Key report findings include:

• More than 6.7 million students were taking at least one online course during the fall 2011 term, an increase of 570,000 students over the previous year.
• Thirty-two percent of higher education students now take at least one course online.
• Only 2.6 percent of higher education institutions currently have a MOOC (Massive Open Online Course), another 9.4 percent report MOOCs are in the planning stages.
• Academic leaders remain unconvinced that MOOCs represent a sustainable method for offering online courses, but do believe they provide an important means for institutions to learn about online pedagogy.
• Seventy-seven percent of academic leaders rate the learning outcomes in online education as the same or superior to those in face-to-face classes.
• The proportion of chief academic officers who believe their faculty accept the value and legitimacy of online education has not increased – it now stands at only 30.2 percent.
• The proportion of chief academic leaders who say online learning is critical to their long-term strategy is at a new high of 69.1 percent.
• The perception of a majority of chief academic officers at all types of institutions is lower retention rates for online courses remain a barrier to the growth of online instruction.

Frank Mayadas, Senior Advisor to the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation and founding President of the Sloan Consortium noted “As in past years, the survey demonstrates the continuing robust growth in a wide range of institutions. It underscores the importance of online learning in higher education in the U.S. What a remarkable ten year period the survey has captured.”

The tenth annual survey, a collaborative effort between the Babson Survey Research Group and the College Board, is the leading barometer of online learning in the United States. Based on responses from over 2,800 academic leaders, the complete survey report, “Changing Course: Ten Years of Tracking Online Education in the United States” is available at http://sloanconsortium.org/publications/survey/changing_course_2012

Previously underwritten by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, the report has been able to remain independent through the generous support of Pearson Learning Solutions and the Sloan Consortium.

During a recent online seminar titled Improve Participation to Enhance Learning in Online Courses, Joan Thormann, Ph.D., a professor in the Department of Technology in Education at Lesley University and author of The Complete Step-by-Step Guide to Designing and Teaching Online Courses, shared six techniques for encouraging interactions that boost learning in an online class.

1. Optimized use of introductions: Encourage students (and the professor) to share personal information like hobbies, interests, and demographic data. This will build community, raise interest in the students in the class, and make for a friendly online environment. This is an easy first assignment.
2. Use of the instructor as a model: As an instructor, consider giving students feedback about their assignments using a template that details the expectations for the assignment. Model good communications by adding personal comments tailored to the student, thereby giving an example of substantive writing.
3. Use of a clear grading system: Encourage the students to give helpful contributions by grading their discussions every week. Give them guidance on what sort of contributions are expected, such as in-depth analysis rather than simply “I agree.”
4. Use of student moderators: The instructor does not have to be the only one to encourage valuable contributions from students in the course. Use student moderators on a rotating basis to manage discussions. This practice will increase the sense of ownership of the course and help students learn to support each other and deepen their content knowledge.
5. Use of voice conferences: In some cases, a live voice conference can be a valuable addition to the online course. These opportunities let students get to know each other and strengthen their overall communication.
6. Development of supportive forums: Develop some online forums where students can go for support, assistance, and an exchange of information with other students. Don’t respond right away to inquiries; give students time to help one another and build community.

Online courses can have the kind of vibrant interaction you find in the best of courses, both online and traditional. All it takes is the use of some simple tools that encourage students to engage with one another in substantive ways.

Some of the more common learning disabilities include dyslexia, expressive language disorder, reading processing disability, and attention deficit disorder. Ideally, the students will self-identify and contact the institution’s disability services office so the instructor will know what accommodations are required, but not all students are forthcoming about letting others know about their learning disabilities, Crum says. For some, online learning provides the opportunity to hide their learning disabilities from classmates, which can be a welcome relief from the unwanted attention their learning disabilities received in their face-to-face courses.

This lack of disclosure makes supporting students with learning disabilities difficult for online instructors. Further complicating the issue is that under FERPA instructors cannot make the determination or question the student as to whether they have a learning disability. Instructors can raise concerns about a student’s performance (chronic late assignments, excessive errors in discussion board posts, irrelevant or inappropriate answer to questions that seem to indicate a lack of understanding, etc.) and recommend that the student talk with his or her advisor, at which point the student may make his or her learning disabilities known.

Supporting students with learning disabilities
In her research on the issue of addressing learning disabilities in online courses, Crum asked departments of disabilities how online instructors could help students with learning disabilities. Their response: open and constant communication, compassion, a willingness to bend the rules to accommodate students, and one-on-one instruction.

“You can pretty much see it as an online teacher within the first week of a course. You’ll see postings that just aren’t in synch. If you notice that everybody else is answering the question and one student is talking around the question, the next step is to contact the student immediately by phone or email and say, ‘What’s going on? Did you not understand the question? What can I do to help?’ Get to the bottom of it right away because if it is left unaddressed by week three, frustration sets in and the student basically adapts an attitude of , ‘Why even bother?’”

One aspect of communication that some instructors overlook is feedback on assignments. Crum comments on every paragraph of submitted assignments because it’s a great opportunity to maintain that communication with students. This is a technique she applies across the board, and it benefits students with and without learning disabilities.

Special accommodations for students with learning disabilities can include extending deadlines, working with the disabilities services office to help students get access to assistive software, or working individually with the student, and matching the struggling student with a professor that has a lot of compassion.

Crum has found that when students who need extra time initially receive it, they tend to get subsequent assignments in on time. Planning becomes a way for them to reach their potential once the obstacle of a due date is removed.

Students with learning disabilities may have difficulties with online courses that are predominantly text based. There are ways to get around it. There are several software products that read text aloud (such as ReadPlease, available at www.readplease.com/). In addition, textbooks could be loaded into Kindle, or other wireless reading devices, that can make reading easier by allowing students to increase font size and use with black letters on a white background.

Course design
Instructors do not always have the ability to alter course design to accommodate students with learning disabilities, but instructional designers should pay attention to course elements that might be problematic for some students. For example, students with certain visual discrimination disorders may have trouble distinguishing text from background colors.

“Some instructional designers have gotten fancy with colors, graphics, animations, and so forth, and it creates havoc for people with any type of visual disability. Designers need to take disabilities into account. The bells and whistles do not need to be in the electronic classroom. There are Web tools that are great at adding bells and whistles, but use them as an add-on instead of as one size fits all,” Crum says.

Crum also recommends that instructional designers test courses on students with learning disabilities. Doing so would enable designers to prevent problems before they happen.

Excerpted from How to Handle Learning Disabilities in the Online Classroom, August 2009, Online Classroom.

1. An instructor’s personality impacts student learning;
2. More is learned in a class than just course content; and
3. It can be difficult to show your personality in an online course.

And yet, with the proliferation of Web 2.0 applications making inroads into the higher education community, educators now have more ways than ever before to share a piece of themselves with their students, while adding a new dimension to the course content, says Todd Conaway, an instructional designer at Yavapai College.

During the recent online seminar, Using Web 2.0 to Enhance Classes, Improve Retention, Conaway gave participants a crash course in a wide variety of Web 2.0 tools that are relatively easy to use and provide anywhere from basic to advanced features for free.

“None of these tools can replace the passion you have for your content or for teaching, but they can help you demonstrate that passion and carry it forward to your online students,” Conaway says.

Many of the Web 2.0 applications Conaway encourages faculty to experiment with are the very same ones being used by students and others in their personal lives, including YouTube, Blogger, Wikispaces, Second Life, Jing, Screencast.com, Audacity, Dimdim, Flickr, and Ning.

While the first generation of the Internet was largely information presented in a static fashion, Web 2.0 is participatory and collaborative in nature and everyone is invited to create as well as consume, says Conaway. With more educators moving to a learner-centered teaching, it’s not hard to envision the instructional implications these tools carry.

Ready to get started? Head on over to a Ning site Conaway created just for this seminar. There you can dip your toes in the Web 2.0 waters or, if you’re really brave, do a cannonball right into the deep end. The site is available here.

Perhaps you’ve heard someone make this objection to online learning? Or even uttered it yourself?

My answer to this is very simple: hogwash.

What do I mean? Beyond the giving and taking of stats, facts, ideas, etc., injecting ourselves into the teaching experience AND getting our students actively involved (beyond merely responding to what we ask or require) can quickly translate into one really dynamic and exciting “learning event”!

Here are a few tips for engaging online students:

Be organized. The “absent-minded professor” is not, unfortunately, an urban legend! Look at any list of student complaints about their instructors—online or otherwise—and being disorganized always shows up.

Start your course or program with a welcoming e-mail. This helps set the tone for the entire semester or session and lets the students know you are more than merely R2D2; you are instead a human who looks forward to working with the class, who welcomes their feedback and questions, and who is very excited about the upcoming course.

Keep all due dates and promises: Students who take courses online rely exclusively on what they read online in terms of due dates for readings, assignments, quizzes, etc., as well as any promises you make (e.g., “I will have the draft of your first paper returned by X date”) and virtual office hours. It is EXTREMELY important that you adhere to the dates and promises given. Students respect for you as their teacher will plummet if they find you can’t be relied on.

Follow up on all e-mail received—and promptly. E-mail is the students’ lifeline that allows for specific questions to be answered, confusions to be cleared up, and uncertainties to be quantified. Respond to all e-mail—if only an acknowledgement that you received it—and in a timely manner.

Use chat rooms, threaded discussions, journals, etc. These allow for spontaneity, for student involvement, for personal commentary by students—all items that make for more ownership of the course on their part. And by meeting with students in chat rooms and responding to journal entries, they not only get to see a more personal (read: real) side to you but also can readily see you are sincerely interested in each one of them—so important in establishing a strong teacher–student rapport.

Send general e-mails throughout the course—and post them. I call this my “glue.” I have included compliments on an overall class, “well done!” on a certain paper, wishes for a happy holiday or semester break, an offering of some additional clarification on an item I find many students are having difficulty with, a change in an initial due date, clarification on an assignment, or an attachment of an additional reading.

Be a motivator. Give students—both as a class and individually—compliments on their work, insights, extra efforts, an outstanding project or paper, etc. They are so used to being told what they got wrong or didn’t complete that positives are a nice change—and extremely important in motivating them to do better.

Do not use stuffy, formal language. I’m not suggesting you use “corner lingo” or the like, but a nice mix of conversational language with a formal way of writing will equal the students feeling as if they are reading something written by a real person—not someone who thinks that he/she is better and above the students.

Do occasional “just-for-fun” things. In my occasional, general e-mails I might end with a puzzle, a joke, a (what I call) “cool website,” an interesting item that happened on the date of the e-mail I’m sending. And I’ve also invited students to send me their “cool websites,” which I then will organize and send out to all in a master list—a really nice way (for both the students and me!) to have a bit of fun with the class while getting more involved.

REMEMBER: The effective online instructor will wear a combination of a fuzzy down comforter; a black leather jacket; and formal wear—these translate into the perfect teaching personality “attire.”

Excerpted from Teaching Online With Errol: Establishing a Solid Rapport with Online Students, Online Classroom, Jan. 2006.

In a recent interview, Todd Conaway, an instructional designer at Yavapai College, shared a few tips on building student engagement, including how to use web 2.0 tools to create the kind of rich learning environment today’s online students expect.

Q: How do you define “presence”, and what is its significance in the online classroom?
Conaway: Presence is more than how often instructors send out announcements, how frequently they participate in discussion forums, or how quickly they respond to student emails. Having a strong presence in an online classroom is just like a face-to-face classroom. Instructors are visible to the students and can be heard and seen. Instructors have personalities; they are open to the students and are more than just a source of information. They also inspire and communicate more than course-specific content. A healthy presence in class is using the communication tools the Web has to offer.

If something does not serve a purpose to the learner, it should not be used. But, online teachers need to be aware of what can be used, and that students will expect them to deliver the information in the best way possible.

Q: Given the time-constraints that many instructors face, what relatively simple first steps do you suggest for incorporating web 2.0 tools into an online course?

Conaway: If a picture paints a thousand words, I think simply adding images to the online course is an easy first step. If a few paragraphs of text are wrapped around a graph or image, not only does it assist visual learners, but it is visually more appealing to most people. Look at any magazine or textbook. Online content developed by instructors should be the same. Information about the instructor should include images so that the students can visualize who they are communicating with. Audio and video is certainly the next step. There is a huge difference to hearing a narrated PowerPoint and just looking at the slides.

That was the question posed to attendees to kick off the online seminar Five Steps to Improve Your Online Courses and Instruction by presenter Dr. Patti Shank. Most of the respondents selected as their answers “to better support students” or “I hope this will reduce some of the hassles of teaching online.” A few of the more honest ones chose “I’m expected to do this” and a couple more came because they “need to address specific problems.”

In other words, despite the mainstreaming of online education, course improvement efforts are never ending, says Shank. There’s always something to improve upon, something new to try, and something that used to work, but for some reason fails miserably with your current group of students.

While not discounting the importance of what Shank terms “global metrics” — those universal best practices such as turn-around times on student queries, online etiquette, etc. — it’s likely that your students and your courses have a few unique needs that aren’t satisfied by these broader guidelines.

For example, if a lot of your students travel for work, they may need a little more flexibility. If you teach a course like statistics that intimidates some students, you may want to address those fears at the start of the course. If you’re teaching a lot of online neophytes, you may need to spend a little extra time letting them practice using the course management system (CMS) and its various tools.

Q: In your opinion, is the majority of “difficult” behavior caused by poorly communicated expectations? Is there any special training that can help instructors with this?
Ko: Yes, managing student expectations is a big part of the picture. A well-organized class and a syllabus that clearly lays out the requirements, procedures, and other aspects of the class are necessary elements. In regard to interaction, the instructor also does much to set the tone for the class, and how well one provides feedback is also a critical factor. Training for instructors should address how to organize and manage an online class so as to reduce the odds of miscommunication, and should also help instructors recognize and manage difficulties when they arise.

Q: How can you engage with a student profoundly enough to discuss problems when you can’t meet face-to-face?
Ko: In an online class, one might actually have access to more clues and information from the student’s postings to help fill out the picture than would be the case in a face-to-face class. In most cases, the instructor should first seek to clarify the situation by personally emailing the student. Sometimes it’s simply a matter of explaining the requirements or offering additional assistance. Or a student might not be aware of the impression their postings in discussion might have made on classmates. A phone call, real-time chat or IM or even a Skype session with video cam might be used to facilitate engagement with the student.

Q: What are a couple of the most common “difficult” behaviors that online teachers face with online students?
Ko: Many of these are the same as one would encounter face-to-face, but are simply manifested in different ways online. For example, there are students who disappear from the class and then suddenly reappear, students who dominate all discussion; students who don’t hold up their end of work in group assignments, and of course, the procrastinators and those who don’t follow directions. While some problems are easily recognized, others may be more difficult to detect online.

1. Online students need to feel integrated into the program and the institution. Research has shown that responsiveness to student’s needs is a critical variable in terms of retention. A sense of belonging as a student, whether traditional or distance learner, has been shown to be an important aspect in retention, and responsiveness to student’s needs is a large determinant in a student feeling like they are part of a course or an institution. Intuitively we can assume that if students are not engaged and do not perceive themselves as an integral part of their environment they will likely choose to leave that environment and seek one where their needs are met.

2. Pedagogy and instructor training affect online student retention. There is a huge (and flawed) assumption that professors who teach on-campus courses can automatically do a good job teaching online courses. Teaching online has its own very distinct set of instructor skills that are essential for an online course to be successful. While online instruction may not have its own separate pedagogy, those professors who teach well in the traditional (on-campus) setting need to add to their skill set those additional unique skills required for a successful online course. So in that sense it may not be a matter of developing a separate pedagogy for online teaching, but expanding those traditional teaching skills with resources that allow an effective transition between on-campus and online course delivery.

Excerpted from Get Your Retention Act Together Now: 8 Pieces of Advice, Distance Education Report, May 1, 2007

Online teachers are both the students’ MapQuest and umbilical cord to their courses; without us they can still learn, to be sure, but the guidance, motivation, and insight needed to master the skills of their courses would be missing. Thus, our feedback—in so many forms—is crucial.

To enhance your student feedback effectiveness, I offer the following suggestions:

• Check email at least three times daily. Students may be in different time zones; their professions may dictate varied posting times; they may have sudden problems—whatever the reason, checking your course email regularly will keep you on top things.
• Set reminders of when and what to check. This becomes especially important if you are teaching more than one course, and/or for more than one school.
• Keep generic postings to a minimum. The generic posting is easy but offers nothing specific to the course and does not connect you to the students. The majority of your class postings should be specific to both the course and the students.
• Answer every email sent to you. You do not need to answer each student email as soon as you see it, but make it a general rule to answer all student emails within 24 hours—and let your students know this.
• Make your presence regularly known in discussions, chats, etc. Yes, these are for your students, but they need to know that you are monitoring them and that you are active in all aspects of the course.
• Offer detailed and constructive comments in assignments. Never simply offer feedback such as, “This is wrong!” —it does the student no good. Your comments on assignments should be detailed and constructive. When a student does something good, let him or her know!
• Occasionally, use humor. Let the students know that you have a personality—put a bit of smile into your comments and postings sometimes, even using news or items to highlight certain parts of the course. This not only makes the course more enjoyable but allows you to reinforce certain parts of the course in a lighter manner.
• Note student-specific information for a more personalized approach. Jot down information you learn about your students, either through their bios or information revealed in emails. This allows you to respond more specifically to their needs—and shows your genuine interest in the student, which is a major component in keeping students actively involved in a course.
• Follow through on promises. It’s easy to toss a promises, but you damn well better follow through on it. Not doing so immediately ruins your credibility, and credibility is important for any teacher, especially for the online instructor.

God uses fire and brimstone to get His message across—the online teacher’s available tools for giving student feedback are not quite as dramatic but can be just as effective.

Excerpted from Teaching Online With Errol: Overcoming the #1 Complaint of Online Students: Poor Instructor Feedback! Online Classroom, June 2007.