Usability Issues That Impact Online Learning
Despite the benefits of online education, there are inevitable frustrations as well. The tools online learners need to use take time to master and don’t always behave in intuitive ways.…
The ECHO Model of Experiential Learning
As educators we hear and heed Peter McLaren’s warning, “You can't teach people anything … You have to create a context in which they can analyze themselves and their social formations and lives.” 1 We believe the creation of this context must be our aim as educators, and this context must be balanced between theory and practice. In our pursuit to strike this balance, we believe that experiential education has the potential to assist our fellow educators in transforming their pedagogical practices to more deeply engage their students and improve learning outcomes.
Learn How to Recognize Red-Flag Behaviors on Campus
A new online course designed to help higher education faculty and staff recognize and mitigate disruptive and potentially dangerous student behavior is now available from Magna Publications. The six-part course,…
Four Ways to Improve Online Discussion Forums
Rebecca Arbisi, chair of the business department at State Fair Community College in Missouri, offers the following tips for improving the quality of threaded discussions:
Tips for Marketing Your Online Education Program on a Budget
One of the key strengths of a distance education program also can be a weakness. While web-based learning increases dramatically the pool of potential students that you can target, the number of competitors vying for those same students increases as well.
Using Video Clips to Stimulate Discussion in Online Courses
If you’re looking to improve threaded discussions in your online courses, consider using brief video clips as discussion prompts. When carefully selected and integrated into a course, these clips can lead students to higher-order thinking and appeal to auditory and visual learning styles.
Engaging Online Students with Synchronous and Asynchronous Learning Tools
Opportunities for meaningful synchronous and asynchronous interaction are plentiful, provided you design and facilitate your online course in the correct manner and with the proper tools. This free report provides practical advice on effective ways to promote learning and build a sense of community in your online courses.
Seven Ways to Improve Student Satisfaction in Online Courses
Preparing students for the online learning experience and managing expectations are critical to student satisfaction, says Marie Gould, assistant professor and program manager of Business Administration, and Denise Padavano, associate…
How to Make Course Evaluations More Valuable
The major benefit any conscientious professor seeks in course evaluations is in gaining useful student feedback. Yet most rating instruments generate vague, unjustified student comments. Quantitative scales provide ambiguous statistics…
Large Courses and Student Expectations
Have you tried implementing some active learning strategies in a large course only to find students resisting those efforts? You put students in groups and give them some challenging discussion questions, only to see most of them sitting silently while a few make feeble comments to which no one in the group responds.