Two words are dominating conversations, and if they aren't, the conversation quickly drifts back to the topic: COVID-19 and/or Coronavirus. At present, schooling systems and universities are moving at an accelerating speed to generate digital solutions to meet the challenge of physical distancing brought on by the pandemic. Because many Australian students are not attending schools in a face-to-face capacity, many thousands of initial teacher education students are unable to complete their professional experience placements and therefore their degrees. This will likely have a flow-on effect for getting graduate teachers into the classrooms and potentially exacerbate the teacher shortages being felt across Australia.

In 2016, a change was made to the approach taken for delivery of the first practicum placement experience for initial teacher education students at [the university]. Rather than the traditional 20-day in-school observation placement, an alternative 10-day online experience, called the Online Demonstration School (ODS), was developed. The ODS provided students with a fully online practicum experience involving viewing videos of a variety of classroom situations developed in conjunction with local schools. Subsequent reflection and collaboration with peers and academics allowed targeted aspects in the classroom situations to be examined in depth. This article summarises the literature supporting this change and presents a comparison of the effectiveness of these two alternative approaches based upon an analysis of mentor teacher grading of the second practicum placement completed. The analysis indicates that there are few significant differences in grading of the second in-school practicum placement by mentor teachers based upon whether students complete the in-school placement or the ODS. The benefits of the use and possible future development of the ODS are discussed.