O.R.E.O: Become a Self-Regulated Online Learner

How might we help students become self-regulated online learners?

We are entering our second week of online learning and it looks like the school closure will be expended for a couple of more weeks with the increasing confirmed Covid-19 cases in Thailand. The first week was very exhausting for both students and teachers. We were making a deliberate effort to adapt ourselves to the online teaching and learning instructional model. I don’t think it will get easier as intentional teaching and learning is never easy, and now we are adding different kinds of complexity in our current situation.

In social media, educators shared many success stories of how fast and adaptive their students have gotten used to online learning. When students are intrinsically motivated, they always try to keep up with their work and have high expectations of themselves regardless of learning online or in the actual classrooms. We had two-thirds of students who followed instructions correctly and did what they were supposed to be doing. One-third of students did not log in to ManageBac (the learning management system we used at KIS) to check subject instructions and tasks. Therefore, they were behind on their assignments. We contacted 140 students and their families. We checked in with families and made sure they were healthy, safe, and had a good learning environment for their kids. We also communicate our expectations of online learning with families and students again.

It occurs to me that many students can benefit from this online learning opportunity to develop specific approaches to learning skills so that they are empowered to tackle their online learning engagement more effectively and productively. All schools are moving into the online learning model so drastically. If we don’t provide teachers and students with any tool or scaffolding, we leave them in a sink or swim situation.

I created Online Teaching @ KIS: Do This, Not That collaboratively with my secondary school academic leadership team to support our teachers. I am not an online teaching expert. I had obtained lots of good ideas from my PLN, and it is my goal to share back and learn more from others. It was a surprise that my infographic had utterly gone viral. I am humbled that it is helpful to other teaching communities, and the infographic has been translated into different languages. 

After one week of implementing online teaching and learning, I now create another poster, “O.R.E.O: Become a Self-Regulated Online Learner” to support our students at KIS. Based on the student feedback, students enjoyed the freedom to design their daily learning schedule. We don’t want just to engage them with tasks. Ultimately we want to empower them and they can be self-regulated in designing their own learning. The aim is to promote student self-regulation through online learning by providing some actionable and explicit strategies. Many educators shared how they hope this online teaching can transform pedagogy. In addition to this, I also want to add that this is a great opportunity for students to develop approaches to learning skills and learn specific strategies to develop their motivation and positive attitude towards learning.

In the poster’s section titled “Manage My State of Mind”, I explicitly want to teach students some affective skills in this period. This is a pretty scary time with the Covid-19 pandemic for students (and also for adults). What we hear and read all day in the media is about Covid-19 and we seem to be trapped and isolated. This might trigger anxiety and stress in our students, and we need to pay extra attention to students’ emotional states. One strategy to develop motivation and feel grounded is to develop positive talk. On the other hand, we also consider ourselves lucky and feel grateful as we are still healthy, safe and have no trouble getting food. Students can develop gratitude by writing down 2-3 things that they feel grateful for every day. Having a gratitude journal is very much encouraged.

​Become Self-regulated Online Learner

You can click the image below to download the PDF file. ​