Online Education

Using Wikis for Collaborative Learning

If you are looking for ways to facilitate collaboration among students, consider using a wiki—a website that contains pages that can be easily created and edited by multiple users. Several characteristics of Wikis make them excellent choices for projects that involve brainstorming and research and that require a final report, says Rhonda Ficek, director of instructional technology services at Minnesota State University Moorhead.

Rob Kelly December 9, 2010

Online Education Continues its Rapid Growth, Study Finds

The 2010 Sloan Survey of Online Learning reveals that online enrollment rose by almost one million students – the largest ever year-to-year increase since the study began eight years ago. The survey of more than 2,500 colleges and universities nationwide finds approximately 5.6 million students were enrolled in at least one online course in Fall 2009, the most recent term for which figures are available.

Mary Bart November 30, 2010

Preparing Your Online Students for the Tough Weeks Ahead

Our courses are rolled out to online students with assignments scheduled for each week. Some of these assignments are relatively easy, meaning there will be weeks that are “light” in terms of scheduled assignments, while others will be “killer” weeks because of especially difficult assignments and/or a large number of assignments. While you need to prepare students to do all the assignments, it is especially important that you pre-assist them for those killer weeks. If you don’t do this, their anxiety can markedly increase, their involvement in and enthusiasm for the course can decrease, and you can lose them altogether.

Errol Craig Sull November 18, 2010

Making Online Discussion Boards Work for Skills-Based Courses

If you teach a skills-based course and wonder how online discussion can enhance the learning experience, consider Roger Gee’s approach to the use of online discussions in his introduction to accounting course.

Rob Kelly November 11, 2010

Online Teaching Tips for Leveraging Students' Insights and Experiences

Teaching any online class is time-consuming and can be a juggling act. The instructor must keep students engaged and motivated, adhere to a variety of deadlines, quickly answer all student emails and postings, react to in-class “emergencies,” stay on top of all school policies, and teach the subject in an easy-to-understand manner—while remaining a patient, upbeat, and constant presence through it all. This is no easy task, and while we each have developed approaches to help us, there is one often underused “tool” that online instructors can employ: the students in one’s course.

Errol Craig Sull October 28, 2010

Intellectual Property, Copyright, and Harassment: Navigating the Murky Legal Waters of Online Teaching

If you teach online, here’s a simple quiz for you:

Are you familiar with your college’s intellectual property policy?
Do you know if you own the class material you have created?
Do you have permission to use all copyrighted materials you use regularly?
Do you know how to prevent defamation and harassment issues online?
Do you have a disability expert on campus that regularly assists in the development of online materials so that you do not violate disability guidelines?

Mary Bart October 18, 2010

Three Tips for Handling Disruptive Online Students

Disruptive students, in any teaching and learning environment, are a challenge to manage, but they can be particularly so online. And it may take longer for an instructor to realize that a student is actually being disruptive online, since online communications can be ambiguous and one always wants to give students the benefit of the doubt.

Susan Ko PhD October 12, 2010

Online vs. Face-to-Face Throwdown: Good Teaching Transcends Course Format

In the 2009 report, Evaluation of Evidence-Based Practices in Online Learning: A Meta-Analysis and Review of Online Learning Studies, the Department of Education reported that “on average, students in online learning conditions performed better than those receiving face-to-face instruction.”

Mary Bart October 11, 2010

Online Teaching Challenge: Creating an Emotional Connection to Learning, part 2

“One of the biggest barriers to online learning is our inability to respond in the moment, unless we happen to be on live chat or video, which is really rare in most of the online learning world,” says Rick Van Sant, associate professor of education at Ferris State University.

Rob Kelly September 30, 2010

Online Teaching Challenge: Creating an Emotional Connection to Learning, part 1

Learning research indicates that people learn better in the presence of some emotional connection—to the content or to other people. Creating this emotional connection is particularly challenging in the online classroom, where most communication is asynchronous and lacks many of the emotional cues of the face-to-face environment. Nevertheless, it is possible to do, with a learner-centered approach to teaching and a mastery of the technology that supports it, says Rick Van Sant, associate professor of education at Ferris State University.

Rob Kelly September 28, 2010

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