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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.

The centrality of teaching actively comes up a lot. all is not lost! Teaching presence is the key to social and cognitive presences.

This study affirms the need to attend to individual differences among learners. Whatever technologies we use or approaches we take, we need to keep in mind that there will be significant variation in how students use all these components of the course. aim too low and we lose the top to boredom. aim too low and we lose the bottom to confusion. I think this means we need to be reactive and be ready to alter plans and methods as needed. Leah demonstrated this when she made the group project optional.

This article provides an overview of the benefits of a "backchannel" (such as Twitter and todaysmeet.com). It also explains ways to go about implementing Twitter into the classroom. Finally, the article touches on digital literacy (also web literacy skills). This article will be particularly useful for M4 and beyond.

Interesting article incorporating experiential learning theory into online teaching. This allows courses to enhance the learning power of learners, empower learners and challenge learners as they move through a series of planned learning cycles.

With the number of students taking online classes increasing, the need for instructors to be versed in the world of online teaching also increases. What are some best practices of online teaching? Do MOOCs have a place in the higher education learning market? How will the virtual classroom evolve?

I appreciated this article's insistence that our focus needs to be on learning outcomes rather than technology. Recently, I taught an in-person class that was designed with a strong audio-visual component. This was for an adult education program outside Emory. But after the first class I realized that the audiovisual material was distracting me and not contributing that much, so I ditched it. What worries me about being an online instructor is not being able to make quick changes to the audiovisual regime during the semester.

This guide to syllabus construction from Vanderbilt reiterates many points from our readings and is not specifically concerned with online teaching. However, one thing I had not yet seen in other readings that concerns us here is the importance of choosing the right tone for introducing the class to students. I am not sure that the warm and friendly approach recommended here is always the right one but it makes sense for us given the difficulty we will have in any case making personal connections with students in the online environment.

I think this is an important point. I had to revise some of my syllabi for exactly this reason. I guess when I first started teaching, I wanted to sound official and proper, but then a few years later discovered that I did not even recognize the person behind the formal, detached voice of the syllabi, and perhaps along the way, that a good instructor did not need to sound official or proper! Good reminder for me this time around, so thanks for posting this!

Thanks, Yu, I am just seeing this now. I think my draft syllabus was too formal and scary, but on the other hand I want to be super clear up front about expectations. I will need to tweak this,

A online teAcher hAs been teAching online for five yeArs. Here, she shAres the top 10 best prActices she hAs leArned About online teAching.

Thank you, marshall!

Thanks, this is actually very helpful. I am struggling now with how to adapt my assignments and particularly with how much reading i can realistically assign in an online summer class.

This short blog by an anthropology professor resonated very much with my own state of mind out this. The importance of doing assessment right, alongside the numbing effects of assessment as a hugely time consuming new set of bureaucratic requirements. In the end, the author provides some really helpful reminders about how this works in practice. It helped me to realize that assessment itself is a topic we need to continually assess, for our own educational goals.

My department spent a lot of time this year thinking about assessment in a process driven by accreditation. We came up with some fairly broad learning outcomes and not much in the way of detailed assessment. So I am very impressed by this webpage from the Dept. of Sociology and anthropology in Ohio. Their departmental webpage includes very detailed assessment information that may be useful for everyone to keep in mind, but probably does not do much to attract students. In our own discussions we sometimes ran into confusion between providing information for current students about what we would be assessing and departmental advertizing-- two very different things.

While this paper set out to discover what activities and/or interaction channels might be expected to lead to more highly engaged student s, what it found was a bit different. after first creating a scale to measure online student engagement, and then surveying 186 students from six campuses in the Midwest, the results indicate that there is no particular activity that will automatically help students to be more engaged in online classes. However, the results also suggest that multiple communication channels may be related to higher engagement and that student-student and instructor-student communication are clearly strongly correlated with higher student engagement with the course, in general. Thus, advice for online instructors is still to use active learning but to be sure to incorporate meaningful and multiple ways of interacting with students and encouraging/requiring students to interact with each other.

This was linked to from the authentic assessment website and looks like a treasure trove of useful assessment tools and rubrics for InfoLit. Page was last updated in March of this year too, so it's not likely to be full of broken links.

Depth of Knowledge Levels

Leah, This is a great visual aid for those who need a quick reminder with constructing measurable objectives. Thanks for the connection.

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".

This page is actually a brief (but helpful and concise) overview of the use of rubrics. The main reason I am posting it here is because the entire site (Cornell University Center for Teaching Excellence) has a wealth of information on design, assessment, student engagement and using technology in the classroom.

Practitioners are regularly confronted with significant events which present them with learning opportunities, and yet many are unable to recognise the learning opportunity these significant events present. The ability to recognise a learning opportunity in the workplace and learn from it, is a higher-order cognitive skill which instructors should be seeking to develop in learners.

Features a selection of multimedia tools to help students integrate music and visual arts in order to put up a show at an online gallery.

This study focuses on the presence of the teacher in the virtual classroom and how the instructor interacts with the students. Can an instructor's behavior encourage more student activity? Certainly, but it has to be more than the occasional "well done," the authors say. Students want more teacher presence, specifically more frequent responses, more acknowledgement of individuals' contribution, and more suggestions and guidance related to a specific response. So the bottom line is try to respond to individual students rather than a group and customize your comments as much as possible. You will have more engaged students.

Similar to the triad of education model...this model explains how a "student" teacher transitions to become an experienced teacher with the assistance of a 'co-operative' teacher and 'university' supervisor. The article also explains the areas which need further research to strengthen the model and its application in practice.

Primer for using Google Docs in your class. Provides information about various tools and plugins that enable bibliographic work, speech recognition and voice commenting, assessment using a rubric, and more.

Following up on Brent's post on Justine Sacco, here is a feature story one of my students wrote last semester on public shaming at Emory. You also can go to her podcast which you might find interesting despite its length and annoying undertone of typing.