Group items tagged

The American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages (ACTFL) and Weber State University (Ogden, UT) have developed an Online teaching methods course that reflects state-of-the-art research and practice in foreign language education. This course is offered through WSU Online. For information concerning registration or to see an outline and syllabus, go to http://www.weber.edu/ForeignLanguages/Student_Resources/Onlinemethods.html.

This is an unpublished research article on a model for group work in an online or blended course environment. The two salient points in this article are that the students must have unique skills for the online classroom. First they must be taught how to use the necessary technologies for collaboration and the second is that they must be taught social skills for online collaboration. The first point seems obvious, but I think the second point is often overlooked. We assume that students know how to interact with others, however interacting online is quite different than in person. Therefore these skills must be included in our curriculum.

This is an easy to read infographic that provides data about the growth of online learning

Brief article by online instructor sharing tips on managing online courses. Two tips I think would be especially useful include: 1) using a "What's New" section for adding content so students can find it easily and 2) for large classes to keep personalized grading assignments and high tech features to a minimum.

Kristy, thanks for this good resource, I think that author has several good points. There are ways to think about the "What's New" area. There is a module page within the site that can be used, I've added one in our class, just so you can see. Learners can also use the Global Navigation at the top right of the Bb site to see all (or to filter specific courses) of all new and up-to-date happenings. There are definitely strategies of workload management including team and peer-review assignments. You can also have student-led discussions. Large online classes are there own beast - and I think SON is facing it. I believe that we can come up with some solid solutions that still meet the instructional goals without burning out the faculty.

This article compares the work patterns of a more successful and a less successful online group collaboration and draws conclusions about strategies that instructors can promote/encourage/require to help students successfully collaborate.

Playing Devils' Advocate here.... http://chronicle.com/article/Cheating-Goes-High-Tech/132093/ Would cheating in an online course be considered a "successful collaboration," or promoting positive peer-peer interactions?

If a group worked together to cheat, that certainly would be successful collaboration. I'm sure there are articles out there (that I haven't come across yet) that discuss strategies to minimize or circumvent cheating. Scaffolding assignments and requiring students to make visible all the steps in the process would help I think. Thanks!

This chapter presents a theoretical model of online learning, the Community of Inquiry (CoI) framework, which is grounded in John Dewey's progressive understanding of education. The CoI framework is a process model of online learning which views the

This article gives 6 practical tips to manage your time when teaching online

Thanks for sharing this, Simona. Skimming the article you highlighted and a few of the others in the journal, I noticed that some of the themes and suggestions were similar to the ones in the texts assigned by Leah (manage the students and their interactions actively and constantly/consistently, be empathic and explicit); I also appreciate the user-friendliness of these articles, as they include plenty of bullet-points for the busy reader ... Finally, I like that this journal is indeed international, including views on online teaching from around the world. Would be great if we could learn more about how online education functions elsewhere.

Here are some tips and tools for implementing universal design into online and blended courses.

A quick read about the nature of presence within online learning and the usefulness of social media platforms therein.

There are some great suggestions and examples of how to use social media to increase the "social presence" element of the online classroom.

This reference outlines the outcomes of an online course in genetics for NP students. I found this reference particularly helpful as it focuses on a science based online course. It can be done!

Not surprising (to me), there are very few studies of online teaching in Linguistics. The authors of this article state that they found only one prior to this 2014 publication. Similar to other research on online teaching in general, they found that time management, communication, and detailed instructions are crucial for a successful course. They also discuss how attitudes toward technology play a significant role in course success.

Since we were delayed in getting to the e-Gallery, I looked around for info on strategies and found this. It provides thumbnail sketches of ten very useful strategic considerations.several of which ring very true for me. I especially like the blended teaching approach and the early participatory orientation (which Leah did with us and it worked really well!)

With this and another article that I will also post, I think I have found the answer to the question I posted on Bb discussion/reflection - is it better to be redundant or to be a minimalist? To quote from the other article, "in an online environment, redundancy is often better than elegant succinctness." To quote from this article - in Cybernetics, Norbert Wiener said, "We can hardly expect that any important message is entrusted for transmission to a single neuron, nor that any important operation is entrusted to a single neuronal mechanism." When teaching writing online, simply put, you should provide information to your students through multiple means.

OK. Here is the other article I promised. My interest was to find out about the principle of redundancy, but this article is not just about that. Editor's Note : Effective online learning requires careful preparation, design, implementation, and follow-up. This article combines best practices from a variety of resources - research studies, publications, and discussions among online instructors. The analogy of a garden is used to reinforce practices that will ensure a successful "harvest!"

Hi Yu, I like this article. For some points, I had not thought about them. Thanks for sharing.

This article outlines some ways to evaluate online courses - get faculty involved from the start and develop the rating scales...Is this authentic evaluation?

This paper reports the findings of a case study in which audio feedback replaced text-based feedback in asynchronous courses. Previous research has demonstrated that participants in online courses can build effective learning communities through text based communication alone. Similarly, it has been demonstrated that instructors for online courses can adequately project immediacy behaviors using text-based communication.