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Rubrics provide students with insight into their performance and attainment of learning outcomes, providing clarity on how grades are assigned and teaching students how to tailor their work. For instructors, rubrics take the guesswork out of deciding how to grade, saving valuable time.

Whether experienced in or new to online teaching, following these tips on online instruction can make the process more intuitive. The online environment may seem vastly different from the classroom, but these tips will make it feel natural, allowing you to improve student experience, increase teaching efficacy, cultivate engagement, and ensure successful course management.

In online courses, opportunities for student engagement need to be deliberately designed (Martin & Bolliger, 2018). One common way to promote student engagement online is through discussion forums, for which there are widespread, established best practices. However, the Q&A discussion forum, which is typically not graded or required, is often thrown into a course without clear intentions or structure. When purposefully designed, a Q&A forum can facilitate the crucial engagement types that are essential to building a community of inquiry in an online classroom, ultimately improving student satisfaction and learning outcomes. These engagement types are student-content, student-student, and student-instructor (Bernard et al., 2009, as cited in Martin & Bolliger, 2018). A Q&A forum should incorporate best practices around all three engagement types.