Into a new dimension: tips & tools for teaching online

This story was written in partnership with the Office of Digital Learning at Teachers College, Columbia University

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Last year, we accepted the challenge to consider how we would be able to translate our in-person workshop series into an online course for new teachers. This effort was motivated in part by our desire to provide both in-person and online offerings for Teachers College alumni who are members of our New Teacher Network at Teachers College. At CPET, we build all of our professional development services on five core values, and we wanted to ensure that shifting to an online platform did not conflict with values we hold, like developing personal relationships with our participants, providing hands-on engaging activities, or customizing the content of the workshop with feedback from participants. 

To begin, we established a few think-tank working meetings to try to articulate what we do to design in-person learning, what could translate directly, and what would need to be transformed. At first, we were overwhelmed. How would we hold small group discussions, or group work in an online, asynchronous course? First we had to accept that some things wouldn’t translate directly from in-person, to online.  Which meant we needed to find an alternative approach to reach our desired outcome. This is when everything shifted.

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