Active blended and online teaching

How to support your students

When teaching online, there are five key important questions to ask yourself at every stage:

	How can I best communicate with students? Students need clear guidance on expectations, assessment, tasks and how to ask for help. When students no longer have access to educators before, during or after classes, they need new avenues for support. Part of the communication strategy is to think about the flow of the unit/week to be able to adjust your learning/teaching to meet students’ needs.
	How can I ensure that learning is meaningful? Simply broadcasting information such as streamed classes or recorded videos do not necessarily result in effective learning! It is useful to ask yourself how you might get students to engage with your ideas in meaningful ways, such as: synthesising, practising, debating, defending, solving, interpreting, applying, teaching, and evaluating.
	How will feedback be provided to students? When creating online activities, whether synchronous or asynchronous, consider how feedback will be integrated. Decide whether you will provide students with immediate or deferred feedback, whether feedback will be between students or from you to the student, and what level of feedback you will provide. Make sure there are opportunities for feedback to be actioned.
	How do I engage students in the online environment? An engaged educator is likely to have engaged students. When you develop your online presence, share your ideas, knowledge and even emotions with students. By doing so, you will create a positive and supportive educator-student relationship and an engaging learning environment.
	How will I know that learning is successful? In every good teaching sequence you should build in opportunities that help you and your students know if they are learning and engaging in expected ways. This helps you and it helps your students to consider what extra information or support could be provided. Some related questions include: How do you monitor and assess whether students are comprehending the content? Do you know if students are keeping up with the delivery of a synchronous class? How do you know if students are able to apply what they are learning?

There's a good chance you're already addressing the above questions in your teaching and learning activities, and successful learning sequences can have many different combinations and approaches.

Enabling students’ learning

There are times when students have a legitimate reason for missing an activity.  There are also students with disabilities or medical illnesses who must be provided with reasonable adjustments to enable their learning. While educators should make every effort to ensure students are not at a disadvantage, ensuring at least one activity is recorded allows us to meet these needs as a reasonable last resort.

Helping students to plan their studies

Recognising that students must plan their studies and other activities, Scheduling Operations expect that faculties have in place a Seat Management Plan that would indicate the actions to be taken if all available classes are full and new classes are required.

Such a plan facilitates quick actions (under 24 hours) that enable students to complete their timetables.

Helping students plan their studies relies on a set of principles as follows:

1. Scheduled assessments (including in-class tests) are not scheduled on a Friday, Saturday, Sunday or a public holiday recognised in Malaysia for any units taught at Monash University Malaysia.
2. The timetable is finalised and available to record student preferences for class allocation at least 4 weeks before the teaching period commences.
3. The students’ personal timetables is available at least 2 weeks before the teaching period commences.  This timetable includes teaching staff information where available.
4. Students can request a change to their personal timetable, however, their requests are assessed on being clash-free and the availability of seats in the requested activity.

What resources and services are available to students

Learning online or in a hybrid format can be a new and stressful experience for students. Here are some key resources that you can share with them in your unit to support them in their learning journey.

Student Support: Learning online

This guide provides Monash students with information about studying online. They have resources on study support, specialist support, learning technologies, enrolments, units and timetables, resources to study successfully online.

Learn HQ: Build digital capabilities

Suite of resources for students to develop their digital communication skills, make the most of technologies and study, share and create online.

Learn HQ: Moodle

An excellent resource that will help students learn how to navigate Moodle. The resource inlcludes guidance on how to set up individual preferences, submit assessments, and post in forums.

LearnHQ: Zoom

A resource introducing students to the use of Zoom for a variety of online learning and teaching contexts at Monash University, from large-scale sessions, to small classes based on groupwork, as well as study group or teamwork collaboration meetings.

Use Microsoft Teams for study groups

This resource will guide students to effectively use Microsoft Teams for online communication: create and manage teams, share screens, collaborate on whiteboards, participate in discussions and share files.

Counselling service

Share this link for counselling services so that students can obtain additional support around a number of issues from managing motivation, coping with stress and/or anxiety, prioritisation and managing perfectionism. This is a free service for Monash students.