Online courses and degree programs continue to be popular with both students and instructors. Many online instructors use discussion forums in their online courses with varying levels of success. This article shares three ideas instructors can use to enhance their online course discussions. Idea 1:
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
In the fall of 2016, we embarked on a journey to integrate high-touch processes into our online introductory courses in psychology and business administration. Examples of our processes include such well-known technology best practices as instructor personalized videos (including weekly course communication), synchronous events (including
Drexel University is among several schools that offer students a free “test-drive” course before taking a full online class (Goodman 2017). This is a shortened version of a regular online course meant to allow students to determine whether online learning is right for them. Drexel
In a recent New York Times article, researchers point out that popular self-paced “brain training” programs have not been demonstrated to improve performance in school or work (DeSteno, Breazeal, and Harris 2017). They chalk up the problem to the lack of social cues in online
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
TED Talks captivate us because their speakers apply fundamental principles of communication that are lost on 99 percent of speakers. Because teaching is fundamentally about communication, these principles apply just as well to teaching, especially to online teaching with videos, which is still stuck in
Faculty often assume that their digital millennial students will take to any classroom technology like a fish to water. But these faculty are often surprised by the limits to student understanding of technology, which, Abamu (2017) points out, tend to be narrowly focused on the
Course navigation is what learners instinctively use and consciously rely on to find, select, and explore, and as with any navigational map, keys are necessary to help steer. When logging in, “Home” is usually the first key of the course seen, with others like “Syllabus,”
A community of practice is a network of people who exchange knowledge about a common profession. Members of the community exchange best practices and share evidence and results while supporting each other on a personal level. Good examples of these communities are the LinkedIn groups
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