How do you motivate online learners?
It’s an age-old question that continues to stump online instructors as well as the managers of distance education programs trying to solve the attrition problem that continues to drag down this otherwise thriving segment of higher education.
Everyone wants a blueprint for managing their distance education program, but sometimes the best thing to do may be to throw away the old business model and begin thinking about new ways to deliver and share online courses.
Given the rate of department chair turnover and the skills and knowledge required to do the job well, it makes sense to consider ways to smooth the transition.
Most instructors attempt to encourage class participation by making it part of the overall grade. But evaluating individual contributions and promoting a substantive, intriguing discussion
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.
Administrators can help inspire much-needed reform of the tenure and promotion processes at their institutions if they begin discussions of reducing the workload of both candidates and committees in the following three ways.
In last Wednesday’s post, Stephen F. Davis, Patrick F. Drinan, and Tricia Bertram Gallant, the authors of the newly released CHEATING IN SCHOOL: What We Know and What We Can Do, recommended steps faculty can take to reduce cheating in their classroom. In this, the second of a two-part email interview, the authors offer advice to academic leaders on how to create healthy environments that support ethical choices at all levels of the organization.
For six years, Cecilia McInnis-Bowers and E. Byron Chew served as dean-partners for the division of business and graduate programs at Birmingham-Southern College, taking shared leadership beyond a simple division of labor by working together on every decision, jointly advising students, and conducting each meeting and telephone call together.
Larry Ragan, director of faculty development for Penn State World Campus, may have given a new spin to the old expression “If you don’t know where you’re going, any road will take you there.” Except, unlike the philosophical musing that’s become immortalized as one of those motivational posters, Ragan’s focus is on improving online learning.
The intermediate statistics class I took quite a number of years ago had two types of learners at the outset—those who were worried about passing the course and those who were sure they couldn’t pass it. The professor clearly understood the “fear-of-stats” phenomenon and used a number of instructional techniques to help learners gain confidence and skills.
