I came home from my second day of teaching my “HyFlex” class (some students in the classroom and others on Zoom) utterly discouraged. Despite my efforts at planning activities…
As an online instructor with many students, it is challenging to remember details about every learner who has passed through my virtual classroom. But there are some whom I…
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Put Yourself in Their Shoes: How to Check in with Students in an Online Learning Environment
November 6, 2020 Randa G. Keeley, PhD, and Maria B. Peterson-Ahmad, PhD
Exhaustion, fear, panic, the unknown…these are common words that educators have repeatedly expressed since COVID-19 appeared in early spring. Many K-12 and university courses have had to move completely…
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Creating Magic in Your (Online) Classroom
October 28, 2020 Kenya Jenkins Fletcher
We all know that the best teachers are most often those who ignite passion and curiosity within their students. What we may not all know (yet) is that we…
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“Keep teaching and learning.” This was and is still the motto of the pandemic. Unlike spring 2020 when we shifted to remote teaching after students and faculty had the…
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Managing the Chat in Online Teaching: What We Can Learn From Live Streamers
October 7, 2020 Eric B. Gonzales, PhD and Amber J. Heck, PhD
Due to the pandemic, educators have had to make adjustments to their classroom delivery, including utilizing online venues such as Zoom, Google Talk, or CANVAS. While the use of…
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How to Make Your Virtual Discussions Engaging, Effective, and Equitable in Eight Steps
October 2, 2020 Jill Abney and Trey Conatser
The perfect class discussion can feel like something of an alchemy. From the instructor’s preparation to the students’ personalities, many ingredients can enable or challenge the social construction of…
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Syncing with Students: Valuable Qualities of Synchronous Online Teaching
September 25, 2020 Margot M. Craven, MFA, EdM
“One good conversation can shift the direction of change forever” – Linda Lambert Despite alterations to our teaching during spring of 2020, the one aspect that remained intact was…
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Don’t Turn into a Bot Online: Three Easy Strategies to Let Your Personality Shine in Your Online Course
September 21, 2020 Jessica Evans
One of the perks of teaching online is that there are so many great tools that make facilitating an online course easier. For example, not having to manually grade…
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Emotions in Online Teaching: A Powerful Tool for Helping Online Students Engage, Persist, and Succeed
September 18, 2020 Flower Darby
Online classes, by their very nature as distance learning experiences, present barriers to student engagement and learning. These barriers are a primary reason that we see low student engagement…
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In Effective Teaching Strategies, Online Education
Implementing Instructional Design Approaches to Inform Your Online Teaching Strategies
September 16, 2020 Darina M. Slattery, PhD
The primary focus of any instruction should be to focus on the learning outcomes or capabilities you are trying to achieve. Bloom (1956, 1964) identified three types of learning…
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Engagement: The Secret to Teaching Online This Fall
September 4, 2020 Neria Sebastien, EdD
When hundreds of spring and summer undergraduate courses were abruptly moved from onsite to online delivery in the wake of COVID-19, several faculty and students nationwide reacted with panic…
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Tips for Fostering Students’ Self-Regulated Learning in Asynchronous Online Learning Environments
September 2, 2020 Rachel J. Ebner, PhD
Due to the pandemic, both instructors and students have had to adapt quickly to different forms of online learning models. Asynchronous learning has emerged as a predominant model because…
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A Flexible Teaching Model: A Seamless Pivot from Face-to-Face to Online Teaching
August 24, 2020 Julie Sochacki, JD
When I envision teaching this fall, my highest priorities are social presence and flexibility. No matter the outcome of the fall 2020 semester, my goal is for students to…
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Can We Talk About It?: Enhancing Student Engagement by Integrating Discussions of COVID-19
August 21, 2020 Dennis Lowe, PhD, and Taylor Lowe, BA
In the Chronicle of Higher Education’s guide to student engagement, Cavanagh (2019) emphasizes the importance of connecting course content to the emotional lives of students. Bundick, et al. (2014)…
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Back to the Basics: Revisiting the ABCs of Teaching Online Courses
August 19, 2020 Jeremiah E. Shipp, EdD
The global pandemic sent higher education institutions into a whirlwind as many faculty members scrambled to make the rapid transition from traditional to online courses. However, COVID-19 revealed the…
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I was in the middle of conducting a research study, examining my own teaching of implementing fun and play into learning, when COVID-19 hit, and we were forced to…
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Transformative Teaching: How Faculty Can Elevate Their Teaching Through Online Instruction
August 14, 2020 Tracey-Ann Carter, PhD, and Toni SimsMuhammad, DAH
It is safe to say that online instruction may become to the traditional classroom what the telescope is to the naked eye. The future of higher education institutions will…
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Improving Breakout Room Discussions in Online Teaching by Using Collaborative Documents
August 10, 2020 Dennis Lowe, PhD
During a recent online class, a student posted in the chat, “We should use breakout groups in all courses.” On the other hand, a faculty director bemoaned receiving student…
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**Editor’s Note: This is a recent article from The Teaching Professor. If you are interested in similar articles, check out The Teaching Professor membership.** Most higher education institutions have…
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Creating a vibrant community is always on my mind, so the very first thing I do on the first day of class is pass around a tray of cookies…
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Enhancing Online Course Discussions through Conference Roles and Blogs
July 31, 2020 Susan Swayze, PhD and Rick Jakeman, EdD
The discussion forum plays a central role in our online graduate-level, advanced research methods course, providing opportunities for students to demonstrate knowledge and connect and learn with each other…
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Giving Students an Individualized Experience in Online Learning: Staying Connected while Disconnected
July 27, 2020 Andrew St. James and Darlene Campbell, PhD
“No combination of words can put together the feeling of relief, comfort and gratitude I have towards your course and your fantastic TAs.” –Student comment, Spring 2020 As universities…
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“Okay, anyone have any questions? . . . No? Then let’s do it with the music. We’ll start the combination to the right.” The instructor, Julie, ducked off camera…
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Connecting with students is one of the most rewarding aspects of a professor’s job. Some faculty hesitate to teach online, frequently offering the rationale: “I want to connect with…
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“What are we supposed to be doing?” (said every student at least once in a breakout room). Small groupwork enables students to “compare their current understandings with those of…
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Last spring, my college, like so many other schools, made a dramatic mid-semester pivot from face-to-face instruction to online classes. It was trial by fire for instructors and students…
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In Course Design, Online Education
The Emergency Campaign: Discord, D&D, and Distance Learning
June 29, 2020 Kristen Bailey, Thomas Bullington, and Luke MacIver
Dr_Tom 🎲 Dungeon Master (DM): Not every DM plays the villain. That’s not my style. I prefer to hover the party, telling the story, urging the student-adventurers onward. One…
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In Effective Teaching Strategies, Online Education
Helping Students Develop Digital Content Curation Skills
June 26, 2020 Brad Garner, PhD
In our 24/7, always-connected world where we are inundated with information from all sides, the ability to identify quality resources to inform our research and actions has become a…
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Using Social Media to Retain and Connect with Students in the Shift to Online Education
June 24, 2020 Abdullah Al-Bahrani, PhD, and Rebecca Moryl, PhD
COVID-19 has upended normal social connections that develop between students and professors. We are missing the connections that develop through casual interactions in office hours, pre-class discussions, post-class questions,…
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Fostering Fun: Engaging Students with Asynchronous Online Learning
June 17, 2020 Lisa K. Forbes, PhD
Today, faculty are being asked to abruptly expand their teaching practices in ways many of us would never have imagined. For many, teaching online is something they’ve never done…
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In Course Design, Online Education
Teaching with Unknowns: Finding Meaning in Your Online Course Delivery
June 8, 2020 Miriam Bowers-Abbott
While there is no shortage of data about COVID-19, finding meaning within that data has been another matter entirely. Meaning would be especially helpful for faculty who are trying…
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In Online Education, Teaching and Learning
How Students Re-Imagined the Teach-Learning Environment and Visualized a Virtual Event
June 3, 2020 Bonnie Bechard, EdD
For the past three years, I have taught a social entrepreneurship course with a semester-long project called Climb Above Addiction. This social venture supports prevention and recovery from drug…
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Instructors, and instructional designers, spend a lot of time thinking about the flow of a classroom and how to create an intuitive sensibility that paves the progression a student…
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In Effective Teaching Strategies, Online Education
Six Practical Approaches for Teaching Writing Online
May 22, 2020 Christian Aguiar and Albert Pearsall, III
This spring, the COVID-19 pandemic forced many to make a sudden transition to online teaching, a field with its own rich body of research, best practices, and good ideas.…
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An Educational Shift: Encouraging Mission-Driven Online Learning
May 20, 2020 Gwen Bass, PhD, and Michael Lawrence-Riddell
Over the past decade, many independent schools have intentionally expanded their missions to go beyond academic excellence and include goals related to character development, equity, accessibility, and social responsibility.…
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In Online Education, Philosophy of Teaching
Like the Phoenix: Finding New Life in an Online Course
May 18, 2020 Mary Hoeft
It was Friday, March 12, 2020—the end of a long week of “What Ifs.” What if Covid-19 spreads across the U.S.? What if our university closes? What if our…
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While it might seem like a different lifetime, it was not so long ago that our world was turned upside down by the emergence of COVID-19 and the onslaught…
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Because I teach online courses, I hoped—foolishly—that my own students would not suffer too much from the destabilizing effects of COVID-19 on higher education. I knew them to be well-versed…
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A Reflection on the Sudden Transition: Ideas to Make Your Synchronous Online Classes More Fun
April 29, 2020 Siva priya Santhanam, PhD
The transition to online teaching has been partially, if not completely, challenging for faculty teaching in colleges and universities. I am writing this article while reflecting on my own…