Group items tagged

" The purpose of this article is to describe and analyze two online legal environment courses to determine whether the instructor successfully used technology to create an effective online teaching and learning environment. The central focus is on the concept of "teaching presence" in physical and online environments and how teaching presence can be created in an online environment. "

This was a long article (50 pages) it was a study of two legal courses and whether they engaged the students in learning. It provided a background on distance learning, and learning theories, and then described the two courses and the research questionnaire. It was an interesting study, but I am not sure that faculty would find this useful or informative on how to improve their presence in their courses.

Road block for me: options for accessing this content: If you have access to this content through a society membership, please first log in to your society website. If you would like institutional access to this content, please recommend the title to your librarian. Login via other institutional login options http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/login-options. You can purchase online access to this Article for a 24-hour period (price varies by title) If you already have a Wiley Online Library or Wiley InterScience user account: login above and proceed to purchase the article. New Users: Please register, then proceed to purchase the article.

"Faculty often describe the role of the online teacher as more of a "guide-on- the-side"rather than a "sage-on-the-stage." However, this cliché can be taken to extremes; there isa fine line between being a guide on the side and being absent. Therefore, this articlefocuses on different strategies online faculty can use to improve their teaching andultimately student learning by balancing their teaching presence when teaching online."

Nice introductory article on what online presence is, along with some specific examples of how faculty have tried to improve their online presence in their classes. Clearly defines what online presence is in the literature, and some of the components that go into making up online presence from the design, teaching, and student perspective.

Road block: You must be logged in to download - many people don't want to log in or create accounts when they just want to blast around and read about a topic.

"Discussions of technology strategy and planning for new media at colleges and universities are informed by many factors of higher education culture and the way its core constituents--faculty and students--work and learn. One rapidly evolving area is online assessment, whether for fully online programs or for blended learning environments. Here, learning designer Judith Boettcher examines online assessment strategies beyond the traditional end-of-term paper."

"A model that encourages students to participate in online forum discussions, provides a template for new online faculty to use in creating effective discussion questions, and promotes a higher level processing of the material."

Research on online classes strongly identifies participation as a positive variable. Research on online teaching also reveals the time intensive practices involved with providing individualized attention and feedback. An online instructor must negotiate the balance between being responsive and managing time effectively. To that end, writing sound discussion questions, based on a model, is one way to invite and increase participation and maximize the time element. The CREST+ model, a model for writing effective online discussion questions, covers the cognitive nature of the question, the reading basis, any experiential possibility, style and type of question, and finally ways to structure a good question.  This model encourages students to participate in online forum discussions, provides a template for new online faculty to use in creating effective discussion questions, and promotes a higher level processing of the material.

"Engaging Online Students: Practical Interaction Strategies to Enhance Learning"

"The increase in the adop-tion of Internet-related technologies for online learning has been accompanied by a parallel, but separate, demand for greater accountability in higher education. Measures of student engagement offer valuable indicators of educational quality, yet have been limited to use in on-campus settings. The authors used key engagement dimensions that the National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE) defined to measure student engagement in online courses from 3 universities. Online students were modestly engaged in selected NSSE dimensions and had a pattern of engagement that differed from on-campus students."

Here's a direct link to the article. http://anitacrawley.net/Articles/New%20Benchmarks%20in%20Higher%20Education.pdf

"How Students Develop Online Learning Skills"

"As a core project, a university eLearning Pedagogy Faculty Learning Community (FLC) chose to apply recommendations for the "art" of good teaching to the online realm. There is relatively little discussion of this issue in the literature. In this paper, we use Bain's (2004) book What the Best College Teachers Do to discuss some of the major ways that the practices of effective teaching in general can be applied to online teaching in particular. Specifically, we explore methods of fostering student engagement, stimulating intellectual development, and building rapport with students when teaching online. This analysis provides a much-needed "art of teaching" set of recommendations that complements the "science of teaching" best practices approach to online pedagogy. "

Good article. Takes the characteristics of best college teachers and applies it to teaching in an online environment. Three major Characteristics: Fostering Student Engagement Stimulating Intellectual Development Building Rapport with Students

" teaching presence in online education depends on course design and organization, facilitation of online discourse, and well-focused direct instruction."

Good article that talks about developing online presence through both the design and implementation of the course. Provides some basic examples on how faculty can establish an online presence.

I liked this article very much

Here are ten best practices for anyone just getting started in the online environment. Research and experience suggest that these practices contribute to an effective, efficient and satisfying teaching and learning experience for both faculty and students. Using these practices can help develop confidence, comfort, and experience in teaching online.

"Garrison, Anderson, and Archer (2000) identify and explain the critical elements of a Community of Inquiry that supports instruction and learning. The elements include: cognitive presence, social presence, and teaching presence."

Short article giving five tips on building online presence: Have your online students introduce themselves. Introduce yourself to your students. Create a "commons area" for off-topic discussions. Use synchronous tools for office hours. Don't be the center of every discussion.

Very good.

One of the most unique characteristics of mobile learning is that it should be delivered in short 'nuggets' rather than large units of information. Successful mobile applications are goal directed, and are not effective if they expect too much reading from a small screen.

"A hypertextual concept map of established learning theories."

I'd like a poster of this

Nice map, would be useful with the right context of articles around it.

"Sometimes students in the online environment just need that extra nudge to feel connected in order to truly excel. As instructors, we can facilitate community-building in an asynchronous environment by utilizing synchronous tools, such as Wimba, Skype, Elluminate, and others available to us via our learning management system or outside of the LMS. "

"The basic components in this model of Integrated Course Design are the same as those found in other models of instructional design: analyze the situational factors, formulate the learning goals, design the feedback and assessment procedures, and select the teaching/learning activities. What is distinctive about this model is that these components have been put together in a way that reveals and emphasizes their inter-relatedness."

This is a good article with helpful worksheets to get faculty to think about how to design an online course. However it is pretty long 30+ pages, which is probably a barrier.

The University of Central Florida's (UCF) Center for Distributed Learning (CDL) offers the Teaching Online Pedagogical Repository (TOPR) as a public resource for faculty and instructional designers interested in online and blended teaching strategies. Each entry describes a strategy drawn from the pedagogical practice of online/blended teaching faculty, depicts this strategy with artifacts from actual courses, and is aligned with findings from research or professional practice literature. While TOPR is currently in its beta release, all are welcome to browse and search its contents.

I like this resource, it links to a lot of good information on many different topics. It may be a little difficult for a beginning faculty member to jump right into and find useful, but I think it would be a good companion to an article or two that first outlines the general principles of instructional design.

This special report features eight articles pulled from the pages of Distance Education Report, and covers a variety of different aspects of online course design. Some of the articles you will find in the report include: * The Collaborative Approach to Developing Online Courses * Building Course Quality Systematically * Who Ya Gonna Call When a Course Needs Help? * Developing a Course Maintenance Process for Your Online Courses * What Learning Object Repositories Mean for Your Program

Series of articles on Distance Ed. They are all good, but they seem more geared towards administrators. Most do not talk about specific design aspects that faculty should be aware of when designing and implementing courses.

"Video Primers in an Online Repository for e-Teaching & Learning"

"Dr. Curt Bonk, Professor in Instructional Systems Technology, Indiana University, in a video series addressing the design and best practices of Distance Education courses. "

I like the idea of this, but not the implementation.

"ToOLS: Test of Online Learning Success*"

I like this and think we should make our own.... another subcommittee....?

I replaced the student readiness questionnaire that was linked to in Designing an Exemplary Course with this version.

"A roadmap for instructors during the course design process or as a "self-evaluation" tool to assist instructors in revision of an existing online course using the rubric and suggested examples. "

Nice checklist for what should go into designing a course. Would be better if it had links to describe or go into detail on what each of those items are.