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Ioana Pitu, Queen’s University student and founder of , shares 3 approaches for your studying strategy this semester.

For some instructors, teaching online is an intimidating, foreign idea. But for award-winning professor Avi Cohen, it is a familiar skill he has crafted over the years.

With an eCampus Ontario grant, in 2016 he created an online version of his introductory economics course for 300 students at the University of Toronto. This Fall, with Professor Gordana Colby, they moved online a massive York University introductory economics course, with almost 3000 students. The radically transformed online course has increased student engagement, student participation, and instructor involvement.

With his extensive online teaching experience, including using student surveys to modify courses, Avi Cohen shares his experience for teaching online and creating an effective online course.

(These responses have been edited for brevity and clarity.)

Tell us a little bit about your experience with moving your 500-person introductory economics course online.

At York University, before we moved online, our economics introductory course had 8 sections, each with 400-500 students. The 8 section instructors would each repeat essentially the same information in lecture halls where maybe 150-200 students would show up.

In the restructured online course, there are asynchronous recorded online lectures, which are very sophisticated (small chunked videos, high production values, embedded knowledge check questions, targeted visual and auditory feedback) and delivered by an award-winning teacher. Although Professor Colby and I both have had online training and experience, restructuring the course still took 6 months of collaboration, time, and planning, involving 8 instructors. In our case, the student experience online has been far superior than a face-to-face experience sitting anxiously and feeling alone in a 500-person lecture hall.

How do you drive participation, student engagement, and bridge the screen gap?

The knowledge check questions that intersperse the asynchronous videos promote active recall, Another advantage is that instructors no longer have to deliver the same material over and over again. Now, instructors divide their section into 3 smaller seminars, and the professors engage in smaller group teaching, all devoted to Socratic-style active learning.

Previously, our discussion boards were staffed by TA’s, many of whom are international students whose first language is not English. There were also limited TA hours due to budgetary constraints. Now, the professors themselves are actually the ones responding to discussion questions and comments. This is a level of interaction that did not exist before in the traditional face-to-face model.

There has been a lot of criticism with the student experience with online learning. What are your thoughts on them?

When universities went online in March [2020], there was a lot of criticism around the student experience. There was an editorial in a national newspaper which said that online learning is a pale reflection of the real thing. When COVID struck, most instructors didn’t have training in online learning. I would call what happened then emergency remote teaching: when people take what they do in a classroom and just try to push it online. Instead of standing in front of a lecture hall, instructors stood (or sat) in front of a Zoom camera. There was no fundamental restructuring of the course to take advantage of the real opportunities online learning presents.

I disagree with the generalization that online learning is worse than face-to-face. It might be true for smaller seminars, but it’s not necessarily true for large classes. Large lecture halls—no matter how good the professor is—can be very alienating for students. They’re afraid to ask questions. There’s very little interaction. And that’s the core of their weekly experience. In an online course that’s been properly developed, you can have much more involvement, much more learner-centered activities than you can in a traditional lecture hall.

What does building a good online course require?

A good online course can take up to 6-12 months to create. You have to first decide on your course learning objectives. Then, using the backward design process go back and ask:

• What are the that will help students accomplish those objectives?
• What will test those specific objectives?
• How to incorporate the technology?
• How to promote ?

It’s a very complex process but when done well, the student can have a really great learning experience.

As a Canadian professor and sociologist, Bruce Ravelli has devoted much of his career to thinking about the student learning experience and how social events influence people. When COVID-19 disrupted higher education halfway into the spring 2020 semester, educators and students scrambled to adjust to a new online learning reality.

Professor Ravelli sat down to reflect on what he’s learned through this experience, the true value of higher education, and important things to consider when moving online. ��

(These responses have been edited for brevity and clarity.)

What’s been most surprising about moving your class online?

When the university shut down in March, I remember feeling surprised at how quickly the discussion evolved to thinking about university only as a place where a bunch of information is conveyed from instructors to students. I think we missed that real opportunity to educate the public and our colleagues about what really happens at a university.

A lot of learning certainly occurs in classrooms, but it also occurs over a coffee or a chat in between classes. As teachers, our gift is to introduce concepts, ideas, and theories that students have never heard before. Often, those teachings inform the discussions students have at coffee shops, at bars, and with friends.

So, what surprised me was how many assumed that what we do can be simply packaged and distributed electronically when the pandemic first hit. I think the best thing we do as educators is have our students think about the world in a different way. I certainly don’t want to miss this opportunity to celebrate the very best things we do as teachers, and not lose sight of that in a post-COVID world.

“I think the best thing we do as educators is have our students think about the world in a different way. I certainly don’t want to lose sight of that in a post-COVID world.”

What advice would you give to others in your position?

I would ask you to consider two things:

1.����������Think about what you do well and what you might need help with.��If you're a good lecturer, in the online world, maybe it’s best for you to record a video and present it. Maybe its a series of blog posts where you discuss different issues in the media, society, or theory to let students see the world as you see it.So, I would caution you to think critically on what technology you're going to use and why. You should only use technology that will make your teaching more effective and to compensate on areas you need support.

2.�������� What do you want your students to achieve in your courses?

Think about what students’ lives must be like in this post-COVID world. They're probably taking 3-4 different courses online with 4-5 different instructors each having different sets of expectations. So, I'd ask you to be very reasonable in your expectations of students.

If you want them to learn a lot of concepts and theories, there are many supplementary materials provided for textbooks these days. They have online testing strategies to help you assess your students. They can provide links to YouTube videos, and more.

I would just caution any new person moving online to not rush into 50 different techniques and technologies, but really think about what you are good at, what you need some help with, and what you want your students to achieve. Be thoughtful, practical, methodical. And certainly have some compassion for all the students facing so many different demands in this post-COVID world.

“Be thoughtful, practical, methodical. And certainly have some compassion for all the students facing so many different demands in this post-COVID world.

What have you learned during this time? ��

What I learned came as a bit of a surprise. I always knew I liked teaching, but I was surprised by how much I missed the classroom.

I miss that feeling when you’re giving a great lecture—when the students are indicating that they’re learning something they’ve never thought about before. When you can make them laugh, when you can make them have that deep thoughtful moment. I miss students diligently working, diligently asking questions, meeting their friends in class. I miss all of those moments.

“I always knew I liked teaching, but I was surprised by how much I missed the classroom.”

Through a lot of social media conversations, I also learned how students want to learn from somebody they can trust, talking about things the person is an expert in. So, I cherish those moments thinking about teaching again. I am really gratified to know the important role that many of us play in our students lives when we get to show them things for the first time. So, it's not so much what I've learned about myself over the last six months, but how I've relearned being invigorated by my discipline, by the joy I have in teaching and meeting students.

“I am really gratified to know the important role that many of us play in our students. I've relearned being invigorated by my discipline, by the joy I have in teaching and meeting students.”