Theory and Practice of Digital Student Teaching Demos

Designed by Chase L. Way

To efficiently structure the self-paced learning experience and ensure instructional continuity, all tutorials are divided into a suggested series of study sessions. The modules build on one another, so learners are strongly encouraged them to complete them in the recommended sequence. If you haven't yet had the opportunity to complete Tutorials #1 and #2, please consider doing so before exploring this tutorial.

Why should our students do teaching demos?

Even if our students don't follow in our footsteps as college professors, they may still work as an educator, broadly defined. Perhaps their career will take them in a traditional teaching-oriented direction (e.g. middle school teacher, private tutor, school administrator). But it might also demand that they teach material to professional peers outside of the confines of a formal classroom context. For example, they might end up doing corporate training, facilitating non-profit workshops or seminars, and/or running an entrepreneurial endeavor in which part of their profits are earned from extracurricular, "on demand" classes they teach through platforms like LinkedIn Learning, Udemy, Teachable, Skillshare. LearnWorlds, Rise, or Rise 360.

Now, when we talk about "teaching online," we tend to think about what we need to do to facilitate our Canvas classes online - and for good reason! But this tutorial provides us with a powerful opportunity to think about how our students - regardless of their future professional path - might also benefit from being taught to teach online. Here are three powerful reasons why we should consider integrating student-created digital teaching experiences into our courses:

By integrating digital peer-to-peer teaching experiences into our curriculum, we help our students to develop a marketable skill and envision new professional paths. Having designed and built their own online class (even if it's very limited in scope) is an impressive achievement which students can add to their Portfolium account, list on LinkedIn, discuss in a cover letter or job interview, and so forth.
By integrating digital peer-to-peer teaching experiences into our curriculum, we provide a new way for our students to more deeply master our discipline. This is sometimes called the "protégé effect," and many of us have already embedded some kind of peer teaching exercise into our in-person courses (how many of us assign class presentations, right?). But it's exciting to realize that we can still draw on this teaching technique when we re-format our classes for asynchronous online environments. We just need to be a little creative in how we do it!
By integrating digital peer-to-peer teaching experiences into our curriculum, we help our students to feel more empowered in a world where education has very suddenly become remote - both literally and metaphorically. Online teaching isn't better or worse than in-person teaching, just as film isn't a better or worse artistic genre than oil painting. It's just a different educational genre. Paradoxically, by allowing our students to experiment with being online teachers, they may become better online learners. To return to the art analogy, consider that when a student goes to film school, she doesn't just take courses in directing - even if she is utterly intent on being a professional director. She also has to take courses in cinematography, editing, film history, special effects, etc. The same principle applies to something like online teaching, which, when done well, asks us to engage with and re-structure our approach to material in creative new ways. By studying this educational process from multiple angles, we are more likely to successfully master this learning environment.

Tutorial Session A

Read this article about nine popular platforms for extracurricular online teaching (in other words, teaching which is not affiliated with a formal academic institution).
- Pro-tip #1: This piece is posted on a website maintained by Zapier, a company which deals with digital automation. You don't need to know anything about what Zapier does for the purposes of this tutorial. But you might find it helpful and/or interesting to pay attention to the way that Zapier talks about the pros and cons of different ed tech platforms.
Explore each of the platforms mentioned in the aforementioned article. Can you envision your students using any of them to teach, say, a single lesson on a topic covered in your class? It's okay if the lesson is really basic and/or theoretical.
- Pro-tip #2: Don't get super bogged down about how realistic it might be for your students to try and create a lesson on such a platform. Just give yourself permission to think outside the box about how you present material to your students, and how they might in turn present that same material to someone else. Remember the film school analogy used above and be creative!
Note that many of these platforms offer a free trial to potential subscribers.
- Pro-tip #3: It is completely acceptable to ask your students to sign up for a free trial of an ed tech tool, as long as you know in advance how long the free trial lasts (read: do not create an assignment which will take 6 weeks to complete on a platform whose free trial period is only a month). Likewise, be sure to remind your students to cancel their free trial before they are charged a subscription fee (if they are asked to enter financial information upfront: this isn't always the case).
Reflect on whether it might be appropriate to have your students create a mini-course on one of these platforms instead of, say, writing a term paper or doing a live Zoom "class presentation."
- Pro-tip #4: The ideal is always to help students cultivate an intrinsic motivation to learn. In today's devilishly difficult economy, though, you may find that incentivizing your students with the potential for an extrinsic reward - the possibility that they might exit your class with material they could develop into a passive income stream in the future, by teaching it as an online course - is an awesome teaching tool. Also keep in mind that undocumented students may have no choice but to pursue an entrepreneurial career, so providing them with this teaching skillset can contribute to social justice goals.
- Pro-tip #5: Also start playing with the idea of how your students might frame their teaching skills while seeking paid employment. For example:
  - Could they earn extra credit points by making a Portfolium account, and then posting examples of their course in the Project section of their Portfolium profile?
  - Could they earn extra credit points by making a LinkedIn page, and then listing this course on that profile (as we shall see later in the semester, you can actually link up Portfolium and LinkedIn, so there is the potential for some really nice synergy here)?
  - Could you have MCC's Career Center do a free 20-minute demo on how to write a cover letter - and then have them write a mock cover letter in which they talk about their course? Bonus points if they have the Career Center review it with them before they submit it to you! You can always request a Career Center presentation on this topic by filling out this form.

Tutorial Session B

Note: You may find it easiest to work with the following platforms in a Chrome web browser. If you do not have Chrome installed on your device, you can download it here.

(1) Select Your Tool

Now we get to experiment with the features our students might use if we ask them to set up a lesson or a mini-course on an non-institutionally affiliated teaching platform. For the purposes of this class, I will ask you to pick just one of the two platforms produced by a company called Articulate (you can look at side-by-side comparisons by clicking here). These are some of the more graphically sophisticated platforms and, in my opinion, they're also among the easiest to learn how to use. Most importantly, for many of our students, they have longer free trial periods, and these can be activated without a credit card number:

Here is a good demo video which I recommend that you watch. The images shown are from Rise 360, but in truth the Rise platform looks almost identical. So, the video is helpful either way.

(2) Learn to Use Your Tool

If you selected Rise, login to your account. Then go to this page for step-by-step instructions on how to navigate while in your Rise account to a video tutorial session.

If you selected Rise 360, login to your account. Then go to this page for step-by-step instructions on how to navigate while in your Rise 360 account to a video tutorial session.

For easy reference, screenshots have been included to guide your navigation through your chosen platforms.

If you have two digital devices, you may want to play the tutorial on one screen (perhaps on a tablet) while following along on another (maybe a desktop or laptop computer).

Tutorial Session C

Start a new mock course in either Rise or Rise 360. Try and make it relevant to something you are currently teaching at MCC, or may teach in the future.

OR

Select a template course to modify in either Rise or Rise 360. Most of the template courses have super generic business-related content, but remember that all of this can be edited as you wish!

AND

Build at least two course-relevant features within your platform. Keep it simple: remember, the idea is not that you're going to rebuild your class on Rise or Rise 360. It's that your student will use the process of building a demo lesson or mini-course on Rise or Rise 360 to learn the material that you are already teaching them more deeply.
- If it were me, I would probably build one learning feature (i.e. an annotated graphic, process module, etc.) and one quiz.
- If you'd like to upload images to your Rise or Rise 360 demo course, you can use the image feature already provided by Articulate. Conversely, you can upload copyright-free images from Unsplash!

Tutorial Session D

Create instructions for a teaching demo assignment. Always remember that you need to keep the length of the free trial in mind: every assignment needs to end before the free trial does!
Watch the following video on learning through teaching.