[MUSIC, Title: "Introduction to Teaching Online"] [Barb] Welcome to our course: "Teaching Online." We have our stalwart instruction team here: Terry Sejnowski, the Francis Crick Professor at the Salk Institute, where he is the Director of the Computational Neuroscience Laboratory. And me, I'm Barb Oakley. [Terry] It's nice to be back! [Barb] Terry and I have taught some of the world's most popular massive open online courses, with millions of students. We've also taught small online courses over the course of several decades. So between us, we have a wealth of experience teaching online and writing and researching in the online world. We're joined in this course by David Joyner, who's funny. Oh yes, he's the Executive Director of the Online Education Program in Georgia Tech's College of Computing, with years of extensive experience reaching and teaching in the online world. [David] Like Barb said, by day I work for Georgia Tech. But for this course, I'm stepping outside and joining Barb and Terry to teach you about what has become my passion over the last decade: online learning. Now you might wonder why you should take THIS course. After all, there are HUNDREDS of courses on online teaching out there. Many of them cover the same important ideas, such as developing community through discussion forums, and improving your instructor presence. But these courses don't necessarily tell you what's going on under the hood of these approaches, inside students' brains. And perhaps as importantly, they don't tell you how your own brain can trick you, so that even when you learn a better approach to teaching, you still fall back into the same, less-desirable habits. In this course, we'll use insights from movie-making— not to mention some odd visual tricks from Barb's kitchen— to see how students work both independently and together, to understand key concepts and store them in long-term memory. Many instructors know that retrieval practice is valuable— but they don't necessarily know how to promote retrieval practice in their online courses. More than that, we all know that social learning is valuable in helping students grapple with tough concepts, as well as in making learning more fun. But if you understand what is happening in the brain during social learning, you can also understand why certain approaches commonly used in online learning, such as discussion forums, can be problematic. As you'll see, we can use insights from neuroscience not only to motivate our students, but to help them change their very identity. [Terry] In our course, we want to help you look with fresh eyes at your online teaching— and teaching in general—by using a little bit of neuroscientific wizardry. Today's researchers are gaining special insights into teaching and learning precisely BECAUSE they're able to look more easily "under the hood" at what the brain is doing when students are in the online world. This allows us to understand why some tried-and-true approaches to teaching online work great—but other approaches, even ones that have been popular for decades, don't work well at all, or don't necessarily work the way you've always been told that they do. [Barb] In this course, then, we'd like to help move you toward fresh approaches to teaching— especially online teaching— that build on the latest insights from scientific research. You can take this course independently from the other two courses in this specialization. Some of the neuroscience- and cognitive-psychology-based insights we'll mention here in simple ways are explored more deeply in those other courses. So, feel free to take one or both of the other courses in the Uncommon Sense Teaching specialization in conjunction with, or after this course. If you've already taken one or two of the other courses, you'll find that this course reviews and extends the practical insights from neuroscience you've already received in unexpected new directions. And you'll find even deeper insights we haven't covered before. [David] Our course is designed for university professors, college instructors, K-12 teachers, business trainers, and in fact, anyone who is trying to teach concepts or skills online. It's not just academic materials— if you've ever considered teaching a course on Udemy, putting up a video series on YouTube, or launching your own educational blog, this course is also for you. An essential and exciting point— one that we see not only in the research, but also in my personal experience teaching tens of thousands of students— is that students can learn even BETTER online than in traditional face-to-face classrooms. That's whether you're teaching synchronously. That is, live, via a platform like Zoom. Or you're teaching asynchronously. That is, by having videos and other teaching materials accessible to students whenever they want. Spoiler alert: I prefer asynchronous. I love getting to do multiple takes of the same video and choosing the best one. I'm no good with a live audience. Now part of what makes teaching online SEEM difficult is that when you watch the best online teachers at work, you often see special effects and complicated equipment that you just don't have the funding to acquire, or the time to learn to use. But the good news is that you don't have to. You can be an effective online teacher using only the technologies you're likely familiar with today. Some excellent course videos I've seen were taken with a smartphone camera and a selfie stick. It's entirely possible to teach effectively online using just your standard computer and webcam. In fact, it can be even better. The easier your setup is to use, the more likely you are to actually use it. Of course, that can lead to a different challenge. Some online teachers can make it seem TOO easy. You don't need fancy equipment or complicated effects to teach effectively online, but there are many conscious and subconscious choices that can be easy to miss when you set out on teaching online on your own. In this course, we'll surface many of these choices, so you can more clearly see how to burnish your online instruction. You'll find plenty of ideas here. This course is NOT meant to reinvent your teaching, but instead, to simply provide a pallet of ideas so you can move ahead with insightful tweaks that can help you have an even bigger impact on your students' learning. [Barb] Remember, we're a team in moving education forward— we can't do it without you! One of our deepest goals for this course is to help YOU teach other teachers. It's taken us a lot to create the unique animations you see in this course— animations and visuals that can help make these ideas seem simple. We've loaded these materials online in PowerPoints— licensed under Creative Commons— in the assets under the videos, as well as in the "Resources" section. You can rework these PowerPoints as you wish to reteach the material to your colleagues and students. Your sharing and re-sharing of this material is one of the best things you can do to help us all move teaching and learning forward to a visionary future. With that, let's get started! [Barb] I'm Barb Oakley. [David] I'm David Joyner. [Terry] I'm Terry Sejnowski. [All] Learn it, link it, let's do it!