In a recent Inside Higher Ed blog post, Steven Mintz discusses lessons learned from the pandemic about effective teaching. His lessons learned are:
- Teaching online is tough work.
- It’s easy for online students to disengage, self-isolate and fall off track.
- Social and emotional issues are as important as course content.
- Coverage and pacing pose a big challenge.
Steven goes on to list eight ethical issues around online learning that will persist after the pandemic. Those ethical issues are:
- Equity: How to ensure that every student has an equal opportunity to learn and to fully participate in our online courses.
- Learner diversity: How to address the special challenges that e-learning poses.
- Support: How to ensure that students have the ready access to the academic, technological, mental health and other supports that they need to succeed.
- Feedback and responsiveness: Making sure that students receive the guidance and feedback they need to succeed academically.
- Privacy: How to ensure that students’ right to privacy is protected.
- Netiquette: How to ensure that all participants in the class behave in a civil, respectful manner.
- Assessment: How to maintain academic integrity in an online environment.
- Intellectual property: What rules should govern respect for copyright in online classes.
If you are interested in Steven’s strategies for addressing these ethical issues, read his What the Pandemic Should Have Taught Us about Effective Teaching blog post.
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