Posts Tagged ‘advice to online instructors’
January 6 - How to Create Effective Activities for Online Teaching
By: Errol Craig Sull in Online Education
We’ve all used them, first as students and now as online instructors: activities in a class meant to highlight, spotlight, underline, enhance, or explain some aspect of the subject we are teaching. Too often, not much thought or effort is given to these activities, resulting in outdated and unsuccessful activities. With the right approaches and a bit of knowledge, online instructors can create activities that are dynamic, effective, and interesting.
December 21 - How to Balance Online Learner Needs and Instructor Workload
By: Mary Bart in Online Seminars
Instructor workload in online courses can be overwhelming and can make faculty shy away from using more interactive assignments. Yet, encouraging students to take more responsibility for their learning fosters deeper learning for the students and can allow the instructor to manage his or her workload more effectively. This seminar will outline strategies for developing engaging, interactive assignments, establishing instructor presence and managing instructor workload.
December 10 - Instructor’s Personality: An Essential Online Course Component
By: Rob Kelly in Online Education
An instructor’s “digital” personality can influence student achievement, retention or completion, and satisfaction with courses, says Todd Conaway, an instructional designer at Yavapai College in Arizona. This is why he encourages instructors to infuse their personalities into their online courses. A growing number of tools and technologies can help.
October 28 - Online Teaching Tips for Leveraging Students’ Insights and Experiences
By: Errol Craig Sull in Online Education
Teaching any online class is time-consuming and can be a juggling act. The instructor must keep students engaged and motivated, adhere to a variety of deadlines, quickly answer all student emails and postings, react to in-class “emergencies,” stay on top of all school policies, and teach the subject in an easy-to-understand manner—while remaining a patient, upbeat, and constant presence through it all. This is no easy task, and while we each have developed approaches to help us, there is one often underused “tool” that online instructors can employ: the students in one’s course.
October 22 - Online Courses: Step-by-Step
By: Mary Bart in Online Courses
This three-part online course provides an in-depth, yet straightforward explanation of online teaching’s essentials. You’ll gain valuable insight into the pedagogy of online teaching, the tools and technology at your disposal in the online classroom, and how to get your courses up and running efficiently and painlessly!
October 18 - Intellectual Property, Copyright, and Harassment: Navigating the Murky Legal Waters of Online Teaching
By: Mary Bart in Online Education
If you teach online, here’s a simple quiz for you:
- Are you familiar with your college’s intellectual property policy?
- Do you know if you own the class material you have created?
- Do you have permission to use all copyrighted materials you use regularly?
- Do you know how to prevent defamation and harassment issues online?
- Do you have a disability expert on campus that regularly assists in the development of online materials so that you do not violate disability guidelines?
October 12 - Three Tips for Handling Disruptive Online Students
By: Susan Ko, PhD in Online Education
Disruptive students, in any teaching and learning environment, are a challenge to manage, but they can be particularly so online. And it may take longer for an instructor to realize that a student is actually being disruptive online, since online communications can be ambiguous and one always wants to give students the benefit of the doubt.
September 30 - Online Teaching Challenge: Creating an Emotional Connection to Learning, part 2
By: Rob Kelly in Online Education
“One of the biggest barriers to online learning is our inability to respond in the moment, unless we happen to be on live chat or video, which is really rare in most of the online learning world,” says Rick Van Sant, associate professor of education at Ferris State University.
September 28 - Online Teaching Challenge: Creating an Emotional Connection to Learning, part 1
By: Rob Kelly in Online Education
Learning research indicates that people learn better in the presence of some emotional connection—to the content or to other people. Creating this emotional connection is particularly challenging in the online classroom, where most communication is asynchronous and lacks many of the emotional cues of the face-to-face environment. Nevertheless, it is possible to do, with a learner-centered approach to teaching and a mastery of the technology that supports it, says Rick Van Sant, associate professor of education at Ferris State University.
September 22 - How Much Multimedia Should You Add to PowerPoint Slides When Teaching Online?
By: Debra Ferdinand, PhD in Learning Styles
PowerPoint is versatile in allowing us to add multimedia (graphics, sound, audio, video, text, animation, etc.) to our presentations for keeping online students’ rapt attention. But how much multimedia should you add? In answering this question, I find that taking into consideration students’ learning styles and cultural/international backgrounds can help to lessen the risk of using too much or too little multimedia in your online PPTs.
