Posts Tagged ‘online teaching’
August 9 - Get Your Online Course Off to a Good Start
By: Susan Biro, EdD in Online Education
The beginning of an online course is a critical time in which the instructor establishes expectations, sets the tone, and helps students navigate the course. Here are some points to consider for the time leading up to and including that first week:
May 18 - Guidelines for Online Teaching Success
By: Mary Bart in Distance Learning Administration
Years ago at a faculty meeting Larry Ragan, PhD, director of Faculty Development for Penn State’s World Campus, was trying to soft-sell the idea of performance expectations for online faculty. He didn’t want the discussion to be misinterpreted as an indictment against their teaching style, but he also saw an opportunity to share proven practices for improving the online teaching and learning experience. Finally a senior faculty member grew tired of the tip-toeing around the subject and said, “If you don’t tell us what is expected, how will we know what to do to succeed?”
January 14 - Tips for Increasing Interactivity in an Online Course
By: Rob Kelly in Online Education
In a follow-up to the online seminar “Creatively Engaging Online Students: Models and Activities,” Curt Bonk, professor of instructional systems technology at Indiana University, offered the following response from a participant who asked, “What is your favorite method to increase interactivity in an online class?”
November 18 - Preparing Your Online Students for the Tough Weeks Ahead
By: Errol Craig Sull in Online Education
Our courses are rolled out to online students with assignments scheduled for each week. Some of these assignments are relatively easy, meaning there will be weeks that are “light” in terms of scheduled assignments, while others will be “killer” weeks because of especially difficult assignments and/or a large number of assignments. While you need to prepare students to do all the assignments, it is especially important that you pre-assist them for those killer weeks. If you don’t do this, their anxiety can markedly increase, their involvement in and enthusiasm for the course can decrease, and you can lose them altogether.
June 11 - Case Study: Building New Online Programs from Your Existing Courses
By: Christopher Hill in Distance Learning Administration
So often, universities hoping to expand their online course offerings think in terms of developing entire online programs from scratch, writing new courses, translating existing ones into the new delivery methods, and generally making a program that is separate from its campus analog. But for Northern Michigan University, expanding online offerings was a function of examining their existing course offerings and finding the opportunities to complete programs with courses already online.
March 5 - Does Teaching Online Really Take More Time?
By: Christopher Hill in Distance Learning Administration
There are certain widely held ideas about how time is used in distance education. One is that distance education “takes more time” than face-to-face teaching. This is one of those axioms that people accept and repeat, but don’t think about. Because as soon as you start to think about it, questions arise: Exactly what takes more time? Course development, or teaching? How much more time does it take? Does it take less time to teach the second time you teach it? What about the third? What takes longer to master—the technology, or online pedagogy?
January 28 - Instructor or Professor, It’s Not Your Title but What You Do That’s Important
By: Errol Craig Sull in Online Education
In a recent conversation, an online teaching colleague complained that her school had wrongly listed her as “adjunct instructor,” rather than “adjunct professor,” in its faculty roster. “That term ‘professor’—it means so much more than merely being an instructor,” she complained. Au contraire, I countered: ultimately, titles—and one’s accomplishments—count for little throughout any online course one teaches and never equate to long-term respect.
December 7 - Primed for Learning: Maximizing Teachable Moments When Students are Ready and Willing to Learn
By: Mary Bart in Teaching and Learning
Teachable moments, those special times when students are most ready and willing to learn, are traditionally considered unplanned opportunities. But should teachable moments be treated like unexpected gifts or can they actually be set in motion with a little advanced anticipation and planning by the instructor?
October 19 - Understanding the Instructor’s Role in Facilitating Online Discussions
By: Michelle Everson, PhD. in Asynchronous Learning and Trends
In my classroom-based courses I have always valued discussion as a powerful learning tool that provides students with opportunities to explain their reasoning and understanding, learn different perspectives and points of view, and re-think and possibly revise their own conceptions based on careful reflection of potentially disparate viewpoints. As I prepared to teach my first online course five years ago, it was only natural that discussion would be a part of it.
September 30 - Reaching Online Students with Learning Disabilities
By: Mary Bart in Online Education
Students with disabilities are drawn to online courses for many of the same reasons as everyone else, but it’s often the anonymity that makes learning online particularly attractive to someone who’s spent his or her life trying to mask a disability. For online instructors, this can present new issues. After all, it’s hard enough distinguishing
