Caro Giacomo, grazie per avere condiviso questo interessante pezzo. Da docente, intervengo sugli aspetti didattici della conclusione. Non è corretto dire che la didattica asincrona (tout court) sia migliore di quella sincrona. Ciò che dice l'articolo (ed anche la letteratura, senza escludere l'esperienza fatta sulle proprie spalle) è che funziona meglio un 'mix' di asincrono (per la parte principalmente "unidirezionale" della lezione) con dei momenti (ben focalizzati, più interattivi) sincroni in cui gli studenti possano confrontarsi tra loro e con il docente. E questo è molto difficile da fare "bene", perché nessuno di noi ha avuto una formazione o una sufficiente esperienza per potersi allenare in questa forma di didattica. In questo scenario, i modelli didattici "standardizzati" proposti a livello delle scuole e delle università (va per la maggiore l'ipotesi di fare lezione sincrona con alcuni studenti in aula ed altri in remoto) combina il peggio delle varie soluzioni possibili. Però dal punto di vista burocratico-organizzativo, sulla carta, funziona. Buona giornata Fulvio Il 09/09/2020 02:29, Giacomo Tesio ha scritto:
Just to back up a step: after teaching online since about 2005, after doing a lot of research on best practices for online teaching, after doing a lot of writing and research about MOOCs, I’ve learned at least two things about teaching online:
- Asynchronous instruction works better than synchronous instruction because of the affordances (and limitations) of the medium. - Video – particularly videos of professors just lecturing into a webcam while students (supposedly) sit and pay attention– is not very effective. [...]
judging from what I see on social media, a lot of my colleagues who are teaching online this fall for the first time are completely ignoring these best practices: they’re teaching synchronous classes during the originally scheduled time of the course and they are relying heavily on Zoom. In many cases (again, based on what I’ve seen on the internets), instructors have no choice: that is, the institution is requiring that what were originally scheduled f2f classes be taught with synch video regardless of what the instructor wants to do, what the class is, and if it makes any sense. But a lot of instructors are doing this to themselves (which, in a lot of ways, is even worse). In my department at EMU, all but a few classes are online this fall, and as far as I can tell, many (most?) of my colleagues have decided on their own to teach their classes with Zoom and synchronously.
It doesn’t make sense to me at all. [...]
I think requiring students to meet online but synchronously for a class via Zoom simply is putting a round peg into a square hole. Imagine the logical opposite situation: say I was scheduled to teach an asynchronous online class that was suddenly changed into a traditional f2f class, something that meets Tuesdays and Thursdays from 10 am to 11:45 am. Instead of changing my approach to this now different mode/medium, I decided I was going to teach the class as an asynch online class anyway. I’d require everyone to physically show up to the class on Tuesdays and Thursdays at 10 am (I have no choice about that), but instead of taking advantage of the mode of teaching f2f, I did everything all asynch and online. There’d be no conversation or acknowledgement that we were sitting in the same room. Students would only be allowed to interact with each other in the class LMS. No one would be allowed to actually talk to each other, though texting would be okay. Students would sit there for 75 minutes, silently doing their work but never allowed to speak with each other, and as the instructor, I would sit in the front of the room and do the same. We’d repeat this at all meetings the entire semester.
A ridiculous hypothetical, right? Well, because I’m pretty used to teaching online, that’s what an all Zoom class looks like like to me.
The other problem I have with Zoom is its part in policing and surveilling both students and teachers. Inside Higher Ed and the Chronicle of Higher Education both published inadvertently hilarious op-eds written to an audience of faculty about how they should maintain their own appearances and of their “Zoom backgrounds” to project professionalism and respect. [...]
When online teaching came up in the first department meeting of the year (held on Zoom, of course), the main concern voiced by my colleagues who had never taught online before was dealing with students who misbehave in these online forums. I’ve seen similar kinds of discussions about how to surveil students from other folks on social media. And what could possibly motivate a teacher’s need to have bodily control over what their students do in their own homes to the point of requiring them to wear fucking shoes?
This kind of “soft surveillance” is bad enough, but as I understand it, one of Zoom’s features it sells to institutions is robust data on what users do with it: who is logged in, when, for how long, etc. [...]
On the other hand…
The conventional wisdom about teaching online asynchronously and without Zoom might be wrong, and that makes it potentially interesting to study. For example, the main reason why online classes are almost always asynchronous is the difficulty of scheduling and the flexibility helps students take classes in the first place. But if you could have a class that was mostly asynchronous but with some previously scheduled synchronous meetings as a part of the mix, well, that might be a good thing.
Continua su http://stevendkrause.com/2020/09/07/synch-video-is-bad-perhaps-a-new-researc...
Ho trovato il pezzo interessante perché scritto da un insegnante. L'idea della privacy non lo sfiora lontanamente. Non nomina alternative libere o open source come Jitsi o BigBlue Button, nominando solo Zoom e Google Meet (evidenziando involontariamente il controllo assoluto del mercato da parte di queste aziende).
Eppure, dalla sua prospettiva di insegnante che tiene da anni corsi online, conferma che la didattica a distanza asincrona è nettamente superiore a quella sincrona, cui sono stati costretti docenti e studenti durante il lockdown.
La teledidattica asincrona è anche molto più economica da realizzare in modo scalabile, sicuro, distribuito e "privacy preserving". Non servono tecnologie avanzate: basta un servizio di hosting attraverso cui distribuire i materiali e una mailing list o un forum.
Magari pensiamoci... alla prossima pandemia! ;-)
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-- -- Fulvio Corno <Fulvio.Corno@polito.it> Vice-coordinatore Collegio ing. Informatica, Cinema e Meccatronica <coord.icm@polito.it> Politecnico di Torino - Dip. di Automatica e Informatica C.so Duca degli Abruzzi 24, 10129 Torino (Italy) http://elite.polito.it/corno