Schools adapt: Resources for teaching BHR online

Voltaire Veneracion

CREATIVE COMMONS PHOTO BY ALLISON SHELLEY FOR AMERICAN EDUCATION: IMAGES OF TEACHERS AND STUDENTS IN ACTION

With many schools worldwide conducting classes online, teachers of BHR and their respective educational institutions would benefit from open access resources online that support their vocation and mission. An example of such a school is Ateneo Law School in Makati City, Philippines, which offers a course on BHR as part the International Human Rights Law track of its Master of Laws program.

Today, let’s discuss three such resources:

1. The academic journal article, “Teaching Business and Human Rights During the Pandemic” by Rachel Chambers, Anthony Ewing, and Meg Roggensack (Business and Human Rights Journal, (published online on 9 Nov. 2020), Developments in the Field, First View, pp. 1–6);
2. University of the Philippines Open University’s MODeL, “Executive Course on Remote Teaching and Learning”; and
3. University of New South Wales’ MOOC, “Learning to Teach Online (LTTO).”

PORTION OF THE COVER OF CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS’ BHRJ

If you’re a teacher of BHR and need resources specific to your specialty, you’d benefit from reading BHRJ’s new article, “Teaching Business and Human Rights During the Pandemic” by Rachel Chambers, Anthony Ewing, and Meg Roggensack.

The online platform of Cambridge University Press’ Business and Human Rights Journal, last accessed on 8 December 2020, features the practical journal article above that shares the lessons learned and resources on how to teaching BHR effectively during COVID-19. The paper’s authors – teachers in University of Connecticut, Columbia Law School, and Georgetown Law School – are Governance Committee members of Teaching Business and Human Rights Forum, a platform for collaboration on TeachBHR.org .

According to footnote no. 3 of the BHRJ article,

“Founded in 2011 to promote and strengthen business and human rights education worldwide, the Teaching Business and Human Rights Forum (TeachBHR.org) connects more than 350 members teaching business and human rights at some 200 institutions in 45 countries. Teaching Forum initiatives include a Discussion Board, a Syllabi Bank, multidisciplinary Teaching Workshops, and the online Teaching Business and Human Rights Handbook (BHRHandbook.org).”

According to the Forum’s website, 

“[t]he Teaching Forum was founded by Joanne Bauer, Adjunct Professor of International Affairs, Columbia University and Anthony Ewing, Lecturer, Columbia School of Law. Forum activities have been supported by the Institute for the Study of Human Rights at Columbia University and the Columbia Law School Human Rights Institute. Since 2018, the Teaching Forum has actively collaborated with the Global Business and Human Rights Scholars Association.”

The discussion board on Basecamp (a cloud project management app) is limited to existing Forum members. Similarly, syllabi uploaded by other teachers and stored on Columbia Law School’s own platform may be viewed only after you’ve shared yours.

However, many other teaching resources – some of which are cited in the BHRJ article – are open access and may be viewed for free here.

The BHRJ article, including many of the footnotes, provide useful links for teachers of BHR. It benefits from being the product of long years of collaborations, as well as resources shared by teachers of BHR during the COVID-19 pandemic. This is helpful for BHR teachers who need immediate support.

It can improve as an academic journal article by citing more literature outside the Forum platform. What pedagogies or frameworks for online education are available to BHR teachers and which ones do the authors or polled community members recommend? How have teachers in different countries and historical periods facing similar crises – such as the Spanish flu or wars – adapted and continued to teach in challenging conditions?

It would also be good to crowdsource and develop resources for BHR and human rights teachers in the Global South, where Internet or computer access may be limited. In countries with authoritarian regimes, how can teachers of other subjects – say, social studies, history, or commerce – incorporate BHR into their curricula? How can they assess and plan for risks to their security, both physical and online, during COVID-19 when many countries are seeing the escalation of surveillance and shrinking of civic space?

Finally, the text would have been more appealing had the authors included visual aids. It would have been nice to see charts showing the demographic data of Forum member teachers and their learners such as their respective sex, gender, race, nationality, and age.

The article succeeds in sharing practical resources for the immediate use of BHR teachers during the COVID-19 emergency. Future research would benefit from a more extensive review of literature on the topic of teaching human rights during emergencies, including in the Global South, and a longer period of reflection on the human rights impacts of the global shift to teaching BHR online.

Executive Course on Remote Teaching and Learning

UPOU HOMEPAGE FEATURES THE ICONIC OBLATION STATUE SYMBOLISING THE PRESTIGIOUS STATE UNIVERSITY

If you’re an administrator, director, or trustee of an educational institution that offers BHR and are concerned with school policies and quality assurance for remote teaching and learning, you may be interested in University of the Philippines Open University’s “Executive Course on Remote Teaching and Learning.”

UPOU describes its courses as MODeL: Massive Open Distance e-Learning. In the Philippines, UPOU says on its log-in page that it

“pioneered in online teaching and learning and continues to play a leading role in the study and practice of open learning and distance education in the Philippines.”

This writer discovered this course, as well as UNSW’s Learning to Teach Online course below, through VolunTeach Philippines.

What’s good about this course – comprised of three modules – is the plethora of references, including guidance from Asia and the Global South. Examples are Philippine Institute for Development Studies’ Massive Open Online Course Discussion Paper Series No. 2015-47 (Nov. 2015); Commonwealth of Learning’s Guidelines for Quality Assurance and Accreditation of MOOCs (2016); UNESCO’s Synthesis Paper “COVID-19 Education Response Webinar: What do we know about effectiveness?” (17 April 2020); and, for planning a preliminary Self-Assessment Report (SAR), the Plan-Do-Check-Act (PDCA) cycle approach of ASEAN University Network (2016).

The Executive Course seeks to examine the pros and cons of a range of remote teaching and learning methods (instead of just purely online learning): this is practical for communities and countries, for example, where blended learning may be more appropriate during the pandemic because not all students may have access to fast Internet or their own computer.

The output from the modules’ writing exercises, with a little editing, can already be used in real life. They include a briefing paper to a school’s policy makers on implementing Quality Assurance (QA) for remote teaching and learning (RTL) and a concept paper for a school’s transition to RTL.

There’s also more attention given by the instructors compared with those of asynchronous MOOCs. One even gave a live Zoom lecture when this writer took the course in May 2020 – this made the course semi-synchronous (most of the lectures were still prerecorded videos). When I emailed the UPOU staff and instructors on a technical concern, I received responses and resolutions to the issue the very next day from a staff member and an instructor. Moreover, all the papers submitted were personally assessed by instructors or their team.

The disadvantage of this set-up was the long period of waiting for assessment results. While my batch 2 for the Executive Course finished submitting requirements in May 2020, certificates were said to be available for download (and strictly once only!) on 29 July 2020 (for module 1); 11 August 2020 (for module 2); and 4 September 2020 (for module 3). And in this writer’s case, I’m still waiting for the latter two certificates.

Other points for improvement:

• The website needs to get an SSL certificate to be made secure and protect users from hackers or third-parties who may view or capture usernames and passwords entered during log-in: the beginning of its URL would then become https:// (instead of the http:// as of this writer’s last access on 17 Dec. 2020; the site had a notice of ongoing maintenance starting last 14 Dec. 2020);
• The website design could be made more appealing to the eyes and the user interface, easier to navigate (with org and coursera.org as design benchmarks);
• The long videos could be cut into five- to 15-minute segments for a more pleasant online experience that avoids screen burnout;
• The readings are voluminous, just as in a face-to-face class: for better remote or online learning outcomes, one- to four-page excerpts of these could be required reading for everyone, while the full documents could be made optional readings;
• It would be better to give access to content and assignments after completion of the online course (as of last access on 17 Dec. 2020), and also unlimited downloads and views of one’s certificates, as in LTTO in Coursera below.

In sum, this course is useful for educational institutions’ policy-makers and faculty concerned with Quality Assurance (QA), as well as those interested in scholarly literature on massive open distance e-learning.

Learning to Teach Online (LTTO)

DR. SIMON MCINTYRE GIVES A PRE-RECORDED OVERVIEW OF LTTO ON COURSERA

If you’re a BHR teacher and would like to understand best practices in designing online or blended classes in such a way that you’d be able to optimise technology, you may be interested in enrolling in “Learning to Teach Online (LTTO),” a MOOC offered by University of New South Wales on Coursera.

The course is based upon the multi-award-winning open educational resource developed by Dr Simon McIntyre and Karin Watson. It features interviews with teachers in different schools, many in Australia and the United Kingdom, who have practical experience with using online technologies for classes.

As LTTO’s course description on Coursera says,

            “Integrating online technologies into your teaching can be a challenging prospect, and it can be difficult to know how to approach it effectively for the benefit of both students and yourself. No one knows your own content and teaching strengths better than you, and the ‘one size fits all’ formula doesn’t always suit everyone. No matter what type of technology you are interested in exploring or your level of experience, this course will help you draw on your teaching strengths and find the approach that is right for you, your students and your educational context”.

“This course will guide you through your journey of understanding how online technologies can enhance your course design. You will have the opportunity to develop your understanding of effective online teaching practices and their relationship to the use of different technologies. You will also be encouraged to progressively design and reflect upon your own online learning activity, assessment or resource for use in your own class if you choose to undertake the course assignments.”

LTTO’s positive aspects include:

• Use of Coursera’s platform, which has a good design and user interface (for this writer, ChinaX by Harvard on org offers the most engaging online learning experience among online courses he’s taken and could serve as a MOOC industry standard);
• Short video segments that comprise modules, a strategy that prevents learners’ screen burnout and loss of focus;
• You get a balance of required content and recommended optional readings based on your own needs (as assessed online), so that you create your own unique LTTO course;
• Output from exercises can be used in real life: this writer, for example, wrote a concept paper entitled, “Open-Access Video on BHR in Filipino for Popular Education” and, for the final project, made a slideshow entitled, “Flipped Symposium on BHR for Grade 10 Araling Panlipunan [Social Studies]”;
• There was one Zoom meeting with instructors Dr. McIntyre and Prof. Watson that lasted around an hour during which they responded to learners’ questions;
• Access of learners (at least those of us who got verified certificates) to LTTO videos and readings, as well as unlimited views, shares, and downloads of verified certificates, after completion of the course.

Points for the course’s improvement include:

• Taking into account the needs of teachers and learners in the Global South for example in addressing the digital divide; structural inequities, whether racial, ethnic, or gender-based, in schools; and even digital security;
• Allowing learners access to our completed assignments even after completion of the course;
• Continuous editing and curation of course content, such that required videos and readings and exercises won’t take longer than the projected course duration of 18 hours (this is a comprehensive course and, consequently, not feasible for those who have limited time for online study or who need quick fixes for emergencies).

LTTO is highly recommended for BHR teachers who are conducting classes online. Watch the course video below: