Choosing the Best Online Teaching Resources

The onset of the pandemic rushed teachers into a digital environment that is at once exhilarating, challenging, intriguing … and somewhat overwhelming. Software developers scrambled to design online tools to replace, and perhaps even surpass, the traditional classroom experience. But it’s a crowded field, and selecting the best online teaching resources is not a simple task. They should be flexible, user-friendly, and efficient, with robust support mechanisms. And they must align with course curricula, class sizes, and available budget.

Learning management systems (LMS) provide centralized, interactive content; facilitate communication and assessment; and work with web-based tools such as e-portfolios, wikis, and blogs. Beyond the LMS, instructors can access other cross-platform resources, many of which can be integrated into their system.

Here is an overview of some of the digital learning resources that instructors in higher education in Canada have found effective: to organize, communicate, present, and assess.

Organization

• Todoist: Todoist organizes and prioritizes tasks, integrating with tools such as Dropbox and Google calendar. Projects for each class contain tasks, notes, and events, with due dates and reminders.
• Pocket: This free app can replace an overloaded bookmarks bar by saving web resources, with recommendations based on your interests: useful for creating lists to share with students and colleagues.

Communication

• Slack: Slack manages communication through customized channels and direct messaging. Workspaces for each course or audience can include their own set of channels for projects, topics, teams, classwork, or student groups.
• Floop: In a physical classroom, students raise their hand to ask questions or make comments. Built by teachers, Floop is its digital twin, providing one-on-one support. Students can upload images, PDFs, and Google docs, sheets, and slides for instructor feedback.
• Simple Survey: Designed and hosted in Canada, this tool creates online surveys, polls, or forms. Its features include respondent management and tracking, real-time reporting and analysis, export capabilities to formats such as Excel or CSV, and WCAG for improved accessibility.

Presentation

• Zoom: Beyond hosting online meetings with breakout rooms and group chat, this resource is valuable for screen-sharing video presentations and recording for later review. Some alternatives to Zoom are BlueJeans, GoToMeeting, and Google Hangouts.
• Webex: Another alternative to Zoom is Webex, which supports file transfers and the ability to remove attendees from a meeting. Hosts can lock and unlock the focus on specific people, allowing everyone to see who is talking.
• Prezi: Professionally designed templates make this presentation tool more flexible and visually appealing than PowerPoint or Google Slides. Teachers can interact with the information as they speak, moving to any place rather than through a linear progression from one slide to the next.
• Loom: Probably every teacher has laid out detailed instructions, only to hear “What are we supposed to do afterward?" Loom solves this frustration with easy screen recording to share directions and produce tutorials, demos, examples, and reminders.
• Idroo: Idroo’s online whiteboard enables freehand annotation of presentations, images, PDFs, or Word docs in real-time, with an equation editor for math and physics formulas.
• Snagit: Snagit exceeds the capacity of a snipping tool by capturing any type of picture, including animated GIFs. Panoramic scrolling handles lengthy material; while editing capacities can blur sensitive information, mark up screenshots, or simplify the content.
• Audacity: This open-source audio editor is easy to use for live streaming and recording to tell digital stories. It can be used for instructors’ lectures, review of verbal assignments by teachers or peers, or student podcasts as a substitute for journal entries.

Assessment

• ALEKS: ALEKS (Assessment and Learning in Knowledge Spaces) evaluates student comprehension in math and chemistry. Mapping each student’s knowledge status pinpoints the areas that need more focus and customizes a student learning path with real-time, positive feedback. Instructors can choose from adaptive and non-adaptive assignments and assessments.
• Dropbox Paper: A collaborative space for making, sharing, and editing documents, Dropbox Paper integrates with Slack. Task management tools incorporate assignment due dates and linking capacity to videos, GIFs, and maps. Paper can also transform a document into a professionally designed presentation.
• Connect: McGraw-Hill’s Connect synchronizes with Blackboard, Brightspace, and Canvas. Its toolkit promotes student engagement and participation through adaptive technology while assisting instructors with consolidated resources, automatic grading, and assessment reports.
• Markup Hero: A free screenshot and annotation tool, Markup Hero’s Chrome app can take scrolling screenshots that can be organized, annotated, and edited.
• Crowdmark: Crowdmark facilitates the review of scanned images of student work with instructors’ comments, hyperlinks, embedded images, and math and science notations. The tool can add scores and return graded assignments to students online.

As classrooms flip and students take on more responsibility for their own learning, a well-planned virtual toolkit is a key to a superior experience. Instructors can prepare for the upcoming fall session by reviewing the resources that will complement their course delivery and set their students up for success.