After teaching online for a number of years, I grew weary of the normal “make an initial post, then respond to two others” discussions. Was there another way to engage students? How could I make discussions more meaningful and in-depth? Were there ways to ensure
Discussion is a critical component of any online course, but instructors are often puzzled about what makes some discussions lively and others dead. To fill this gap, He and Gunter examined the factors that lead to participation in virtual teams and came up with some
We run across excellent online content all the time. Instructional designers are always finding new tools and applications that would be of interest to faculty and course designers. Librarians also frequently have a wealth of information on systems that would benefit those involved in developing
Many online courses still use static content such as readings, PowerPoint presentations, and the like. Students are not “doing” anything other than consuming the information. We wanted to buck this trend by providing more interactive and engaging content. We did so by creating the Conversations
Adaptive learning has drawn growing interest in education. The premise makes perfect sense. Instead of giving students of all knowledge and abilities the same content, the student is first assessed on his or her knowledge, then provided the content appropriate to that knowledge. The student
Online faculty often assume that all student collaboration should go through the LMS discussion board, but there are other methods of hosting discussion. Yanyan Sun of Ohio University and Fei Gao of Bowling Green State University experimented with Web annotations as an alternative to traditional
How do you inspire your online students to move beyond making status quo postings in your discussion component and lackluster responses to their peers? Is there a way to get students engaged in meaningful group work in the online classroom? Consider using problem-based learning (PBL)
One of the most common mistakes I see among online faculty is to misuse questions under the guide of teaching by “Socratic dialogue.” Faculty will drop comments such as “Why did the author take this position?” into the margins of a student’s assignment thinking that
Hundreds of studies have demonstrated that there is no significant difference in learning outcomes between online and face-to-face courses. But many students still report having a bad experience with online education because their instructor makes some easily identified mistake when moving courses online.
Student discussion differentiates online education from the old correspondence courses. But there are still many questions to answer in order to facilitate good discussion online. Hong Zhiu, of the University of Texas at San Antonio, did a meta-analysis of studies of online discussion over the
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