Those who know me might be aware that I have been into techy teaching for a while now, which just escalated and accelerated "thanks to" the pandemic. So, I had already had some experience with designing remote courses before this whole online teaching revolution came about. But now I decided to compare how I designed the same IELTS prep course last year and this year. What did I learn, what did I change, and what would I do differently next time?
1. The course
To understand what I'm talking about, it'll help if I quickly explain how the whole course looks. I decided to plan a 6-week course with two online 45-minute lessons and one individual shorter tutorial each week. These are the synchronous segments. On top of these, students also get diagnostic tasks, tasks that check their progress, and individual tasks tailored to their needs based on their tutorials. These are dealt with asynchronously. There is a mock exam planned for the final week.
2. The platform
I chose Google Classroom in both years because of its neat and minimalistic design, and because I'm already using Google Drive, so why not have the whole Google universe experience then? I also like that you have no ads at all, and everything is solely about the particular course you're on.
For the whole text, please go to the original article: https://www.freeed.com/articles/1904/designing-a-remote-course-on-google-classroom-lessons-learned
So, what I wished to show you with this short comparison is how I use Google Classroom to run a remote course and also how much I have learned in the past year even though I thought that my course last year was pretty neat :D
What will I do differently next year (supposing I run the course next year too :) )? I'm pretty satisfied now with my categorisation and grading system. What I'd like to revise is the tutorial tasks because even though I can set the same task to different students at different times, I still have a lot of tasks under that particular category, and I wish to see something even more systematic :D But I guess the solution for that would be if Google introduced subcategories as well. That would make me very happy!
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