The pandemic increased the use of technology and online education. However, monitoring their students’ progress during online education is challenging for teachers. Adequate monitoring is essential for providing necessary support. 10 teachers were interviewed to investigate their monitoring strategies and the difficulties they faced during online education. Recommendations are provided to stimulate teacher monitoring, and to show how learning analytics can support this.

Background information

In blended learning, face-to-face education is combined with online educational activities. The flipped classroom is an example of blended learning in which online self-study activities are combined with face-to-face teacher-guided activities. Teacher support is essential for learning, and an important component of this support is teacher monitoring. Teacher monitoring can be defined as the assessment of students for the purpose of making informed decisions about what support to provide to students. In the flipped classroom, teachers can monitor their students by using information from the preparatory self-study activities (pathway 1) or by interacting with and observing the students in the guided sessions (pathway 2).

Figure 1. Two monitoring pathways

Project description

Nevertheless, teacher monitoring practices in the context of online education have not been investigated in detail yet. Therefore, this project tries to make sense of teachers’ experiences with online education in terms of the distinction between monitoring and supporting, and the two pathways available for monitoring. 10 teachers with online teaching experience were interviewed to provide an answer to the research questions.

Aims

This project aims to answer the following research questions:

• Which monitoring strategies do teachers use in terms of the two monitoring pathways and what cues do they use?
• What monitoring challenges do teachers experience when they compare their online experiences with the face-to-face setting?  

Results & Conclusions

Results showed that teachers primarily monitored their students during the online guided sessions (pathway 1), but that this was harder than monitoring during the face-to-face guided sessions. This difficulty may stem from the lack of monitoring cues in the online guided sessions. To compensate for this lack of cues, the teachers said that they asked their students more questions. Monitoring students based on preparatory activities (pathway 2) did not provide enough valuable information for the teachers.

Best practices for enhancing monitoring

This figure is a visualisation of the recommendations for the structure of an online guided session.

Figure 2. Recommendations for the structure of a guided session

References

• Al-Samarraie, H., Shamsuddin, A., & Alzahrani, A. I. (2020). A flipped classroom model in higher education: A review of the evidence across disciplines. Educational Technology Research & Development, 68(3), 1017–1051.
• Staker, H., & Horn, M. B. (2012). Classifying K-12 blended learning. Innosight Institute, 22.
• Gloria, A. M., & Uttal, L. (2020). Conceptual considerations in moving from face-to-face to online teaching. International Journal on E-Learning, 19(2), 139–159.
• Marek, M. W., Chew, C. S., & Wu, W. V. (2021). Teacher experiences in converting classes to distance learning in the COVID-19 pandemic. International Journal of Distance Education Technologies, 19(1), 89–109.
• Van Geel, M., Keuning, T., Frèrejean, J., Dolmans, D., van Merriënboer, J., & Visscher, A. J. (2018). Capturing the complexity of differentiated instruction. School Effectiveness and School Improvement, 30(1), 51–67.
• Lajoie, S. P. (2005). Extending the scaffolding metaphor. Instructional Science, 33(5–6), 541–557.
• Loibl, K., Leuders, T., & Dörfler, T. (2020). A framework for explaining teachers’ Diagnostic Judgements by Cognitive Modeling (DiaCoM). Teaching and Teacher Education, 91.

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