Online Discussion Forums

 

Discussion forums for teachers can be used for many purposes, such as interacting and sharing ideas about education, classroom management, teaching strategies, and more. They are asynchronous communication tools that are widely used in Learning Management Systems, usually with the purpose of enabling interaction between teacher and student, but in our project Aid Kit for Autonomous Classes, we included a video forum, made for sharing ideas and tips – community building for trainers with difficulties in online teaching.

To help break the ice among teachers, in the Aid Kit video forum they will find 5 video podcasts from the Youtube channel, where trainers and teachers share their experience in different topics of distance learning course development.

By allowing trainers to develop and upload their own video podcast, they will first expand and develop digital skills for education providers/trainers and be an open resource for trainers with low digital skills to improve their competences. Apart from that, students will also be able to access these video podcasts, with the following topics:

  • Tips on flipped learning, by MHT Consult
  • Tips on how to search video content for online classes, by Danmar Computers
  • How to motive students in online courses, by BLSH
  • Meeting learner’s expectations within online or hybrid teaching, by SIF
  • Task evaluation and feedback in online or inverted learning, by Iberika

This space with video podcasts aims to effectively share experiences from different teachers perspectives, in order to up-skill trainers’ digital competency to manage the issue of time constraint in the digitalization of their courses. It will also provide a valuable resource for motivating practices. Previous project work and research on digitalization shows that the digital skills of adults (only 44% of EU citizens according to an OECD report) does not correspond to the countless user-friendly online resources and materials available for trainers. To tackle this discrepancy, the video forum is included in the platform, since is an open and interactive digital learning space, which includes supportive materials and digital experimentation possibilities for the users.