What does it Mean to Teach Online?

Comprehending concepts

         The tail end of December 2019 brought the pandemic to the teaching scene and a few months later, we found ourselves teaching in a virtualized context that was new for many a teacher. Now, do pay attention to the word ‘virtualized’ that I used instead of the term ‘virtual’. Here it is where we need to grapple with the meaning of ‘virtual’ rather than ‘virtualized’. Why don’t we explore what it really means to teach online as a synonym for ‘virtual’ and not for ‘virtualized.’

         In my home country, Costa Rica, fellow educators do only use ‘virtual’ for the kind of teaching they found themselves doing from home—some kind of remote teaching. Filling in our students’ blank slates through this type of teaching is not what must be labeled as virtual teaching. What happened in Costa Rica and in many other countries around the globe was that remote teaching was just the virtualization of whatever we were doing in a F2F classroom, including all our bad teaching practices. For sure, many teachers wholeheartedly prepared their lessons to discover that their ‘empty vessel’ learners were not assimilating the course content satisfactorily. In the farther reaches of their minds, these educators could not comprehend why the learning process was not happening as planned. Could it have been possible that they had not really understood the difference between teaching F2F and in a virtual classroom?

         Because the confused mind of an educator is in enmity against online learning and teaching, educators could not really assimilate the quintessential idea of what online teaching is. To start with, remote learning or a virtualized curriculum is not online or virtual learning; we are talking about two very different teaching scenarios. My simple but compelling argument here is actually coming from Cambridge Dictionary ("virtualize.", 2023) that defines ‘virtualize’ as changing “something that exists in a real form into a virtual version (= one that is created using a computer).” In other words, when teachers were sent home to continue with their school year, university term, etc., they were simply asked to ‘virtualize’ what they were doing in the classroom by means of their laptop or desktop computers, which were probably connected to a sort of Learning Management System (LMS) to help them with homework, assignments, tests, handouts, etc. Mistakenly all sorts of instructors are using ‘virtual’ as a catch-all term for anything they were doing online with their students. Priming the pump of knowledge here, it can be concluded that these teachers never taught an online class.

         Virtualizing one’s curricula is, was, and has been a solitary sport. When educators were told by their employers, many of these professionals had not received a diploma accrediting them as ‘virtual educators.’ When the coronavirus began its global rampage early in 2020, in Costa Rica the Ministry of Education might have considered that the pandemic was meant to be short and allowing teachers to virtualize academic programs was a relatively low-risk activity. I’m not going to criticize what was or was not done by the Ministry of Education in my country, but it seems to me that it happened in many other places around the world.

         What does it mean to teach online but in a virtual setting then? Based on Bluestone (2022), there are certain characteristics that a virtual classroom must have. If these elements are present, we have an educator working in a true virtual environment.

Teaching online or virtually does imply the usage of a suite of online tools that may or may not have been fully present while educators were in remote, virtualized teaching; it was not virtual because the program was not born as an online curriculum.

         Albeit a false assumption of what online, virtual teaching is, learners also drew upon their background knowledge on how to behave while in school. A virtual curriculum also prepares students to face the new challenge. Though I like the idea of working hard in short, focused bursts in classroom activities, I bet that the constant complaints teachers had in regard to assignment submissions, homework delivery, and so on were truer than true because students barely put in their learning milage. And all this happened because a virtual, online course is not created in one go. Virtual, online programs do require that teachers don’t stifle their creativity in lesson planning and objective achievement.

 

References

"virtualize". (2023, August 18). Retrieved from Dictionary.Cambridge.Org: https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/virtualize

Bluestone, Z. (2022, November 16). 7 Characteristics of a Virtual Classroom. Retrieved from MemberPress.Com: https://memberpress.com/blog/5-characteristics-virtual-classroom/

 

Suggested Reading Comprehension Exercise.

Now that you have read the blog entry, read the following statements, and decide if they are true or false. The answers are provided below.

True/False: The term 'virtualized' is used in the text to highlight the distinction between different types of online teaching.

True/False: In Costa Rica and many other countries, remote teaching was a direct transformation of traditional classroom teaching into an online format.

True/False: Some educators struggled to understand why their remote teaching methods were not yielding the expected learning outcomes.

True/False: According to Cambridge Dictionary, the term 'virtualize' refers to converting something physical into a computer-generated version.

True/False: The author believes that many instructors use the term 'virtual' inaccurately to describe their online teaching practices.

True/False: The text suggests that virtualizing a curriculum was a collaborative effort among educators.

True/False: The Ministry of Education in Costa Rica took significant steps to accredit teachers as virtual educators during the pandemic.

True/False: Bluestone's characteristics of a virtual classroom provide a framework to differentiate between virtual and virtualized teaching.

True/False: One of Bluestone's criteria for a virtual classroom is having socially connected student groups.

True/False: The text implies that the creation of an online curriculum happens all at once and doesn't require ongoing development by teachers.

 

Answers:

True

True

True

True

True

False

False

True

True

False

 

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What Does It Mean to Teach ... by Jonathan Acuña