For teaching, I find Seesaw (www.seesaw.me) to be an incredible app that allows me to encourage students to develop an online portfolio easily. It was developed for primary school but I use it in higher education as a useful tool. You can link to any other apps or information (e.g., Moodle, Google drive). The assignments encourage quick responses from the students and instructor and to use multimodal responses - audio, drawings, video.
Hi, Anders Norberg. Thank you for your comment. The frequency of “remote learning” in Google Scholar is far higher than that of “remote teaching.” Can’t it be understood to mean remotely controlled/directed learning (i.e. without the physical presence of the teachers and their classes), where the reference is related to the learners being remotely taught?
Hi Adnan Z. Mkhelif ! Yes, you are right, it is about ” remotely controlled/directed learning” but, shouldn’t that better be called teaching? I analysed this in 2016 by googleing very systematically on a number of combined expressions. (I did this so much that I received on-screen questions and warnings from Google as peculiar activity.)
See the intro to my thesis if interested, p 16ff. The term teaching is very impopular nowadays, authors go directly for ”learning” as being a more student-centered term perhaps. Biesta calls this ”learnification of education” and is quite critical of it as a marketing-phenomenon (in The beautiful risk of education, 2017). What a teacher does is to teach, and much is taught but not learnt and also the other way around. That is important.
The term ”distance learning” for example is also based on a center-periphery pattern that is not so much a part of the information society as a classic university perspective of the world. Although we have globally around 20 000 universities that are now trying to save us in this way of ”reaching out”. Time to change perspective. Luciano Floridi, professor in information philosophy writes ”The infosphere has many nodes, but no ultimate centre, so we can be only more or less provinical”. (The fourth revolution, p 80).
I think we must be more precise in using language, especially around ICTs in education, we have a lot of very confusing terminology in use in this field. See my ppt presentation ”The learning alphabet”, attached.
Thesis From blended learning to learning onlife - ICTs, time and ac...
Sanako remote classroom tool (Sanako Connect). It offers a variety of tools to be used in remote teaching as well as online learning at home. Due to the coronavirus situation the company offers it free of charge until the end of the semester.
For me Google classroom is what I am currently using with University students. I am able to have discussions on the stream and I'm also able to upload assignments and mark them online and return them. However I have failed to get the feature to do podcasts which I DESPERATELY need for me to record short lectures just to blend reading, writing and listening for my students
Hi, Anders Norberg. Thank you again for your interesting comments, which remind me of prescriptivists and of the “he/she issue,” where the easiest way to get around is to use the plural form they:-)
So, the question is directed to both teachers and learners. Deciding which of the two words (teaching and learning) is “better” or more appropriate may also depend on what role is being assumed by the participant.
By the way, I also frequently receive on-screen warnings of a peculiar activity from Google as well as questions requesting me to confirm that I am not a robot:-)
In my experience, Moodle and Zoom are a good blend. They can be integrated and together they offer a solution for the entire cycle of course design, delivery and assessment, with the additional advantage of various communication channels with students.
In the teaching act the learning tool can be any Zoom, Google classroom, Microsoft Teams, etc.), but all these are just tools. Very important is the act of teaching and the teacher's abilities to interact with students, so that the information transmitted by the teacher is successfully received by students.
You spotted a great point to consider. In my view this is a field, - case, - and context dependent question. I try to optimize: there is a set of available solutions in a particular situation and I aim at integrating those in a way the yields the most value for the target group in focus:
1) Comcast Business (2020). "Education and COVID 19: Remote Learning Tech Solutions" April 23, 2020, A recorded webinar available via the BrightTALK - platform, further details:
a) https://www.brighttalk.com/webcast/15679/396228/education-and-covid-19-remote-learning-tech-solutions
b) https://www.brighttalk.com/join/
2) Google (2020). "Distance Learning Strategies: Save time and engage students with ideas and resources for remote teaching" Google for Education, Available at:
AITSL (2020). "Spotlight: What Works in Online/Distance Teaching and Learning?" Copyright @ Australian Institute for Teaching and School Leadership, Available at:
Adnan Z. Mkhelif it is a good opportunity to exchange experiences and expand the academic network. In general we use moodle to organize the learning environment, and we also make use of google meet to carry out synchronized moments, as it still allows use at great costs for the University with undergraduate and graduate students. But we have participated in workshops organized by MIT in sessions in which they have the license to use Zoom, which allows them to use other facilities such as organizing participants in small groups with the breakroom. However, as we have students with connectivity difficulties to attend online video call sessions, we also explore audio files using social networks such as whatsapp. Always aiming to reach the largest number of students.