2021