Ready Am I To Teach Online Communication Skills – You Ready To Teach With PowerPoint?

Online Education? Here’s my Test Question: 

“Do you think PowerPoint is essentially the creation of slides that you have to master?”

If so, you’re not ready to teach! You don’t know the essence of teaching!

Susan Gomez shares on Facebook that CNN’s Brian Ries and Meg Wagner have written, “Universities Begin Considering Canceling In-Person Classes Until 2021[1]” – and this Filipino teacher thinks it’s a bright idea. Right now, with the Luzon Lockdown due to the coronavirus scare, my daughter Graciela is holding her Montessori classes online and enjoying it. (online image from The Enterprises Project[2])

Now I speak as a teacher who is digitally & artfully competent. This is a 79-year old sonabagun one-man band who began teaching himself all-digital creative writing, editing, photography, desktop publishing starting in the late 1980s. Yes!

Locked in, locked out, lockdown whatever. In this Digital Age, Online Classes should now be the In-Thing!

The thing is that college professors and instructors may be masters of their subject matters but are not trained to teach such online or digitally – so this calls for new universes of education that the Earth has not seen before! Right here, I want to tell you why creating slides is not the essence of PowerPoint –

With any digital application, via texts and images,
the door to teaching/learning is telling stories.

So, you can teach a whole subject daily in 3 months using only, for instance, PowerPoint – or Microsoft Word!

That’s an original idea. Being Ilocano, I’m an original aboriginal.

I did a Google search on “education digital OR online” and I found one innocent article, Kunal Chawla’s “3 Challenges Facing Online Education Today[3]” (Udacity), where he says:

Learning online is good at multiple-choice questions. While this technique works well for the test makers, it is generally not effective at pushing learners to think of new ideas.

On the contrary! I say multiple choice questions are good in that they force the student to think for oneself: (a), (b), (c), (d), or (e)? It forces one to go back to the lecture or do research.

Open-ended questions are good, says Mr Chawla:

Open-ended questions are encountered in the workplace on a regular basis and any effective learning space will simulate conditions for students to practice such inquiries. Online education, however, has historically been terrible at providing feedback on questions like “How will you break this problem down?” and prompts like “Do you agree with this argument?”

I say if you have a problem with the question “How will you break this problem down?” then you have a problem with teaching in the first place! With that question, it’s like you are asking your student to consider the problem out of the box!

Yes, I am loving online education already. So, who of the Schools, Colleges & Universities in the Philippines – or abroad - would like to engage me as online teacher? Like, I am ready to teach you PowerPoint as the app for teaching anything. Email me, frankahilario@gmail.com@517

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[1] https://edition.cnn.com/2020/04/14/us/university-may-cancel-classes-fall-2021-trnd/index.html

[2] https://enterprisersproject.com/article/2016/9/monsanto-cio-value-inclusiveness-driving-successful-digital-transformation

[3] https://blog.udacity.com/2015/04/3-challenges-facing-online-education-today.html