Online Education
With nearly 7 million students taking at least one online course, understanding best practices for teaching online is critical. Turn to Faculty Focus for news on the latest trends in online education.
February 15 - A Three-Pronged Approach to Improving Online Student Engagement, Critical Thinking
By: Rob Kelly in Online Education
Monica Rothschild-Boros, an art appreciation and cultural anthropology instructor at Orange Coast College, uses a combination of embedded lecture questions, threaded discussion, and innovative assignments to engage students and get them to think critically in her online courses.
February 4 - Tips for Online Instructors: Managing Files, Feedback, and Workload
By: Eileen F. Schiffer, PhD in Online Education
Teaching online is a rewarding experience; but any instructor who makes the transition to online education, thinking it will be easier and less time-consuming than face-to-face classroom teaching, is in for a big surprise! Establishing a regular presence in the online classroom, grading assignments and discussions, and maintaining records and notes from term to term are all time consuming – but essential – tasks. Learning to take care of the details of online teaching more efficiently makes it possible to be more effective in your teaching. The following is an abbreviated version of guidance I provide to new instructors about ways to keep their course files organized, students engaged, and workload manageable.
January 29 - Ideas for Active Online Learning
By: Rob Kelly in Asynchronous Learning and Trends, Online Education
Heidi Beezley, instructional technologist at Georgia Perimeter College, strives to instill online courses with active learning, “providing opportunities for students to meaningfully talk and listen, write, read, and reflect on the content, ideas, issues, and concerns of an academic subject” (as defined by Meyers and Jones). To this she adds: “interact[ing] with realia, manipulatives, simulations,
January 24 - Brain-Based Online Learning Design
By: Rob Kelly in Online Education
Abreena Tompkins, instruction specialist at Surry Community College, has developed a brain-based online course design model based on a meta-analysis of more than 300 articles. In this study, she distilled the following elements of brain-based course design: Low-risk, nonthreatening learning environment Challenging, real-life, authentic assessments Rhythms, patterns, and cycles Appropriate chunking or grouping Learning as
January 15 - Managing High-Enrollment Online Courses
By: Rob Kelly in Online Education
Online instructors are being asked to accommodate an increasing number of students in their courses. The challenge is to manage the workload associated with these high-enrollment courses. Susan Fein, eLearning consultant/instructional designer at Washington State University, offered some advice on how to do this.
January 7 - Adapting PowerPoint Lectures for Online Delivery: Best Practices
By: Emily A. Moore in Online Education
If you use PowerPoint lectures in your face-to-face classes, you can use those same lectures as jumping-off points for creating narrated animations for your online students to watch. That’s the good news.
However, chances are you’ll need to make extensive changes—both to your existing PowerPoint slides, and to how you deliver them. Typically, this means scripting the lecture before narrating and recording it so that all information presented online is:
December 7 - Online Student Retention Strategies: A Baker’s Dozen of Recommendations
By: Michael Jazzar in Online Education
Despite the tremendous growth of online education programs, student retention for online courses remains problematic. The attrition rate from online universities is often cited as 20% to 50% (Diaz, 2002). Studies also reveal that attrition from online programs can be as high as 70% to 80% (Dagger, Wade & Conlan, 2004).
November 29 - Working with Online Teaching Assistants
By: Melissa A. Venable, PhD in Online Education
The presence of Teaching Assistants (TAs) in a college course benefits both instructor and students. An assistant’s responsibilities typically include grading, troubleshooting, and fielding student questions, and their role is evolving to meet the needs of the online classroom.
November 15 - Six Ways to Get Your Online Students Participating in the Course
By: Jennifer Patterson Lorenzetti in Online Education
Have you ever worried about the level of participation in your online courses? Perhaps you have difficulty encouraging students to interact with one another, or maybe you find student responses to be perfunctory. Surely there must be a way to encourage the kinds of participation that really supports learning.
November 2 - Instructor Characteristics That Affect Online Student Success
By: Donald Orso, PhD and Joan Doolittle, MA in Online Education
Which online instructor characteristics help students succeed? It’s a rather basic question that has not been adequately answered. We did a literature search to find if anybody had done any research from the students’ perspective on what constitutes a quality online instructor. There were perhaps 10 articles by professors speculating about what they thought defined quality online instruction, but nobody had asked students.
