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Lessons learnt from delivering a pre-sessional EAP course online

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This and the next post were written by Jane Heath, Lecturer in EAP and module co-leader on a presessional course at the University of Leeds. NB this post was written a few weeks ago.

Introduction:

As well as ‘unprecedented circumstances’ and ‘strange and uncertain times’, one phrase which many of us have been hearing much more often recently has been ‘steep learning curve’. The last two months or so have indeed been a steep learning curve for those of us involved with delivering courses online for the first time. We have made many mistakes which I hope we and others will be able to learn from, although we also seem to have made some good decisions. In this blog post, I hope to share some of the lessons we have learnt about what works well and what doesn’t work well when delivering a pre-sessional EAP course online.

For context, the course I have been co-leading this term is called Academic English for Postgraduate Studies (AEPS) Level 3. It is an EGAP course with approximately 370 students, 250 of whom are based in East Asia, mostly China, and 120 of whom are in Leeds or the Middle East. Some students have already completed AEPS Level 2 and all will go on to study an ESAP course this summer, before starting their postgraduate courses in the autumn.

This blog post is based on the notes that I have been making since the start of the course on what has or hasn’t gone well, with a view to learning lessons for the summer, when I will co-lead another online pre-sessional EAP course.

Reflections on Microsoft Teams:

The first lesson learnt this term was the usefulness of Microsoft Teams as a tool for communicating within the teaching team and sharing files. It is worth spending time early on ensuring that all tutors know how to start a new line within posts (Shift + enter for anyone who is wondering), format/edit/delete posts and tag students and groups. It is also worth encouraging Team members to use the search bar to check if their question has already been answered and to reply to a relevant thread rather than starting a new one. This term, some tutors would have benefitted from having more time to practise using Teams before the term started. This would have made them feel more comfortable about using it to communicate with students. I hope that with the more structured induction week before summer teaching, tutors will feel more confident with Teams before courses start.

While the fact that Teams brings together different aspects of our work on one platform is generally advantageous, it does have some drawbacks. In the past, we might have checked our email regularly, between other tasks, or we might have closed our email altogether in order to focus on an important task. With Teams, this is much more difficult, as those messages and notifications are integrated into the same platform on which we are often working. Even with notifications disabled, we can see those little red numbers adding up and it is hard to resist the temptation to click on them. This constant interruption and distraction can make it difficult to get on with tasks, and the impact of this could be greatest on those who are already struggling with working remotely for various other reasons. This is a potential risk of which module leaders will need to be aware.

Supporting tutors:

As mentioned briefly above, one of the most positive experiences this term has been the support that tutors have offered to each other through our staff-facing Team. As well as responding to each other’s questions, many tutors have shared technical solutions that they have found to make work easier or more efficient, such as solutions to navigate students’ Class Notebooks more quickly or to keep links to important posts for students under one tab. Module leaders and tutors have also created video walkthroughs, showing exactly how to complete various technical tasks. Due to all of this, I have a stronger sense of belonging to a supportive team in which we face and overcome difficulties together than I have had in other terms, even though we are all missing the face-to-face contact.

As our current team is large, with 31 tutors, and we had not met many of the tutors in person before, we decided to organise 20-minute one-to-one online meetings with all tutors over the second and third weeks of the course, with each module leader speaking to half of the tutors. Almost all tutors came to their meetings with a list of questions that they wanted to ask but felt that everyone else already knew the answers or that they were too minor to contact us about them. The one-to-one meetings allowed us to start to build relationships with tutors that we hadn’t worked with previously and, most importantly, to find out how tutors were coping and identify those who would benefit from further support. We were able to reassure tutors that they were doing at least as well as could be expected. There seemed to be less anxiety following the meetings, although it could be that tutors were settling into the course anyway. I will definitely offer one-to-one meetings again when co-leading another course this summer.

Role of module leaders:

Leading a team this term has felt more democratic in many ways than in previous terms. One example of this is the way that Teams has democratised the sharing of information and answering of questions within the teaching Team. Rather than a one-to-one (or one-to-two) email communication between tutors and module leaders, we now have many-to-many communication between all team members, with one-to-one communication still an option when required. Questions posted on our staff-facing Team are often answered well before a module leader reads them and it is much easier for tutors to share their points of view, through discussions on posts or polls. Clearly, this relieves the workload of module leaders, but it also builds a stronger sense of team.

Similarly, Teams has made it easier than ever to share a meeting agenda document that all team members can view and edit. Over the last two terms, on AEPS3, we have asked tutors to read agenda items in advance and to add any questions or comments, which can then be discussed during the meeting. We have also encouraged tutors to add agenda items of their own to the document, leading to valuable discussions on workload, for instance. As well as making meetings much more efficient, this allows for further democratisation, with tutors having more input into their course meetings than previously. Rather than an inefficient way of disseminating information from module leaders to tutors, meetings are becoming a space for productive discussion and debate among all team members.

Much has been written about the danger of being “always on” when working remotely. As co-leader of a team of 31 tutors, this was a risk, particularly in the weeks before the course started and the first three weeks. In order to reduce this risk, we introduced daily office hours: two hours a day for each module leader, during which tutors could contact us about non-urgent issues. This has been successful to some extent, but due to the intrusiveness of Teams notifications, as mentioned above, it sometimes difficult to be strict about these hours, with the risk of appearing inconsistent to tutors. I am also trying to be stricter about responding to questions or issues related to technology: I feel that it is not my role as module leader to Google how to change a Zoom setting on a tutor’s behalf or to deal with issues with MS Office applications that should be directly sent to IT. It has sometimes been difficult to strike a balance between being supportive and disempowering tutors by doing too much for them.

QA / Sharing lessons learnt across the team

Usually, module leaders would carry out ‘buzz’ observations in the first weeks of a course, visiting classrooms unannounced as part of QA. We considered doing this with webinars but felt it would be too intrusive as well as technically difficult. Instead, we carried out a buzz observation of the channels for each group on our student-facing Team, contacting tutors privately with any concerns. We compiled a document about what seemed to be working well and not so well, and shared this with tutors, to be read and then discussed in a weekly staff meeting. This was a useful exercise as it helped us to identify good practices that tutors could be encouraged to adopt, as well as to identify practices that were not as successful.

Further to this, we gave tutors two weeks to visit each other’s channels and contribute their anonymous feedback to a shared document, to be discussed in another staff meeting. Tutors seemed to learn a great amount from observing what was working well for other tutors and applying this in their own channels. In particular, subsequent visits to channels have shown clearer communication with students and more consistency in tutor feedback. I will definitely carry this exercise out again on my summer module.

Leading webinars while covering for tutors has been an eerie experience at times. I have found it difficult to build rapport with students and to gauge how well students are understanding key concepts. Participation in breakout rooms seems to vary and most students seem to prefer to have their cameras turned off. Having discussed my concerns with colleagues, I found that others had some similar concerns. Therefore, we created a document to which tutors could add suggestions and solutions that they had found for common issues in webinars. The discussion within the document so far has been interesting and we hope to be able to share some conclusions soon. This is another way in which technology has opened up a discussion to the whole team and allowed all team members to contribute equally.

Workload

Workload has been a concern since the beginning of the course. We undoubtedly underestimated how long it would take to set up the asynchronous sessions that we had planned, to check student engagement with these sessions and to give light touch feedback to students. We quickly realised that we needed to simplify and ‘strip back’ lessons, ensuring that there was as little setting up to do as possible, that it was not worthwhile asking tutors to record student engagement, and that we needed to be clearer about how much (how little?) feedback was expected, as some tutors were giving much more than others, which was not necessary on a course for which students already receive individual written feedback on an almost weekly basis.

Other actions we have taken to reduce workload include minimising the number of platforms as much as possible; for example, using OneDrive instead of Class Notebook for both collaborative and individual work, as tutors report that it is much faster to set up tasks and to access students’ work this way. We now provide an answer key in the same document so that students can check their answers themselves, rather than tutors having to share a separate answer document. All these actions, and others, do seem to have reduced workload to some extent, but I suspect that our team is still working harder and longer hours than they should be. We have asked our tutors to share any other suggestions that they have for reducing workload.

Comfort zones

First, I would like to give an example of how I have been taken out of my comfort zone this term. We are now using shared OneDrive documents for collaborative tasks. This has been a successful solution and many tutors have been using shared documents very effectively. However, before we decided to use OneDrive, we tried two unsuccessful solutions. Firstly, we tried to use Collaboration Spaces on Class Notebook for collaborative tasks. Many tutors and students reported that these were slow and glitchy, with pages frequently deleted or duplicated due to synching errors. Secondly, we decided to try the Wiki app on Teams and tested this thoroughly with staff. However, when we extended use of this tool to students, we found that it did not work either, with many students unable to add to or edit the Wikis. Arriving at the OneDrive solution was an uncomfortable experience, with both module leaders and tutors having to deal with annoyed and frustrated students.

The situation described above is the type of situation that many of us might have nightmares about (some of us, at least...). In the past, I would have been mortified that we had fallen flat on our faces in front of students and tutors in this way. However, due to the lack of time to prepare for this term, I had to accept early on that it was not going to be possible to run the course like clockwork and that, at times, both tutors and students would be unhappy. Accepting this was difficult at first, as it is very different from how I would like to run the course and I had been proud of how well the course seemed to be running, but it now feels quite freeing and I am putting myself under much less pressure. I have observed the same among our tutors: those who were able to tolerate this uncertainty and accept that the course would not be perfect settled in more quickly and seem to have experienced less stress.

Therefore, above all, we have tried to get across to tutors the message that has been coming to us from management: this is an extraordinary situation and we are not expecting everything to go smoothly. Tutors should be putting themselves under much less pressure than they usually would, and prioritising their health and wellbeing more than ever. We can all gain a sense of perspective by looking at the news: if Zoom crashes during a webinar, it’s not the end of the world. We have also tried to stay positive as much as possible, and focus on the ways in which we are winning and the things that we can change, rather than the things that we can’t change.

Brief conclusion

To conclude, I would like to reflect on where we are now and how far we have come already. We are now in week 6 of our 11-week course. The beginning of last week, week 5, seemed to mark a turning point, with a noticeable reduction in the number of questions asked and issues reported. More and more, posts on our Team are from tutors sharing suggestions and solutions with each other. The simplification of our materials and the reduction in the number of platforms seem to have gone some way towards resolving the issues with workload. We recently offered tutors the opportunity to have a follow-up one-to-one meeting and few tutors felt the need to take us up on this. We will make more mistakes and will try more ‘solutions’ that won’t work before this course is done, but we definitely seem to be moving in the right direction.