Virtual Teaching and Support

An approach developed by Teaching, Learning and Students team, University of Manchester Library in 2020

Photo by Emma Matthews Digital Content Production on Unsplash

“[At] this moment, we should start by designing for the least privileged, most marginalized students, the ones with the least access.”

“We have to build for asynchronous, design real points of entry for students who can’t be physically present at a particular time or in specific ways”

— Jesse Stommel (tweet thread | single page version)

Teaching, Learning and Students (TLS) Virtual Teaching and Support (VTS) core group have been working with your help to research and identify practice for supporting learning remotely — from TLS and beyond — and to agree standards which our support must meet for our learners and ourselves.

We feel that the above quotes from critical educator Jesse Stommel neatly summarise how we would like to offer VTS, and why.

Our standards

• Our support will be asynchronous-first, so we do not exclude based on the timezone, home situation, internet or technology of our learners (or ourselves). This does not exclude live support where there is pedagogical need, it simply makes asynchronous essential (and ‘live’ an optional extra).
• Our support will be text-first, so that we do not exclude based on disability. This does not exclude additional forms of media. We can deliver engaging, personal delivery by prerecorded video — in addition to a text transcript.
• Our support will humanise online learning, with consideration and respect for all participants, regardless of background.
• As always we will be inclusive and accessible in our language and use of tools, with respect for the personal data and safeguarding of participants.
• We will record the approaches we are taking so that they can be shared, reviewed, reused and built upon. We will take part in a community of practice so that we can share and learn together.
• We will ease the strain on academic staff and ourselves by delivering support at program, rather than course unit, level wherever possible.

Our tools

To facilitate our work, we have developed the following:

• the Virtual Teaching Stack (‘the Stack’) which presents a series of prompts to help us start to design support in line with our standards
• the Virtual Teaching Resource Builder (‘the Builder’) which helps us record our chosen approach in a way which we can review and share
• the Virtual Teaching Planner (‘the Planner’) which helps us keep track of the support we are developing, leading to conversations in the VTS Channel, which we hope will form a community of practice. The Planner is a tab in the Virtual Teaching and Support Channel.

Our approach

We will take the below approach to ensure our support is consistent across services and that we share and make the most of knowledge and experience:

• Our services are best placed to commission the support they produce — we will seek approval for new ideas within existing MLE, MRE, SLS, WP and CBT structures, ensuring as part of this that we have capacity to do it. Any support outside of this will be considered by TLS Managers
• We will record all development of new/updated VTS, once approved, in the Planner to facilitate sharing of practice and progress updates
• We will use the VTS Channel as a community of practice to share and learn from each other
• We will ensure new/updated support meets our standards, for learners and for us. This can be achieved by considering the prompts in the Stack
• We will use the Stack and Builder to help us plan and evaluate consistent support, and capture our approaches in a way which facilitates reuse