There’s an elephant in the room!
At times, the whole world seems to be falling to pieces around us. Yet, the expectation is that we carry on and do our best to get through the crisis remains – and this expectation is right, as learners are looking towards educators for guidance and for a way through. I see it as our duty to ensure that the interruption to education is as minimal as possible and we’re all stepping up to try to do our bit. That’s why we’re doing the Oxford English Assessment Professional Development conference, to provide professional development to teachers who want to know more about assessment. Continue reading
Some of the many teachers who attended our recent webinars on Blended Learning (BL) were already in enforced lockdown, having had their face-to-face classes cancelled due to the coronavirus pandemic. This made the topic of BL especially relevant, in particular the concept of ‘face-to-face online’ classes. The webinars were given at a time when thousands in the UK were just starting to work from home which caused a huge spike in online use. Here are some of the questions that were raised: 
As an unprecedented virus makes its way around the world playing havoc with teachers’ schedules, educators are looking into how to use technology as a way of filling the gap left by the closure of many schools. If you’re one of them then the first question you need to ask yourself is do you want to fill that gap in a synchronous or asynchronous way. Or in other words, do you want to use online teaching to get the class together at the same time in a virtual classroom (synchronous) or are will you be sending out work to the students to do in their own time and report back (asynchronous). In this post, I’ll give you some advice about getting started synchronously.