13 January 2021

New course opens to help teachers develop online and blended teaching

In the face of recent moves to remote teaching, a new online course from UCL Institute of Education (IOE) has launched to help teachers develop the skills to teach online and blended learning.

The three-week course, created by CGHE’s Professor Diana Laurillard, is free and open to teaching staff across primary and secondary schools, colleges and universities and aims to support teachers’ own innovations in teaching and learning online.

It uses the Conversational Framework, the idea that the teaching-learning process is an interactive exchange of concepts and practice, based on the ideas of social construction and collaborative learning.

Through using a range of different tools and resources, course participants will see how to improve synchronous and asynchronous learning, and explore how to use videos, forums, creative tools, and quizzes, and to bring a selection of digital tools into their teaching techniques. They use the Learning Designer, a free online tool for teachers, based on research, to support the development of their online teaching.

Professor Laurillard said: “Teachers have been making an extraordinary effort to provide online learning, almost entirely unaided. This course builds on what they have learned already, and provides a collaborative learning environment for them to develop more fully the teaching community’s shared knowledge of how to teach online.”