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Authentic Activities
The majority of online learners seek formal education for a multitude of reasons but can be frustrated by the lack of transferrable skills. Online education can bridge this gap by utilizing authentic activities, allowing learners to gain skills that directly connect to their professional lives.
Five Ways to Succeed as an Online Instructor
Whether experienced 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.
Game-Based Learning Experiences
Game-based learning (GBL) is a learning experience, or set of learning experiences, delivered through gameplay or game-like activities with defined learning outcomes. GBL is often confused with gamification, which is the application of game elements to a non-gaming experience. GBL engages students cognitively, emotionally, behaviorally, and socioculturally (Plass et al., 2015). Many factors should be considered when designing GBL, including narrative, player positioning, and interactive design (Dickey, 2005).
Engagement Series: Introduction
There are many components to consider when developing an online course; a key framework to inform course development is student engagement. The Glossary of Education Reform defines student engagement as “the degree of attention, curiosity, interest, optimism, and passion that students show when they are learning or being taught, which extends to the level of motivation they have to learn and progress in their education” (Great Schools Partnership, 2016, para. 1). Developing and evaluating course content through the lens of engagement can help instructors create an environment that is conducive to learning and mastery of course outcomes.
Using Hotspots
A unique way to share information, images with hotspots offer online learners the opportunity to interact with course content. Learners can click or hover on particular parts of an image and receive pop-ups giving them more information. Hotspots represent information in a particular context; thus, they fulfill the multimedia principle—use words and graphics rather than words alone—and the contiguity principle—align words to corresponding graphics (Clark & Mayer, 2016).
Inheriting an Online Course
Over the course of your teaching career, you may inherit an online course developed by another faculty member. While such a situation can offer many advantages, it can also provoke many questions and pose significant challenges. Inheriting a complete course with materials and assessments already in place can simplify and streamline some aspects of instruction, but it can be difficult to identify where to start and what to prioritize as you begin engaging with the course. This blog outlines a four-phase process that can lead to a successful transition.
Emergency Course Build Checklist: A Response to COVID-19
Your class was never intended to be online. It was delivered face-to- face to a live audience. Perhaps it followed that same structure for years. Now, with little warning, it’s an online class. Where do you start? What do you prioritize? And what is essential to create a meaningfully engaging learning experience online? Rapidly transitioning a course to online doesn’t require recreating every element of the face-to-face version.
Easy and Essential Online Course Elements
Transferring your course online opens a world of possibilities. In fact, you might be tempted to spend hours trying to locate and learn new educational technologies, or to rebuild your entire course in the learning management system (LMS). But while effective use of technology can certainly enhance learning experiences, it can also introduce obstacles for both faculty and students.
Increasing Engagement with Q&A Forums
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.