Sessions

Bending Over Backwards: Scaffolding Online Courses

When the students of your task-based curriculum must abruptly abandon the classroom and retreat to the isolated safety of their device screens, how can you continue to guide students toward achieving the program goals? In this presentation, these researchers share how they continually readjusted their backwards-model curriculum design and class materials to develop students’ discussion and critical thinking skills in response to changing conditions amidst the new social distancing. While the 300 university students had mainly spent their summer semester with asynchronous reading and writing-based lessons, transitioning them to spoken output in synchronous lessons caused a multitude of daunting obstacles such as varying English abilities, lack of technology access, a limited software platform, and growing demands on students from all sides. However, through a constant revision process and a flipped classroom model with both synchronous and asynchronous assignments, the researchers combined engaging online media, scaffolded articles, and original materials in order to build student knowledge, skills, and confidence. Results in speaking tests and end-of-year student surveys show that the new materials were both effective and popular amongst the students.