Handling Annoying, Disruptive, and Dangerous Students

It’s your classroom and you set the rules. But that doesn’t mean students will follow them. If you’re like most instructors you have already encountered students who exhibit annoying, distracting, or even dangerous behaviors. Chances are you will be faced with more of these problem students in your future.

Many see a rise in incivility throughout society, and the college classroom is no different. Difficult students don’t just get under your skin; they also interfere with other students’ abilities to learn. Whether they are texting beneath their desks, carrying on side conversations, or making racist comments in online discussion groups these students damage the educational environment for everyone.

That is why you need effective tools and strategies to manage student behavior. Fortunately you’ll find them in Handling Annoying, Disruptive, and Dangerous Students.

Led by Brian Van Brunt, EdD and Laura Bennett, this 75-minute video seminar will teach participants how to:

• Identify, distinguish, and categorize various negative student behaviors;
• Develop unique intervention and management strategies for different kinds of problem behavior, including annoyances, disruptions, and threats of danger;
• Initiate conversations that lead to positive changes in student behavior;
• Identify when to report potentially dangerous behaviors to a Behavioral Intervention Team or to other campus departments or offices;
• Handle emergencies and other high-stress situations;
• Employ Change Theory techniques;
• Recognize personal triggers and enact strategies to overcome them;
• Use persuasion and body language;
• Defuse, rather than escalate, crisis situations;
• Identify campus resources and determine when to engage them; and
• Appropriately document and report incidents when necessary.

This seminar gives you the tools you need to take control of your classroom and to promote learning without judging, alienating, or demonizing students.

When you order the recording of this seminar on CD, you’ll also receive the complete transcript.

An optional Campus Access License is available for an additional $200. It allows the purchasing institution to upload the CD of the seminar onto the institution’s password-protected internal website for unlimited access by the entire campus community.

Order CD + Transcript Package

Who will benefit:

• Faculty—full time, part time, and adjunct
• Instructors
• Teaching assistants
• Deans
• Department chairs

As if teaching isn’t hard enough, now you have to deal with the added stress incivility brings to the classroom. Learn how to turn problem situations around with a copy of Handling Annoying, Disruptive, and Dangerous Students.

All seminars include a discussion guide for facilitators
Participating in a Magna Online Seminar as a team can help leverage unique insights, foster collaboration, and build momentum for change. Each seminar includes a Discussion Guide for Facilitators which provides step-by-step instructions for generating productive discussions and thoughtful reflection. You’ll also get guidelines for continuing the conversation after the event, implementing the strategies discussed, and creating a feedback loop for sharing best practices and challenges.

How to Balance Online Learner Needs and Instructor Workload

The world of distance education is changing teaching and learning. But for instructors, it may not feel like it’s changing for the better. Instructors are becoming more and more frustrated with the increased workload and the expectation from students to be accessible 24×7.

Distance education has a tremendous upside, but increasingly, students and instructors are experiencing its downside too:

• Instructors’ workloads are increasing. The need to respond individually to students can be all-consuming and exhausting, and instructors are finding their workloads are becoming difficult to maintain.
• Students miss a sense of community. A classroom fosters a community, and some students feel isolated without this connection, which may negatively impact student learning.

The solution is to create a learner-centered online classroom experience, one that compels students to assume more responsibility for their education while lessening the workload on instructors.

You’ll learn how to make this happen in your distance education course with a copy of the audio online seminar How to Balance Online Learner Needs and Instructor Workload. Presented by two experienced online educators, the online audio seminar will help you:

• Identify and implement strategies for establishing an instructor presence while decreasing your workload.
• Discover why combining a learner-centered, interactive instructional activity with targeted instructor feedback enhances student achievement and retention.
• Develop assignments and grading strategies to increase student interaction.
• Create an inclusive, online community where students connect with other members of their class, thereby reducing their reliance on you.

Order this Seminar

Who Should Attend
Any online educator from a two- or four-year college or university will benefit from the seminar. The seminar is especially suited for the following positions:

• Faculty (full and part-time)
• Department Chairs
• Instructional Designers

If you’re interested in getting your students to take more responsibility for their learning while ensuring a more manageable workload for you, this seminar will provide tangible, working solutions that you can implement right away.

New for 2011! A Discussion Guide for Facilitators.

Participating in a Magna Online Seminar as a team can help leverage unique insights, foster collaboration, and build momentum for change. Each seminar now includes a Discussion Guide for Facilitators which provides step-by-step instructions for generating productive discussions and thoughtful reflection. You’ll also get guidelines for continuing the conversation after the event, implementing the strategies discussed, and creating a feedback loop for sharing best practices and challenges.

Order this Seminar

Here are some suggestions to help you better prepare your students and give them a greater understanding of all online assignments—especially for those killer weeks:

Lay the groundwork for the weeks ahead. You know that some weeks will be easier than others for your students, and it’s best to point this out up front. Be encouraging and positive, stress the importance of time management and organization in an online course, and tell the students that your input on all assignments will help them improve from week to week.

Let students know that you are sincerely interested in helping them. It’s up to you to link the course and the students back to you. If the students sense that you really don’t care much about their efforts, you will quickly lose them. By being a constant presence, by responding to student postings and grading assignments in a timely and substantive manner, by injecting some humor into the course, and by giving a little extra help to struggling students, you will keep them involved during the easy weeks and keenly focused in the more difficult weeks.

Stress that an “easy” week is as important as any other week in class. When a course week comes by that seems to have few assignments and/or seemingly easy assignments, students can quickly blow these off by not doing the work or not embracing the value of the assignments. To keep these reactions to a minimum, stress the value of each assignment, even in the slower weeks, including their lessons and use in the students’ everyday world beyond the course.

Put special effort into assisting students you believe might do poorly during intense weeks. You will have students who will do well no matter how difficult an assignment week is; they will appreciate and benefit from all general class postings of encouragement. But there also will be weaker students—students already are struggling with the assignments—who will need extra motivation and attention from you. Emails, chats, MP3 files, and/or calls to them before and throughout an especially daunting week of assignments can often give them the additional information, increased motivation, and needed encouragement they need so they don’t give up.

Remind students of already available course resources. Your school will have a host of online resources always at the ready for your students. These usually include a virtual library, extensive websites and articles related to the course subject, information on plagiarism, a tutoring and/or writing center, and technical assistance. Remind your students—throughout the course—of the importance of these resources, but also relate their use to specific assignments in the course, for all weeks.

Develop an additional library of resources to assist students through all weeks of the course. School-ready resources are developed or made available to help students with studying in general and for specific course subjects. But you can take these resources one step further by adding websites, articles, examples, and suggestions that assist students in tackling and understanding both the course subject and course assignments. It is especially helpful when you post these types of resources for specific assignments.

Errol Craig Sull has been teaching online courses for more than 15 years and has a national reputation in the subject, about which he has written and conducted workshops. He is currently putting the finishing touches on his next book—How to Become the Perfect Online Instructor.

Excerpted from “Preparing Online Students for Course Weeks Ahead—Both Easy and ‘Killer.’” Online Classroom, Nov. 2009, 6-7.

So if we don’t teach with pure text, what do we teach with? Traditionally, we write, draw, and talk students through the problem-solving process while we encourage students to actively work along with us. Online, we should aspire to sparking the same level of comprehension, achievable using exactly the same techniques – writing, drawing, and talking students through problems.

But how do we write, draw, and talk to students online? Fortunately, we have a wide variety of tools available to help us available to help us do it digitally.

To write and draw digitally, we have tablet PCs: laptops where we can write and draw on small screens. For larger spaces, we can work out problems on SMART boards with an assortment of colored pens. Wacom tablets attach to the PC and digitally transcribe everything we write, with the Wacom Cintiq letting us see what we write on the tablet itself. Smart pens capture all we say and write on paper and transfer that to the PC. We can even write “old school” with regular pens and paper or on normal whiteboards using webcams, Flips, and other digital video recorders.

To talk digitally, many systems have built-in microphones. If not, we can easily add a computer microphone or headset. For recording in front of a live audience, we’ll do best using a wireless lapel microphone with computer connectivity.

To record digitally, we have several options. We can use SMART Recorder, part of the SMART classroom software. Screen recording software such as Camtasia or Jing can capture anything on the monitor. Virtual classroom utilities like Wimba and Elluminate record and archive everything that is digital. And lecture capturing software is awesome for longer recordings, especially entire course lectures with face-to-face classes.

In addition to writing, drawing and talking, we can create how-to videos. Today’s non-traditional online students rely heavily on such recordings to master their calculators and computational applications.

Using these tools in our online courses, we can create and embed video, simulating the face-to-face problem solving environment where we lead students through each step of the problem, explaining our work along the way. In some ways, these videos can even improve upon the live classroom experience because students get to stop, rewind, and repeat.

Ellen Smyth is an instructor in the mathematics department at Austin Peay State University at Ft Campbell.

When students are asked to help out, either directly or indirectly, a course can become more efficient and will run more smoothly, and the students can become more engaged with fewer concerns. Following are some suggestions on how to make the best use of your students as “assistants.”

Check out any suggestions and information found in discussion or chat forums. In the discussion and chat features of online courses, students offer information, insights, criticism, and suggestions on specific instructor questions related to the course—as well as on other student postings, the course overall, and even the instructor himself/herself. Read these thoroughly; there is much to be learned about problems in the present course, concerns students have with the subject matter, and confusion about instructor directions or comments.

Get a better sense of student learning needs from their lives. One of the biggest complaints students have about online courses is that they are too generic and theoretical, with little or no thought given to a course’s application in students’ real lives, in terms of “This is what I’m doing now” or “This is what I will be doing.” Yet when course information does touch the students in a meaningful, truly useful manner, it keeps students more engaged in the assignments and creates a better rapport throughout the course.

Two ways to ensure this are by reading the student biographical information that typically is posted at the beginning of a course and by posting a relevant question to the class, such as “How will the information in this course prove helpful in your everyday lives?” Use the information you learn about the students to insert activities, post resources, and offer discussion or chat questions that make the course more pertinent to them.

Post questions that will benefit the students and you—and your future courses. Ask class and individual questions of students relating to their experience in the course, their professional interests, and their course concerns. Don’t hesitate to ask students about other areas of the subject matter they would like to explore, what they think could make the course a more positive experience, and their overall reaction to your teaching of the course. By seeking this information, you can learn much to refine the course while it is being taught, to direct the course more toward student needs, and to improve upon future courses you teach.

When necessary, employ a buddy system to help weaker students. You will come across a student or two whose computer skills or basics in the subject you’re teaching may be very weak; the attention you must give all your students makes giving intense individual assistance to these students difficult if not impossible. To help, set up a buddy system: ask for student volunteers who will be available to answer another student’s questions during the course. You will find there are always students willing to volunteer; the end result is a class that is stronger and thus more engaged and vibrant. (Note that you should never promise extra credit or the like—it is not fair to the members of the class who may not have those strengths to offer.)

Be aware of problem areas that students encounter in navigating the course site. No course management system or course structure is perfect. Keep a master checklist of all items to look over before a course begins, and add those legitimate ones that students point out. This will only ensure that your next courses go smoother yet.

Let students remind you of your responsibility and role as an online instructor. Each student comes to you for guidance, information, insights, and suggestions on a subject so that he or she can become more adept with that subject. It makes no difference whether this is a core subject for a student’s major, a refresher course for a profession or certification, or an elective: the students themselves serve as a constant reminder that you are in the role of instructor because of your subject knowledge, your ability to teach, your adeptness at instructing online, your high ethical and moral standards, and your commitment to your school’s rules and policies. Never forget any of these elements; when you do, the students lose, the school falters, and you disappoint—all results that you never want in your teaching portfolio.

Errol Craig Sull has been teaching online courses for more than 14 years and has a national reputation in the subject. He has written and conducted workshops on it and is currently putting the finishing touches on his next book: How to Become the Perfect Online Instructor.

Excerpted from Teaching Online with Errol: The Online Instructor’s Hidden Assistant: The Online Student, Online Classroom, June 2009, 6-7.

• 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?

If you answer “no” to any of the questions, you might be at risk for a lawsuit, says Rob Jenkins, associate professor of English at Georgia Perimeter College.

In a recent online seminar A Legal Primer for Online Instructors, Jenkins and Debi Moon, JD, assistant vice president of educational affairs at Georgia Perimeter College, discussed the top legal issues for online faculty and how they can limit their exposure.

Consider the following scenario: You are an online professor who has produced an award-winning online course and now want to sell your online materials to a large publishing house. Does your college have any rights to the material?

The answer? It depends.

What the courts would look at is whether your college has a formal policy that spells out intellectual property rights and whether you signed a contract regarding ownership rights at the start of your employment.

“Let me tell you what the general rule is,” says Moon. “If you created your materials in your office, using nothing but what’s called the ‘incidental use of college property,’ and that means using your [office] computer, more than likely, unless you had a contract or unless it said something in your intellectual property policy, you actually own all the rights to those materials.”

While that sounds cut and dried, there are also exceptions. For example, if you were paid a stipend beyond your salary to create the materials, or given a reduced workload, then the school likely will be given at least some ownership to the materials, Moon says. Moreover, if the creation is a “work for hire” as agreed in writing before work begins, then the college has complete ownership of the work, she says.

The best thing is to know your rights.

“The first thing you need to do, if you’re not familiar with exactly what your college’s intellectual property policy says, is go download a copy.” says Moon. “You might be surprised to find out, as I often am, that colleges sometimes don’t have a policy on intellectual property. I’m hoping yours does, so go download it and if you have questions about it, you need to talk to your chair, dean or your VPAA and find out exactly what your rights are. And I would insist, if you have any doubts, get it in writing that you own the rights to your material.”

Other scenarios covered during the seminar involved computer use policies, harassment and defamation issues, social media and privacy concerns, ADA guidelines, and finally copyright issues, which Jenkins says is probably the least understood area in online education.

In those cases in which a student is openly abusive to the instructor or other students, it is essential for the instructor to immediately refer the issue to administrative authority. But there are many students whose disruptiveness, if skillfully handled by instructors at the start of such behavior, can be forestalled from reaching the extremes.

Posting a code of conduct in the class can certainly help set the tone for the class, but there are a few other general techniques that seem to be effective:

• Assume a tone of formality when handling a problem—formality in online classrooms signifies seriousness and firmness, especially when contrasting with an otherwise more casual instructor tone.
• If the student has made his or her issue publicly known by posting something inappropriate in the class forum, handle the issue by using both private email communications and a public clarification.
  The latter should not address the disruptive student but the class as a whole by calmly reminding the students about the course requirements, restating objectives or purpose, or referring students to resources for solving problems, as the case may require. Meanwhile, a private email to the student can allow whatever personal communication seems appropriate.

• Do not allow yourself to argue on the level of the student or get too caught up in one student’s drama. Remember that the other students are equally deserving of your attention.

For more information about managing expectations and working with difficult students, see Ko and Rossen, Teaching Online: A Practical Guide, 2nd edition (Routledge, 2008).

Susan Ko is the executive director of the Center for Teaching and Learning at the University of Maryland University College.

Reprinted from Tips from the Pros: Three Tips for Handling Disruptive Online Students, Online Classroom, February 2009.

Northern Michigan University is a private university serving about 9,000 students located in the center of Michigan’s upper peninsula near Lake Superior. Located in one of the snowiest areas of the U.S., NMU is quite rural and is always seeking ways to make education more accessible for its students, many of whom work and have family obligations, and all of whom are dealing with the winter travel conditions that can make getting to school difficult.

Judith Puncochar, associate professor in the school of education at Northern Michigan University, explains the process by which the university found new opportunities for online education by looking at their existing offerings.

Driven by goals
In 2007, the university set two goals that affected this process: first, to find an additional 1,000 students who would enroll in online classes over the next three to five years, and second, to document the current state of online teaching and learning at the university.

This fit well with the goals set by AQIP, the Academic Quality Improvement Program for accreditation sponsored by the Higher Learning Commission. AQIP set four goals for the university:

• to improve the quality and consistency of the online learning experience for students and faculty
• to identify stakeholders in need of support and/or training, which may be inhibiting them from participating
• to document the current state of online learning at NMU and create a baseline to measure growth
• to identify new opportunities and increase the number of online offerings.

Finding the baseline“The first step was to create a baseline document from which to measure growth,” says Puncochar. This process turned out to be quite labor-intensive, requiring the help of some of Puncochar’s student research assistants.

In short, the baseline document creation process required a manual tally of information gleaned from program web pages, online course offerings, websites, and graduate and undergraduate bulletins. The researchers tallied the number of credits and the number of required courses within each program for each major, minor, associate’s degree, certificate, bachelor’s degree, and master’s degree. The research also looked at course type such as traditional, online, and hybrids.

Identifying new opportunities
Once this raw data had been gathered, Puncochar and her colleagues could begin to find opportunities for expansion of online programs. They did this by analyzing the programs that had courses online and identifying those that were close to having an online certificate or degree available.

For example, the bachelor’s degree in sociology of liberal arts required 124 total credit hours with eight required courses, seven of which were currently offered online. Likewise, the bachelor’s degree in criminal justice also required 124 credit hours but had 11 required courses, nine of which were online. Each of these programs was offering more than 80 percent of its required courses online, meaning that it could likely easily become a program available online with the addition of one or two courses.

Puncochar then began working the phones, asking these departments what it would take to put those last couple of courses online and what barriers the departments were encountering. With some departments, these conversations brought expressions of resistance, as the chairs and faculty members reminded Puncochar that they have academic freedom and can teach the courses they like in the methods they see as most effective.

This is true, Puncochar allows. “Faculty don’t have to teach online,” she says. “How do you sell this?” Sometimes, the conversation addressed the kind of experience a faculty member could expect; for example, Puncochar finds that her online students are more engaged than her traditional classroom sections, where students can sometimes hide in the crowd.

Overall, some programs were easier to complete than others. At the baseline measurement, the percent of required courses offered online ranged from nearly 50 percent for master’s degree required courses to nearly 15 percent for bachelor’s degree courses to a low of about 7.5 percent for certificate program requirements. Just one year later, these numbers had jumped to nearly 78 percent for master’s degree programs, 18 percent for bachelor’s degree programs, and 22 percent for certificate programs.

Additionally, there are some programs that will likely never be offered entirely online. For example, Puncochar says the university has a goal of having programs in all six liberal studies divisions available online, since the school is a liberal arts school. However, some science departments, notably chemistry, are uncertain about having lab courses offered online, since this implies that students would be conducting potentially-dangerous experiments in their kitchens. However, geology and astronomy were both able to find lab course options that were safe to deliver online, so students can indeed fulfill their lab science requirement online.

Excerpted from Building New Programs with Existing Courses, April 15, 2009, Distance Education Report.

Beyond Course Design: Planning for Successful Facilitation

The curriculum for your online course is finished, but a strong curriculum is only half of the equation. To be successful in online education, you must also pay attention to the manner in which your course is facilitated. How’s that going?

Chances are, you’ve spent considerable time and effort revising coursework for better compatibility with distance learning. But, have you done the same with the way you facilitate your courses?

Updating your curricula is critical. But unless you update your approach to facilitating classes at the same time, you’re jeopardizing your overall success. It’s a bit like writing your materials in a foreign language, but forgetting to provide a translation.

Fortunately, experts on the leading-edge of online instruction have developed a new tool to help with planning, self-assessment and peer evaluation. Assessing Online Facilitation (AOF) is a new tool, solidly grounded in both theory and practice.

Order this seminar

Among other things, the AOF clearly addresses each vital role that an effective online facilitator must play:

• Pedagogical: Guiding student learning with a focus on concepts, principles, and skills.
• Social: Creating a welcoming online community in which learning is promoted.
• Managerial: Handling organizational, procedural, and administrative tasks.
• Technical: Assisting participants to become comfortable with the technologies used to deliver the course.

In this informative 90-minute online seminar, you’ll master the AOF and its many uses. It’s a guide for instructors seeking to better understand the paradigm shift between teaching face-to-face and teaching online. It can be used as a self-evaluation tool to determine strengths and areas for improvement. And, it provides a framework for peer assessment of online instructors.

You’ll leave this seminar knowing:

• The key criteria that influence student satisfaction and learning.
• How to meet these criteria in an online (as opposed to face-to-face) environment.
• The different roles of an online facilitator: pedagogical, social, managerial and technical.
• Specific techniques that improve online teaching effectiveness.
• The value of a Facilitation Activity Record in structuring successful repeated facilitation.
• How to guide peer evaluation of facilitator performance in the online classroom.

This audio seminar includes generous take-home materials, including all of the checklists and forms you will need to fully implement the AOF system at your institution.

Order this seminar

Perhaps they can be a little of both. Eric Frierson, a librarian and adjunct professor at the University of Texas at Arlington, encourages faculty to plan for teachable moments by viewing each syllabus through the eyes of their students. By doing this you can anticipate when a student might get stuck, and build in some added support and guidance in the form of an embedded video, online chat, or other learning objects that fulfill what he calls “needs-based” teachable moment.

The “when” and “where” you place these additional resources is critical.

“Students won’t go out of their way to find things and if they have to wait until the next day to get the answer to their question then the moment is lost,” says Frierson. “You need to place it as close as possible to when and where you think they will need it and are motivated to fully absorb the content you’re providing in a way that will stick.”

In the recent online seminar Capturing Teachable Moments Online, Frierson outlined strategies for maximizing teachable moments, including ways to overcome the unique challenges of the asynchronous online classroom when students often are working on assignments at odd times of the day and can’t simply raise their hand to ask for help. In some cases, online self-check quizzes can be used to “force” a needs-based teachable moment, he says.

Interest-based teachable moments, where there’s an intrinsic motivation to learn more, are harder to anticipate and should be supported with materials that appeal to emotions, and provide open-ended exploration opportunities, Frierson says. The challenge here lies with the grade-driven students who may be troubled by supplemental material that’s not required.

“The struggle here is how do we give our students these materials in a way that’s not going to distract grade-driven students but will provide access for students who do want to get involved in their learning a deeper way?” Frierson asked. “My assertion is that you can convert these grade-driven students to become more meaningful learners by using these techniques.”

Here’s how to keep your classes on track during the holidays.

Stay within your established schedule. Students need order in any classroom; the syllabus, your class schedule, and the course website offer a stability that students can count on. Through these the students know where to go for course information, where to turn in assignments, and with whom they can interact. If any of this is out of whack it can be upsetting to the online student, especially during the holidays when extra outside influences are all around. So maintain your regular schedule and same course requirements.

Post a motivational email and announcement. Be sure to indicate to students the importance of giving these holiday weeks their “all” and remind them of the overall impact on their final grade from each week’s work. Also, ask for any heads-up on absences or delays due to holiday travel or guest visits: the more you know ahead of time, the smoother you can run your class(es).

Give students course-related “gifts.” There is a host of either subject-related or just-plain-fun websites you can send to your students as holiday gifts; you can also find cartoons, jokes, puzzles, and light articles— all related to the subject taught. It’s a nice way to strengthen the rapport between you and your students, show you are part of the holiday spirit, and give something that merely offers a chuckle or some additional information on the subject taught.

Invite students to exchange “gifts.” This can be much fun, help students develop new friendships, and offer another item that keeps students involved in and enjoying your course. Whether through assigned pairings or simply having each student give a “gift” to the rest of the class, letting students exchange or send helpful/just-kinda-cool websites, articles, and information can add a nice holiday touch to your class.

Call your students. Many schools allow—and some encourage—faculty to call their students, and what better time to “just call to say hello” than during the holiday season. This not only shows you as a warm, caring person but also allows for an additional and personal interaction with your student.

Send the class electronic holiday cards. This is simply you saying, “I know it’s the holiday time, class, and I just wanted to wish you a very nice one.” Again, this strengthens that all-important student-faculty rapport, adds a dash of lightness to your course, and makes your class just a bit nicer to attend.

Keep your tone serious yet within the holiday spirit. There should not be a dramatic shift in your tone—in emails, announcements, chat, discussion, etc.—during the holiday season, as you want the students to continue all aspects of your course in a serious manner. Yet it is the holiday season, so striking a nice balance between the usual “sound” of your writing and some holiday spirit is both appropriate and important (to help keep students engaged) during November and December.

Errol Craig Sull has been teaching online courses for more than 12 years and has a national reputation in the subject, both writing and conducting workshops on it.

Excerpted from Teaching Online With Errol: Keeping Your Classes on Track During the Holidays!, Online Classroom, Nov. 2008.

Creatively Engaging Online Students: Models and Activities

Student dissatisfaction, apathy and, increasingly, attrition threaten to derail the progress of online education. During this informative video presentation, you’ll learn about proven and practical activities for keeping your students engaged in your online programs, all from one of higher education’s leading technology experts…and most entertaining presenters.

How do you make sure your online classroom is “engaged”?

We fondly recall one former professor who was in the habit of firing rubber bands at snoozing students, or sneaking up on them and poking them with a knitting needle.

Aside from the risks those tactics pose to tenure nowadays, they’re also not transferable to the online classroom. Not that they aren’t needed: Student engagement–or, rather, the lack of it–is a critical problem in distance learning today.

Fortunately, you do have tools at your disposal (albeit not pointy ones) to keep your students interested, involved, engaged, and firmly on the path to successful learning.

You can learn about them in Creatively Engaging Online Students: Models & Activities, where Dr. Curt Bonk provides a wealth of tips and techniques you can put to work in your online classroom right now. In this idea-filled presentation, you’ll:

• Learn how to address student learning preferences online.
• Discover ways to motivate students in online environments with Dr. Bonk’s innovative TEC-VARIETY model.
• Take home a minimum of a dozen ideas you can use in your classrooms and programs.
• Get the facts on two unique ways of thinking about teaching and learning in online environments.
• Hear about a wealth of low-risk, low-cost, low-time activities.
• Create a vision of what you would like your classroom to be, and develop a plan to achieve it.
• See how to use the “R2D2 model” for thinking about diverse learning needs.
• Understand how the example you set online can help (or harm) your students.
• Learn to build peer and expert feedback into your online classes with techniques like critical friends and cross-institutional mentoring.
• Find out how to successfully prepare students for the rigors of online learning.

In Creatively Engaging Online Students: Models & Activities, Dr. Curt Bonk will provide a wealth of tips and techniques you can put to work in your online classroom right now.

Who will benefit:

• Professors, instructors, educators, lecturers
• Online facilitators, tutors, mentors, moderators
• Teaching and learning center personnel
• Instructional designers and media specialists
• E-learning evaluators
• E-learning program developers
• Other e-learning specialists and administrators
• Those interested in emerging learning technologies

Join us for a look at the best in student-engagement strategies online, presented by one of the leading authorities in the field.

Order this seminar

Increasing Cognitive Engagement in the Online Classroom

In a traditional classroom, it’s fairly easy to tell when you are losing your students. Eyelids droop. Heads start to bob. And you have this funny feeling that the click-clacking of keyboards isn’t the result of copious note-taking. In an online classroom, it’s a little more difficult. Not only is it impossible to tell what students are doing on the other end, but the students have access to so many more distractions that it’s sometimes hard to keep them engaged in their learning.

The benefits of online learning are well known, but online learning also has its disadvantages, including high attrition rates. In fact, most online learners, even those who succeed, admit that it takes a little extra effort to stay on top of things to make sure assignments don’t slide.

As an online instructor, how do you keep online students from mentally “checking out,” and surrendering their energy and interest to passivity and apathy? Start by getting a copy of this seminar, Increasing Cognitive Engagement in the Classroom.

Order this seminar

Presented by Dr. B. Jean Mandernach of Park University, this 60-minute presentation will help you create an environment where students are motivated to invest themselves fully in the learning process. You’ll learn:

• Methods of engaging online students efficiently and effectively.
• Empirically supported instructional strategies to increase students’ interest.
• Ways to modify instructional approaches to be more active and authentic.
• Low- (or no-) cost strategies that foster a personal connection with students.
• Approaches for addressing the cognitive barriers associated with online learning.

Online students don’t experience the group dynamics that lend immediacy and camaraderie to the traditional classroom. And wherever they are, they’re presented with substantially greater opportunities for distraction, if they’re feeling bored, it’s simply too tempting to pick up the phone, a video game or the car keys. While it’s the students’ responsibility to take ownership of their learning, there’s a lot you can (and should) do as an online instructor to keep them engaged. The benefits will create a powerful ripple effect.

By enhancing student engagement, you’ll create a richer learning experience – keeping students enrolled in your class, committed to the learning process, and enthused about continuing their online education in future classes.

Who will benefit:

• Faculty
• Academic deans
• Course designers
• Instructional technologists
• Online administrators

Order this seminar