Lessons Learned From Covid-19 Teaching...

What can I say? 2020, Covid, unprecedented, etc. You already know this. Well, since I’m co-organising a Teaching and Learning Mathematics Online (TALMO) workshop today on lessons learned following the sudden switch to online teaching I decided to write down some of my lessons learned. The TALMO meeting can be found at Tackling Term 2: Top Tips from Term 1. Last term, apart from a single hour right at the start, my teaching was online. As expected it didn’t go perfectly. Actually, some of it went quite badly and I’ll talk about that on another day. For the moment I’ll concentrate on the lessons learned. 1. A decent set of notes still counts for a lot. I have a theory that, at least in normal years, students will forgive most things if they have been given a decent — i.e., well-organised and clearly explained — set of notes. Certainly, a set of incoherent notes does not magically “challenge students” and “lead them to study harder” as I’ve sometimes heard. This theory seems to hold true for online teaching as well. In-course questionnaires indicated that students were using their notes for the bulk of learning and were not using the videos as much as expected. My conclusion was that it was important to tailor the videos to the notes and not tailor the notes to the videos. I had initially wondered if students would use the videos more than the notes but that did not appear to be the case. (Aside: I wished that I had worked on my notes more before teaching started. I was teaching on modules that were (mostly) new to me and so I was always going to have to produce new notes this. My mistake was to think it was...