Group items tagged

Start your course or program with a welcoming e-mail.

Follow up on all e-mail received—and promptly.

Use chat rooms, threaded discussions, journals, etc.

Automate parts of the course whenever possible.

Create a “What’s New” section to let your students focus on new assignments or learning materials without having to review the entire course. This also minimizes the amount of e-mail questions you will receive regarding assignments

Communicate with students early in the semester about how to best use the course

What’s interesting is that the methods, i.e., substituting real-world items in the student’s immediate environment when that’s possible and creating online simulations when it’s not, marry so well together in an e-learning environment as strategies for dealing with what is fundamentally an environment of low situational control for instructional designers.

Almost every sentence in the asynchronous discussions of the smaller group, and a vast majority of sentences in the larger group, were classified as content-related.

This is a remarkable result—imagine if learners on campus spent more than 90 percent of their time discussing issues related to course content

“You are interacting with one single individual at all times.  There is no ‘class’ …”

“Design a course with the student perspective, one who has never taken an online course before” (Pickett, What Works?).

I must find a balance, however, in order to complete the necessary tasks well so I can savor the doing of those that have salience.

I also like the creepy treehouse syndrome as described in slides 77-79. This is when a professor requires his/her students to follow him/her on Facebook or Twitter. I do not make my student teachers friend or follow me. I just let them know that I have a treehouse, creepy or otherwise, that they are free to visit.

We can process information in 3 ways: Shallow Processing - This takes two forms 1. Structural processing (appearance) which is when we encode only the physical qualities of something.  E.g. the typeface of a word or how the letters look. 2. Phonemic processing – which is when we encode its sound. Shallow processing only involves maintenance rehearsal (repetition to help us hold something in the STM) and leads to fairly short-term retention of information.  This is the only type of rehearsal to take place within the multi-store model. Deep Processing - This involves 3. Semantic processing, which happens when we encode the meaning of a word and relate it to similar words with similar meaning. Deep processing involves elaboration rehearsal which involves a more meaningful analysis (e.g. images, thinking, associations etc.) of information and leads to better recall. For example, giving words a meaning or linking them with previous knowledge.

misconceptions and myths related to the difficulty of teaching and learning online, technologies available to support online instruction, the support and compensation needed for high-quality instructors, and the needs of online students create challenges for such vision statements and planning documents.

Adding to this dilemma, bored students are dropping out of online classes while pleading for richer and more engaging online learning experiences.1 Given the demand for online learning, the plethora of online technologies to incorporate into teaching, the budgetary problems, and the opportunities for innovation, we argue that online learning environments are facing a "perfect e-storm," linking pedagogy, technology, and learner needs.

cation. In this study, Keeton interviewed faculty in postsecondary institutions, who rated the effectiveness of online instructional strategies. These instructors gave higher ratings to online instructional strategies that "create an environment that supports and encourages inquiry," "broaden the learner's experience of the subject matter," and "elicit active and critical reflection by learners on their growing experience base."12

This line of research indicated that the multivariate measure of learning represented by the cognitive presence factor could be predicted by the quality of teaching presence and social presence reported by learners in online courses. The relationship between these constructs is illustrated in Fig. 1 below.