Useful Tools for Teaching Adults Online
The Covid-19 Pandemic changed the face of online learning and education worldwide. The urgency of the situation brought with it changes in teaching methodologies and innovative new software and apps — all with the notion to make teaching and learning effective, efficient and collaborative.
Here is a list of tools I personally found useful, as an adult, to teach and to learn with:
Zoom
I believe this goes on top of the list beyond question. As an educator who worked with the British Council during the pandemic, teaching English to adults online, Zoom was the default web-conferencing tool.
What makes Zoom great is that it really delivered according to the teaching and learning demands of the times, with very effective and efficient features such as being able to draw and illustrate on the white board, being able to share your own screen and audio/video materials, pinning key speakers to the screen for everyone to focus and most importantly, BreakOut rooms as a feature of the offline classroom.
What I also appreciate about Zoom is that throughout the pandemic, they offered very helpful and often live webinars and guided demonstrative videos for teachers and learners to learn how to better use and utilize their software in online teaching.
Google Classroom
The Google Classroom is another tool that I have found to be an effective portal for online learning, collaboration and sharing things such as announcements, updates and scores for exams etc.
It is a good means of forum discussion and sharing of ideas/resources.
Google Jamboard
This is another tool that works great as a collaboration tool for adult learners to share ideas, brainstorm, work on projects and to prepare presentations on.
What makes this tool great is the flexibility it provides in what you can do with it. The options are vast.
Future Learn
Future Learn is an online learning platform that offers online courses for introduction to various subject materials as well more subject-specific intensive courses to build careers on, for example, nursing or learning computing and coding.
The courses are offered mostly by UK and Australian universities, by professors and lecturers who are experts in their fields and often offered to students for free, complete with a certificate of completion, sponsored by the UK/Australian government.
The idea is to allow a non-formal and ubiquitous system of learning to adults who might not be able to commit to full-time learning but could spare time as working adults to invest in bite-sized modules built into a course.
Padlet
Padlet is another software that can be used for teaching adults, whether that is in corporate or educational settings, or professional or personal, Padlet can be used to upload any form of media and create ‘mood boards’ or presentations, projects, brainstorm charts or infographics.
It can allow both individuals or groups to work together.
Badgr
I am adding badgr to the list of tools, although it is a website that does not aid in education and teaching but rather acts as an incentive and in conjunction with other online teaching methods to make learning a rewarding experience for adult learners.
Badgr is a website that other online websites, such as conferences, universities, learning organizations can use to verify their digital certificates, and offer a place for leaners to have a portfolio of all the certificates they have earned through enrolling and completing various courses.
For example, a learner could complete a webinar on a particular career skill that provides a certificate, and it will be uploaded on their profile on badgr, which shows that it is verified and unique to the learner.
This porfolio and all certificates can then be shared over LinkedIn or other job applications as well as on CVs as proof of added training/knowledge and skill.
Therefore, badgr revamps the idea of reward and achievement by allowing learners to carry an online portfolio of certification.
Coursera
Coursera is yet another leading educational platform that allows short courses for online learning. The platform offers varied levels of courses, from college level introductory courses to ‘specialization’ or ‘micro-degrees’, which are meant to be a series of courses on a particular subject to help bolster knowledge, career and skill in that one area.
Coursera also offers verified certification for each course completed, shareable to employers and also offers scholarships to students, in which an application accepted means a learner can enroll into the course for free but access all features and modules of the course, culminating in a certificate.
Google Forms
Google Forms is another tool I find that aids me in teaching greatly. In the case of structured curriculum and following institutional formats, Google Forms can be a great method of testing, grading and compiling scores.
Google Forms has an easy user-interface, no-fuss navigation and allows for multiple choice format, true or false format, short answer and long answer questions. It allows for media such as audio, video and links to be embedded into the test and can automatically grade forms. It then collects all data, generates each student report and test result, but also offers generalized average scores and other infographic, very helpful to teachers trying to gauge overall class performance.
Google Docs
The last but not the least is Google Docs. I feel I cannot end this list without mentioning the simplest yet longest standing tool for learning and teaching collaboration.
I remember reading an anecdotal story shared by a professor on Twitter. She had mentioned that her college students came up with the idea to open a shared Google document which they used collectively in class to take notes.
What this meant is that notes were being taken on real-time, and if one student had missed something, it would be covered by another student. This also helped students who missed classes, perhaps due to sickness, to get access to class discussions and notes.
During exams, these students would go back to these notes and ‘comment’ questions, which other students would then try to explain and elaborate on. This is a perfect example of collaborative peer learning.
The professor concluded by stating that average scores in that class for that year were the highest she had seen in her career, showing the result of collaborative learning.
