Online Learning — Blog — Jenn Dumoulin

Surviving and Thriving as an Online Teacher: A Few Tips & Tricks from my First Two Weeks

Yes, it’s true! I have two weeks of online teaching under my belt and guess what? It’s going pretty well! I miss the face-to-face interaction with students a lot (I also never realized how helpful non-verbal feedback is), but the chat function in our online teaching platform allows enough feedback to let me know how things are going. I also use polls and status updates which provide real-time responses to questions and class content.

To teach online successfully - and stress free - requires advance planning. In addition to preparing slides, notes and assignments, we need to find and set up other tools that make online teaching more interactive and enjoyable, as well as more effective. If you’re filming lectures, this also needs to be done well in advance so that they’re read to go live before you need them.

While planning is important, if not crucial, to the success of both in-person and online teaching, I’ve found several strategies to be helpful when it comes to navigating the world of online teaching. Read about them there!

TeachingJennifer DumoulinJuly 5, 2020Online Teaching, Online Learning, Ph.D, Teaching, Academic

Welcome to the World of Online Teaching

As you probably know by now, in mid-March post-secondary institutions across North America moved courses online to protect students, faculty and staff from the spread of COVID. Every university handled this process a little differently, and how professors chose to transition their class to an online format varied.

I think that from both a teaching and learning perspective there is a big difference between a class that is designed from the start to be taught and taken online and an offline class that has to be moved online due to unforeseen circumstances. In addition, for both professors and students, the transition to an online learning environment was also impacted by other factors. Among other things, I had students living in residence that were required to move, students from other countries trying to get back home before borders closed up, and students dealing with other effects stemming from the virus (including loss of employment, sick loved ones, and even children or siblings home from school that they had to care for).

I took all of this into consideration when transitioning my course to a virtual environment. Let me walk you through what I did!

TeachingJennifer DumoulinApril 27, 2020Teaching, Online Learning, Online Teaching, Active learning

Adapting to an Online Learning Environment: A Virtual Art Exhibit

For the past two semesters in the Popular Culture & Communication course that I teach at the University of Ottawa, one of the assignments that my students have been tasked with is visually representing their understanding of how popular culture (defined as broadly or narrowly as they conceptualize it) influences their behaviour, lifestyles, passions, interests and - ultimately - their identity.

Traditionally, these posters are displayed as part of an in-person fair, where students walk around and observe, reflect and appreciate the work of their peers. This year, due to the coronavirus outbreak and the closure of post-secondary institutions in Canada, our poster board fair was cancelled and the assignments were submitted electronically.

Not to be deterred, and after several requests from students who were excited to see the work of their classmates, I constructed a Virtual Art Exhibit showcasing their work. Want to see?