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This website is designed for practitioners that want to develop online environments to build and sustain new audiences by using facilitation techniques that affect learning in these informal spaces. Below you'll find different tools that we believe can help you successfully facilitate an online environment.

This resource gives some great, easy to read ideas for matching your learning objectives with your assessment techniques. It also has a list of criteria for writing clear assignments, which could be useful as a checklist when creating a new assignment.

Hi Susan - I particularly liked the Alignment tab, which gave some very clear suggestions of assignments that align with stated learning objectives. Your suggestion of a checklist is brilliant! I also noticed that they linked to their Institutional Assessment page from this page - a nice reminder that everything needs to be in alignment at every level.

Susan, Great find, I too find the tabs really helpful and have bookmarked this reference to my Bookmarks page so that I can refer to it over and over. Thanks so much!

Reconceptualization of the CoI framework that proposes learning presence as an additional construct in the framework. Reflects the unique contributions of students and teachers and embeds the social dimension as part of each presence (i.e., Social-Learning Presence, Social-Teaching Presence, and Socio-Cognitive Presence).

Kristy, thank you so much for locating and sharing this article and study. It's an important find. I really like the fact that it is hosted within our library system and that the authors are suggesting that the model may need some revisions - there is still much to learn and develop in the digital learning environments. Bookmarked!

Yes, yes, I know, the title suggests that this webtext is only relevant for a few people, perhaps only Jane and myself. However, if you browse this webtext - it is indeed not an article, but like all work published in Kairos, a multimedia artifact or well, a webtext - you will find a lot of important insights on student-professor-staff interactions in an online environment. The webtext highlights, for example, the importance of the lack of physical cues in an online class, a facet of online instruction that may necessitate a higher awareness of the effect our formulations, terms, and even typed characters can have in any written communication such as blog posts, emails, chats, and messages. We thus learn quite a bit about communicative techniques and etiquette in an online class (and in a virtual environment more generally). Another webtext in the same Kairos issue reflects upon teaching graduate students how to teach online: http://kairos.technorhetoric.net/20.1/praxis/bourelle-et-al/pedagogycourse.html. Leah, this webtext might be interesting for you - but it should be interesting for others as well because it also addresses questions about assignments and exercises in online classes. By the way, Kairos is an important open-access online journal that has existed since 1996. It publishes scholarship that "examines digital and multimodal composing practices, promoting work that enacts its scholarly argument through rhetorical and innovative uses of new media." ("The Kairos Style Guide", n.d.)

Andragogy--self-directed learning--is making a comeback, thanks to online education. But why did Malcolm Knowles, its author, and the approach based on educating adults lose interest among educators? This article delves into why it faded from favor and why it's on the rebound.

Online classes can be mechanical in nature and feel distant for students, which typically results in low student engagement and retention in the class, or it can be an environment that stimulates an interest in learning and promotes meaningful interactions.

This also is another fairly short read from the pre-digital era (ie, 1990s). (I'm trying to spare you all the 21-page scholarly works). If you looked at the learning object at the CoI community of inquiry, this parallels the short video about traditional education models and preparing students to be nimble, active and adaptable thinkers in rapidly changing environments - something we worry about a lot in healthcare education.

This is a pretty short, not-too-challenging read with some good ideas and strategies for having teachers (K-12, but certainly could be extended to include higher ed instructors) incorporate more resources into their classrooms and learning environments. The article is from 2002, but the strategies still seem sound.

This is a report from 2002 that outlines the importance of certain tasks to be able to effectively management workload in the online environment.  May have some applications to residential teaching, as well.

This paper describes two innovative online introductory statistics courses that utilize technology to create unique interactive learning environments. In these courses, technology is used to enable students to collaborate and learn from each other. I got some ideas about how to encourage students to engage in the course.

Authors: Lehman, Rosemary M. and Conceicão, Simone C. This volume highlights the need for creating a presence in the online environment. The authors explore the emotional, psychological, and social aspects from both the instructor and student perspective. It provides an instructional design framework and shows how a strong presence contributes to effective teaching and learning. Contains methods, case scenarios, and suggested activities.

If you are considering teaching online or are looking for ideas to freshen-up your current online course, you have come to the right resource. Designing for the online environment presents unique challenges, but it also opens a world of exciting possibilities for engaging students in their learning.

This article discusses using the ADDIE model in developing nursing simulation exercises.

Because the early planning stages of online instruction are crucial, Diane Chapman and Todd Nicolet propose a 'project approach' to course Development: a formal, team-based operation that makes use of consistent standards, trackable processes, standardized tools, and structured communication to facilitate technology initiatives of all sizes. This appears to facilitate scaling and the design and development of online instruction while maintaining the quality and integrity of the courses. Course design and development become more manageable when they are translated into repeatable processes and easy-to-apply tools.

This is very similar to Strategy 6: Apply Project Planning and Management Methods to Course Development in last weeks reading, "Effective Workload Management Strategies for the Online Environment".