What do we gain from a virtual meeting: content or experience?

MetaDocencia was born in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic as a response to the need and urgency for incorporating tools for a quick and effective switch to educational online events.

In this context, we developed training proposals that were useful for hundreds of teachers who participated in our courses and had an impact on thousands of students.

Now it is time to reflect on spaces of growth and guidance brought about by our next training proposals. Why not look for answers in the contributions of teachers who were MetaDocencia students?

With this goal in mind, we analyze the responses to the end-of-course surveys conducted between March 2020 and October 2021 in relation to three of our courses:

• Zoom Workshop
• How to teach programming online
• Introduction to online teaching essentials

We built a standard text analysis routine. In this link you can see how directly in the R code we use:

What does this word cloud tell us?

That our community highly values the meeting spaces (grupos - groups; salas - rooms), interaction (interactuar), recommendations (recomendaciones), and shared documents (doc. compartidos). In addition, they recognize the usefulness of the exercises (ejercicios), practices (prácticas), examples (ejemplos) and dynamics (dinámicas) that we proposed. In this sense, they also recognize the importance of a friendly environment (calidez, ambiente), and participation (participación).

We think that these answers are very eloquent to share and we continue thinking:

• The fact that these are the central aspects we take away from some virtual trainings begs the question: do we generate them in all our trainings?
• What is the most enriching aspect about sharing synchronous encounters: the content or the experience?
• Besides making it possible to meet people from all over the world, what do we take away from virtual training?

At MetaDocencia we believe that experience makes the difference and we are working on measuring how experience impacts the effectiveness of learning.

We share these questions to continue learning together!