June 27

Online Teaching Tips You Don’t Hear Too Often

Faculty Focus published Ten Online Teaching Tips You May Not Have Heard, a refreshing read. I will recap the ones I thought are the best “reminders” that you may have heard once or twice but it’s not everyone’s focus. However these tips are truly great and probably something your online students are expecting more and more.

1. Do a Welcome Email – …Send a private email, addressing each student by name, and asking a direct question to start a brief dialogue.

2. Text (SMS) Opt-In – Tell your students to opt in for text notifications in D2L. They can do this by logging-in to D2L, clicking on their name, and going to notifications (see below). This also increases the chances of them seeing any updates thus creating less excuses for not being in the know.

Notifications in D2L

D2L Notifications SMS Opt-In

 

3. Communicate Information Using Multiple Channels – If you have important information to convey to students, don’t use just one channel of communication, use multiple. For example, instead of simply posting information only in the announcements area, or only in the feedback area, or sending it only via email, include the information in all three of these places. This will reduce the number of students saying they did not get the memo. Posting information in as many places as possible will result in more students getting the information they need to succeed.

4. Sync School Email Account to Phone – Contact your institution’s help desk for instructions on how to sync your school email account to your iPhone or Android. Not only will receiving email in multiple places reduce your likelihood of missing messages, it will also allow you to address urgent questions and concerns in a timely fashion. Students are often pleasantly surprised at my response time. However, it is important to set boundaries by letting students know when to expect a reply. For example, you can inform them that you normally respond within a 24-hour period, during regular business hours. This will help maintain your work-life balance.

5. Keep a Running List of Resources to Include in Feedback – Compile a list of helpful resources to send to students who are struggling in certain areas. For example, if a student submits a paper that illustrates he or she does not know how to use commas, don’t just point out the mistake, but refer to your list of resources and include the appropriate resource in your feedback. A Word document, bookmarks folder, or desktop sticky note are great places to keep these resources handy.

P.S. Be on the lookout for our post on Intelligent Agents in D2L, because they can help you with #1 and #5 from this list to be automatic if set up ahead of time with the right criteria.

 

Category: Course Design, D2L Tip of the Month, Online Teaching Pedagogy | LEAVE A COMMENT
February 8

Instructor Presence and Immediacy

Dwinnells (2017) gives great advice on how to keep up with your online students and give them the feeling that you are present, or as he called it: How to Keep from Going MIA in Your Online Course. Many researchers have confirmed that instructor presence or immediacy positively correlate with student satisfaction and success. I will list his suggestions with my comments below. Click here to view the full Faculty Focus post.

  1. Set times to “go to class.”  Advise your students (and do the same yourself) to check in every day for a few minutes and see if t here is a new discussion post or a question (for you), but actually “attend” the class for a half hour to an hour, two to three times a week.
  2. Find ways to personalize your course with your presence. Include media such as a welcome video or audio at the beginning of the course, or in Announcements, and consider video/audio feedback for some assignments. If you can’t do an audio/video try to post a picture of yourself and add some biographical information such as your hobbies and interests, besides your office hours and syllabus. This helps humanizing and personalizing you as an instructor, which ultimately creates a sense of presence and a feeling of community and safety for your students. Encourage them to do the same in a designated discussion forum.
  3. Seek opportunities to engage students in creative ways. Try to personalize feedback, mention your students’ names whenever you can.
  4. Use discussion boards wisely and often.
  5. Remember that online does not mean off-line: “One could have a beautifully designed online course, but with an off-line professor the learning experience will lack the depth, breadth, and richness of a true learning experience.”

Another point to consider is how nonverbal communication and gauging emotions is lost in online courses. There are ways to assess your student’s emotions and behavior in a fully online class.  Here is a short article on emotional presence and why it matters.

 

Category: Online and Distance Education, Online Teaching Pedagogy | LEAVE A COMMENT
January 24

Online Discussion Forum Guide – Dinner Party Analogy

Here is another interesting post from Faculty Focus, written by Cheryl Hayek, associate provost at Grantham University, in 2012. To read the full article click here.

Hayek (2012) wrote: “Discussion forums are like dinner parties, and the instructor is the host. Personally welcoming each student into this new and unfamiliar place and making them feel like they belong in that environment is a necessity to help integrate them socially and academically into the course; key elements in all retention research. We know that retention is heavily reliant on that integration and students’ related satisfaction.”

Here are the steps she suggested. I quite enjoyed her analogy!

  • Welcome EVERYONE personally at the door. (Online forum)
  • Make sure every person feels comfortable in the new environment. (Tone)
  • Don’t ignore anyone. (Reply to each student throughout the course)
  • Disagreements are phrased professionally.
  • No one should be silent, including the host! (Be present in forums)
  • Serve them something delicious. (Content!)
  • Invite them back! (To weekly forums, to the next assignment even if they’ve faltered on the previous one, to the university if they’ve finished your course)
  • Proportionate time with every guest. (Don’t reply to the same students every time)
  • Spend extra time with needy guests. (Struggling students)
  • Don’t talk all at once, spread the conversation throughout the party. (Post on various days, keeping the volume consistent)
  • Start up a new conversation when one is stale! (Add a relevant link to a current event to discuss)
  • Hosts are visible, immediately attend to guests’ needs, personable, and proactively plan for a great evening!

In addition to her post, there were a few responses to her blog post that I noted. Here are a few more ideas that can be used if you are facilitating discussions in your course:

  • Ask for citation/reference to support the student’s view (from the week’s class readings usually. everything they find extra is their choice if they want to dig deeper).
  • Provide examples of a “good” and “bad” discussion post and a reply to a post (if you don’t write up examples but really like a student’s post you can ask them for permission to show it to the other student/put it in your syllabus as a “good post sample”).
  • Focus on the quality, not quantity of student posts. If a student posts too many threads or replies but have not said much or cited, they probably did not fully engage. – However, sometimes by posting many replies they just want to acknowledge that they have read their classmates’ posts and agreed or liked it, so that is nice. My point here – it is the best to require one substantial post where they would express their opinion and cite a relevant resources, and require at least one or two replies. Anything over that can be overwhelming, but if they only say “I agree” or “Good point” let them be, just don’t necessarily consider it if you are grading their discussion posts.
Category: Online and Distance Education, Online Collaborative Learning, Online Teaching Pedagogy | LEAVE A COMMENT
December 5

Online Presence and Engagement in Courses – CoI Interactive Map

Teacher and social presence and engagement with other classmates and the course materials continue to be the greatest indicators of success in online classes.

Community of Inquiry (CoI) framework is a framework developed by Randy Garrison, Terry Anderson et al. (University of Calgary) to help the educational experience of e-learning. It is based on the three “presences” in the classroom: social, teacher, and cognitive. There are many ways for teachers to show their presence in an online course. starting with clearly communicated course objectives and due dates, providing feedback in a timely fashion, encouraging discussion within the course, etc.

Click here to access the interactive map (you can click on each term) of CoI framework and learn more.

garrison_anderson_community_of_inquiry

Category: Course Design, Online and Distance Education, Online Teaching Pedagogy | LEAVE A COMMENT
July 12

The Chronicle Vitae: There’s No Such Thing as Asynchronous Teaching

The Chronicle of Higher Education Vitae Columnist Nicole Matos published an insightful and interesting post on teacher presence (presence, timeliness, and responsiveness) in online courses. You can view the full post, but here I will list her main suggestions:

  • Online teaching should be “just-in-time” teaching. Instructors need to be every bit as mindful of timeliness and urgency in an online course as they are in a face-to-face classroom, and maybe even more so. In a traditional classroom, you wouldn’t normally answer a student’s question with, “I’ll get back to you on that in a few days,” or worse, with a sort of blank, unreadable stare (“Did the professor hear me? Do I even exist?”). But that is the impression created when you fail to respond to emails in a timely manner or leave essays sitting unattended in an online folder. Does that mean online instructors need to be on call 24-7? No. It is perfectly acceptable to maintain business hours, or to set your own quirky hours, so long as you communicate those time limits to your students.

  • Remember to both look forward and gesture back. Because different course materials are often sequestered in different folders or on different screens, it is important for online instructors to consciously build bridges between past, present, and future information. To that end:

  1. I frequently provide quick-and-dirty summaries of past topics, both for reinforcement and review: “Discussion so far looks great! We have been talking about such things as why literature is more like biology than you would think, about the Rhetorical Triangle, and about the differences between literary, pragmatic, and pleasure reading.”
  2. Then I might connect that content to new material: “Both the broad question of how you ‘dissect’ a literary text and the interactions of the Rhetorical Triangle lead directly into our reading for Thursday, where we will consider different modes of literary criticism.”
  3. Finally, I might suggest ways to integrate old and new content: “Does it make sense to attempt to map the different schools of literary criticism against the Rhetorical Triangle? That’s an experiment I’ll urge you to try in our next discussion.”
  • Standardize your course schedule. With students checking in at various points, it is up to the teacher to create some moments of unified class time. In online courses, students are generally free to take advantage of looser scheduling, completing assignments on Monday and Wednesday one week, and on Tuesday and Thursday another week. But I strongly recommend that you not take the same liberties in structuring your due dates or grading. I have seen online courses in which due dates were rotated on three-day, four-day, and five-day cycles, to the confusion of all.Instead, I standardize my due dates — discussion posts are due on Tuesdays and Thursdays, all other projects on Fridays by noon, for example… I am as explicit as possible about when exactly I’ll be doing my grading: “I expect to be grading these assignments on Sunday afternoon, so look for my responses then.” If I have to vary my schedule, I announce the change: “I’m a little behind, but will be completing this round of grading on Monday between 1 p.m. and 5 p.m.” Such small courtesies matter an extraordinary amount to online students.
Category: Course Design, Online Teaching Pedagogy | LEAVE A COMMENT