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There is no such thing as online learning: why in-person teaching methods fail online, and what to do instead: slides from my talk at WITE-22

Here are my slides from the Workshop on International Trends in Education - WITE 2022 held in Budapest and online, which was all about responses and issues arising from COVID-19. Though I missed the start (it started about midnight here in Vancouver) it was fascinating to hear about the problems that in-person teachers were facing. These were precisely what I would predict, but hearing about the problems from those actually living through it was heartbreaking.

My talk is, of course, about solutions to those problems, but I realize that there is a vicious circle in all of this. Effective emergency online teaching that attempts to replicate the in-person experience inevitably demands far greater effort, because it's using solutions to different problems than those experienced online, so good teachers are worn down (as are their students). Unfortunately, the solutions involve making considerably more effort, initially, because the entire thing has to be redesigned from scratch. However, the good teachers have no time or energy left to do that, and the bad ones can't be bothered. I don't have a good solution to that problem.