In the past months, a team of dedicated authors has written the Guidelines for Teachers on Online and Blending Learning, one of the outputs of the Innovation Station project. The guidelines are a response to the challenges faced by both educators and students in the online and blended learning environment. After several rounds of external reviews, the Guidelines are now freely available and aim to support educators from all disciplines regardless of their experience with online teaching and learning methods.
The Guidelines provide tools, tips and recommendations on a wide range of challenges and topics that educators experience and help them to deal with concerns like the safety of students in the online learning environment (e-safety), how to set up a course online, and classroom etiquette. The Guidelines also focus on best practices and specific tools for each subject (history and citizenship education, mathematics, natural sciences and languages). The extensive section on Assessment, dives into the meaning of assessment and the different ways in which it can be used in the online and blended learning environment.
The Guidelines also served as a basis for the Staff Training that took place in July this year, where one of the authors also provided a workshop session on self-directed learning, one of the topics covered.
To make it easier to follow the Guidelines, there is a glossary section at the end including some of the specialist terms. Based on their own experiences, the authors aimed to include a wide range of best practices and aspects of online and blended learning. The guidelines are meant to offer support to educators with extensive online and blended teaching experience, as well as to educators who are completely new to the online teaching environment.
