Staff have been making great strides to make sure City of Bristol College’s online and distance learning – through Microsoft Teams, Notebook, Skype and more – are up and running to deliver comprehensive and engaging sessions to our students during the closure period as a result of Coronavirus.
One week into our interactive online lessons has seen our staff and students work together to further students’ learning and assessment.
The Special Educational Needs (SEN) team at Ashley Down has been using both Microsoft Teams and emails to connect with students during the Coronavirus outbreak. The team has been working with parents and carers to make sure they have received emails and which method is the best form of communication for each family.
Lecturer Denise Incani said: “I personally find emails more successful as they give me the opportunity to mark students’ work and send additional tasks according to their individual needs.
“I focus on each students’ needs, giving appropriate and constructive feedback and create ad-hoc resources.”
Elsewhere in the SEN department, several teachers have gone above and beyond to find different tools to deliver their teaching. For Lecturer Cath Doyle, she found an interactive interview tool which allows her to send work, receive responses and use it to encourage students to practice interview answers which they had been working on a few weeks ago.
Online learning has received a positive response from all users, with staff seeing good attendance numbers in their sessions.
Pathways to Employment Lecturer Sarah Mills has seen her students actively participating and attending their classes through Microsoft Teams and Notebook which she said she was ‘really pleased to see’.
While Education, Training and CIPD Lecturer Sue Foote has seen a ‘great level of responsiveness’ from her adult learners.
She said: “I am incredibly lucky to have adult learners and working from home hasn’t hugely impacted my classes because of the way I work. I am very structured in how I deliver my programme and I break up the course material into tasks on a week-by-week basis.
“Adult learners are very focused and motivated and they are great groups. They really benefit from having a structured programme and being organised in knowing what we will be looking at.
“With online classes, we are restricted with how many can be in the conference call at a time but they all log in and have time slots to speak with me and ask questions on content and videos which are sent earlier that day. This also gives them the opportunity to communicate and speak with each other.
Other departments have been encouraging students to continue to hone their skills from home with daily challenges on social media.
Make-up Lecturers Kate Dowle, Ellie Ford and Jo Peters have been setting daily challengers for their students to create some weird and wonderful creations (shown below).
Air Cabin Crew Lecturer Jo Skirrow has been hosting virtual classes and said it is a huge success. She said: “Everyone joins in and are ready and waiting to learn. There are lots of laughs and various sets of pyjamas!
“One of the students couldn’t connect as her internet was down but she instead joined via phone, over speaker, to her classmate. The tasks were set and all work was completed and sent in by the end of the day.”
Visit our coronavirus information webpage for the latest information about the College closure and online classes.
