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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

Here are some insights into how Georgia Tech's Writing and Communication Program theorizes and practices assessment. They are certainly using some "trendy" approaches to assessment and evaluation; students have to compose a self-review essay, for example. Summary from the Website: The Writing and Communication Program is interested in formative and summative assessment in individual classes and in the program as a whole. To create consistent assessment across the entire program, we use a common base rubric (which individual instructors modify to fit their assignments) and an end-of-semester portfolio system.

A list of free tools for lAnguAge teAchers: for exAmple, tools thAt cAn be used for creAting And editing technology-enhAnced tAsks, Activities, And mAteriAls for lAnguAge leArning. EspeciAlly useful for our group As we hAve mAny instructors teAching lAnguAge clAsses!

This page contains a list of free tools and resources for online teaching. It's geared toward language-learning, but has a wide variety of different things.

Whoops, I seem to keep finding things that have already been posted!

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.

Discusses the difficulty of changing the educational paradigm to a servant professor instead of a professor led classroom--both virtual and real. How steep will be the learning curve to replace lecture-test evaluation with student driven and student centered needs.

I thought you might be interested in Shulman's research, in that he has worked a good bit with students in programs like ours (nursing and theology), which are both professional and academic. He is wrestling, in this essay, with the categories of engagement and commitment in processes of learning.

An excellent guide to use when developing A course And wAnting to be Able to effectively reAch A multitude of devices (student-content interAction)

Good communication from the facilitator to the group and between group members is essential in online learning in order for the group to bond and survive. Pauleen & Yoong (2001) studied how facilitators of virtual teams were able to build and maintain these relationships. They found that prompt communication was key stating "The facilitators in this study have clear expectations that e-mail, as well as other communication messages such as voice-mail, will be replied to in a prompt manner. They believe that a lack of timeliness can lead to poor communication, the creation of ill will, and an undermining of relationships" (p. 16).

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.