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

"Center for Teaching and Learning"

"Lost in Translation: Importance of Effective Communication in Online Education"

"How Students Develop Online Learning Skills"

"ToOLS: Test of Online Learning Success*"

"Seven Principles of Effective Teaching: A Practical Lens for Evaluating Online Courses"

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

"Effective Online Assessment: Scalable Success Strategies"

To help make quality online education accessible and affordable for anyone, anywhere, at any time, the members of the Sloan-C community share techniques, strategies, and practices in online education that have worked for them. All effective practices are peer reviewed to insure quality and to give submitters some documentation for tenure and promotion files.

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.

Pedagogy and the Class Blog