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We don't offer "online" courses at Kenyon, but these tips do apply to our course websites and Moodle pages. It's worth the time to think how a student with a disability would experience your resources and assignments.

These tips and techniques would benefit any breakout activity, but in online teaching this kind of structure will be crucial.

Lots to think about in this deceptively short article. The finding highlights the importance of course design - I think Koh undersells the point that her online course may require more writing than many.

The title of this one pretty much sums up the content completely. There is a link to some good vs. bad examples of PowerPoint slides, but they are pretty self-evident. The guidelines discussed in this article are worth exploring even if you are not developing a MOOC or a smaller online course -- for example, if you just want to flip a class or two.

This is an interesting discussion about vulnerability, trust, and power in the classroom (and outside it). It comes from the Connected Courses community, which focuses on teaching courses with a large public online component, but the discussion is applicable to any class where students are asked to take risks. It's an hour long, but well worth it. (It's also an interesting case study in bringing material from the backchannel into the foreground.)

It seems odd to consider meeting your Kenyon students through an online video chat - until you consider winter weather, cold and flu season, or the various other reasons you might not be able to meet in person. This article suggests some benefits and hurdles to videoconferencing with students.

Tremendous example of reflective teaching and course design, as the hosts of the Tea for Teaching podcast reflect on their fall experiences teaching online courses with significant synchronous elements. This would be great listening as we think about the design of spring courses.

"What does it look like to do this kind of work online? How do we walk our virtual campuses to address accessibility concerns? Where do we hold the necessary town hall meetings to address hard questions about inclusivity?"

News article about an online calculus class to be offered this summer by Macalester and St. Olaf.

This is the second of two MOOC-related stories in the Chronicle yesterday. I am "taking" a MOOC at the moment, which is taught by a professor at Duke University. I do get the feeling that he is treating me (and all the students in the MOOC) with respect, but I can imagine a situation in which this may not be the case. The conveners of the meeting that drafted this "Bill of Rights" clearly want to send the message that online educators should have the best interests of their students FIRST and foremost in their minds. I stress FIRST here because the drafters of the document want to avoid having MOOC students become a commodity that can be sold such as with social media participants (e.g., Facebook).

The author of this opinion urges caution in the rush to MOOC-ify higher education. He touts the benefits of (another version? of a MOOC called) a hybrid online-field course. I think this type of course is tailored for field-based disciplines such as his own (marine biology), but I am sure this could be modified for non-field science disciplines. I am almost positive, though, that such a hybrid course would fail to live up to the largest, most-inclusive (in terms of numbers of students enrolled) meaning of a MOOC.

With Kenyon's ArcGIS Online organizational account, story maps are one tool available to you for presenting spatial pedagogical lessons to your students. I suggest exploring the Gallery and Storytelling Apps links

A TED talk from Kenyon alum John Green about the ways online learning communities support lifelong curiosity.

Here are some rather simple guidelines for developing online videos for your courses, pushing these to your students, and maximizing their pedagogical impact.

This is a good resource for rethinking your course for an online setting

Clay Shirkey, author of "Here Comes Everybody," examines the challenge posed to U.S. higher education by massive open online courses, or MOOCs. Shirkey is the author of "Here Comes Everybody," a book he says is about "what happens when people are given the tools to do things together, without needing traditional organizational structures." In this article, he describes the same dynamic at work in the disruptive potential of MOOCs to all but the most elite institutions of higher education in America. 

If the point of online discussion boards and collaborative projects is to get students discussing course ideas with each other, does it make sense to move those discussions to the social media venues they're already using?

This article deserves attention for opening up a professor's iterative process in figuring out the best structure for her class's online presence. I'm intrigued by the idea of using Facebook instead of or in addition to a professor-run website or Moodle page.

I'm intrigued by Bowen's idea of courses which offer "a playlist of 25 different types of explanations in different languages using different approaches to a single concept" to support different learning preferences. Despite the title, this idea could apply to MOOCs, tuition-based online courses, and face-to-face "blended" courses. (The assertion that the pedagogical innovation will come from MOOC-land and not established campuses is also intriguing, and troubling...)

Some interesting thoughts here on the differences between debates in course discussion boards and the "toxic" level of discussion in other social media.