Emory College Strategies for Online Teaching

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 is a link to an article written by a Debbie Morrison who is an instructional designer trained at George Washington University. The two salient points made in this article are that students want group activities that are meaningful to them, in other words a project about a subject, in which they have a passion or at least strong interest. The other point addressed avoiding "social loafing" which was defined as individuals believing that less work is required on their part because of they are in a group. Some of her suggestions included a group charter and keeping the group size small, such as three participants per group.

This is an unpublished research article on a model for group work in an online or blended course environment.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.

The University of Toronto performed a study on the relationship to class size, class participation and grades. It included 25 courses with 25 instructors and 341 students. The conclusion was that students performed well in small online classes and that performance, defined as participation and grades, declined proportionally as class size increased. The study also looked at small group activities and found that large class performance improved by using small group activities. It also emphasized the importance of the software used for the small group discussions.

Mobile Learning: A Designer's Guide to Fighting Learner Distraction One of the biggest issues in eLearning is distractions. The brain is constantly bombarded with stray thoughts even when users exert great self-control. The problem is yet more pronounced in mLearning, as devices themselves may cause distractions such as phone calls, email alerts, and the knowledge that the user could easily be doing something different.

I follow this blog although it is primarily for course design. In any case, this topic seemed relevant to our course design assignment.

"Competency-based" education appears to be this year's answer to America's higher education challenges, judging from this week's news in Washington. Interesting opinion piece by John Ebersole.

Perhaps just another "hack"

Actually, Leah, I really like this! I had no idea about the audio commenting -- I was using 'jing', but this is better. Thanks for sharing this. Peggy

January 2014 Tracking Online Education in the U.S. report

Tinto, V. (2003). Learning better together: The impact of learning communities on student success. Higher Education monograph series, 1(8). The theme for M5 is "community, presence and interactions." This piece by Tinto is a pretty quick read and although it doesn't address online learning in particular, I thought it was appropriate as it emphasizes the idea that it takes a community of learners to make effective learning happen. He discusses 3 things all learning communities have in common: shared knowledge, shared knowing and shared responsibility (which really struck me as we start our group project).

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!

This article addresses practical concerns about online discussions. It stresses the importance of having good discussion questions that are clearly linked to the learning objectives. There are also some good assessment tips.

I like the title, but I couldn't access it -- sign in required??

Yes, Peggy, the article comes from one of the main databases through the Emory Library.

This article had some great ideas for meaningful online collaborative work.

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.

The survey sought to dig deeper on the quality question, asking respondents which aspects of credit-bearing online courses they think can be better than, or at least equal to, those of in-person courses. Faculty members say they think online courses are the same quality as or better than face-to-face classes in terms of grading and communicating about grading, and in communicating with the college about logistical and other issues. And professors were split 50/50 (the same or better vs. lower quality) on online courses' "ability to deliver the necessary content to meet learning objectives."

"Much of the faculty consternation in the last year about how institutions (and, increasingly, state legislators) want to use online education has revolved around the perceived quality of online offerings (although there are undoubtedly undercurrents of concern about whether colleges and universities will use technology to diminish the role of, and ultimately the need for, instructors)." Read more: http://www.insidehighered.com/news/survey/survey-faculty-attitudes-technology#ixzz38WwyClaW Inside Higher Ed I think it's interesting that indicators of 'quality' that were considered important (by faculty) included whether or not the online course was offered for credit. But, there are plenty of for-credit courses offered at accredited colleges in a traditional format that are pretty....bad. And I think that the EFOT course has given us the clear indication that online courses almost need instructors MORE than traditional f2f courses.

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 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 article addresses barriers to the accessibility of information from state health department websites (rapidly becoming go-to resources for people and practitioners) across 4 dimensions: readability, disability access, non-English translation and privacy / security. The authors state, "These results raise fundamental issues of justice and equality in public health...In the meantime, inaccessible websites hurt the underprivileged and make it difficult to justify the investment in technology that has occurred in state governments...." I thought there was something for everyone in our cohort here.