I recently received a frantic phone call from a distraught colleague who had just received her student evaluations after teaching her first online course. Tearfully, she shared with me sample student comments such as, “I didn’t get any feedback on my assignments until it was
Group projects teach collaboration skills that will be necessary in any job as well as non-job activities in groups such as clubs, religious organizations, and the Boy and Girl Scouts. With an increasingly distributed workforce, learning how to coordinate behavior at a distance has become
Animation is an engaging format for delivering online content. We see it used in TED-Ed presentations, educational documentaries, and elsewhere. It is also much easier to make than many people think. Simple and free, or inexpensive, online systems allow anyone to make animated videos in
When online faculty or course developers are approached about adding videos to their content, they tend to think of either webcam shots of themselves at their computer or screencasts of themselves reading bullet points to students. But there are a variety of highly effective and
The word “motivation” comes from a root that means “to move,” and really, motivation is about what moves us to begin something or to persist in a situation—in this case, a learning situation. Motivation is a driving force. It can be considered an external driving
Study guides and answer keys are common items in every classroom, and for self-motivated students, they may be all that is necessary to prepare for an exam. However, for students with lower proficiency or lower motivation, more coaching may be necessary to help them get
When I see yet another survey asking faculty their opinions about whether online teaching can achieve learning outcomes as well as face-to-face teaching, I immediately ask why they are using face-to-face teaching as the standard of quality education. Why are they not asking whether face-to-face
We seem to have advanced from the traditional web page to an “appified” world where we use a specific app to reach what we want on the web rather than a web browser, whether we are checking the weather, posting on Facebook, or sending a
Most institutions provide instructional design teams to support faculty in creating online courses. At my institution, each department has an assigned instructional designer, and most faculty members consider designers to be an indispensable part of the course development process. The same cannot be said for
While all online programs put new faculty through some sort of training to teach them the techniques of online education, there is still much that comes up during courses that cannot be covered in prior training. This is why a mentoring system is critical to
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