Emory College Strategies for Online Teaching

Author Information Conklin, Heather C., Tuten, J. Terrell, and VanderMeulen, Matt Institution(s) or Organization(s) Where EP Occurred: Ashford University Effective Practice Abstract/Summary Abstract/Summary of Effective Practice: Ashford University's use of cutting-edge, web-based, dynamic rubrics in eight online writing-intensive courses has improved the efficiency and effectiveness of grading, feedback provision, and assessment.

Dynamic criteria mapping (DCM) is a way to develop local standards. Teachers work with colleagues and students to build evaluation criteria. This is a link to a succinct definition developed by the Writing Program at UMass-Amherst, where they practice DCM.

This paper describes a team based approach for on-line course development- focusing on team roles in course design using theoretical frameworks to guide development and evaluation. Team roles are identified using the Quality Matters rubric.

These guidelines focus specifically on hybrid course design and instruction beginning with Fundamental Questions, moving through Best Practices and also covering pitfalls and practices to avoid.

Hey, Ginny, I liked this post. It is bulleted and right to the point. It also brings up something that concerns me for our students, specifically tidbits for what to do (and NOT do) when students are enrolled in multiple hybrid courses. Thanks

This is a very helpful resource, as it is presented for the novice learner and has lots of basic details that I'm trying to make sense of. Thanks for sharing.

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.

Eight different views of the design process are described with the purpose of broadening the practitioner's concept of instructional design. Views both internal and external to instructional design are considered, so that instructional designers can see the traditions of their field in the context of design activity in other professional fields.

Winona State University - Winona Minnesota has made it their mission to collect rubrics and make them available to all.

Thank you, Judy. I'm considering using rubrics for the first time and this is going to be a great resource.

by Mike Acedo Over the years, many of us have personally experienced the growth of technology in today's classrooms. Instead of taking notes, students are now occupied by surfing the Internet, scrolling through Facebook, and messaging their friends on their smart phones, tablets, and laptops.

The author discusses the theory behind online discussions, as well as the potential value of - and problems associated with - online discussions. Some excerpts: "The argument I offer here is that saying an online discussion is a worse version of an IRL discussion is like saying an apple is a worse version of an orange. Disappointment with online discussions because they are not like IRL discussion is like being disappointed with an apple because it is a bad orange." ... "In an IRL discussion, students look, speak, and listen with multiple objects. In online discussion, like during a lecture, students sit and stare at a single object as well: but it is a computer rather than a person speaking. The lecturer is the computer. This lecturer is a screen with a keyboard and includes a complex series of frames within which the student types sentences in varying sequences. By this I am not only talking about video lectures which students watch, but rather more perceptually. In a lecture, the lecturer is the sole object of attention. There is only one object of attention: bracketing the complex material engaged with in the screen, it remains true that students exclusively engage with the screen when learning online. Students in online courses stare at a computer when learning online the same way they would stare at a lecturer speaking, focusing their attention on a single object. At a lecture, it's a person. Online, it's the computer."... "In any case, online discussions are still discussions. It would be a mistake to say all we do during online discussion is stare intensely at a computer. Most of the discussions in my online courses occur asynchronously on discussion boards. On these written discussion boards, for example, we read and write responsively. The whole situation of online discussion is therefore more akin, in this respect, to written correspondence."

From the conclusion: "Participating well in online discussions might be more like writing a good letter or having a good phone conversation, as opposed to a good spoken kind comment in an IRL discussion. We should not expect online discussions to be anything at all like IRL discussions. They are categorically different. In other words, being disappointed with online discussions because they are not like IRL discussions is like being disappointed with apples because they are not oranges." "In planning online courses, generating online assignments, and creating materials for online teaching, it is important to remember that online discussions require students to focus intense attention on a machine, and therefore compels them to cathect and introject that machine. Independently of the fluidity of your module and software, students transfer meanings onto their machines during the learning process rather than a person. While the introjection of machines is an interesting opportunity for further educational research, as an instructor, plan for student participation with this in mind: they are interacting with a machine and not people. An online discussion is more like a computer's lecture than an IRL discussion, no matter how interactive."

Thanks for this, Leah. Given that students are allowed no more than 6 online courses during their career at Emory, I am guessing most typically they are taking one or two at the same time? I cannot imagine taking three, honestly. Unlike for Maymester, when students are only allowed to take one, we cannot assume to have their full academic attention, then. Anyway, I am afraid to make them do too much or too little. It's great to see the variety of online courses that are already running, by the way.

Although I am not completely enamored of the final proposed model, which I think oversimplifies the very issues their analysis distinguishes, I do find this article useful in giving names to a number of factors we have found ourselves discussing: e.g., learner-interface interaction, transaction v. interaction, interaction v. interactivity, provocateur v. academician. Useful for our ongoing conversation.

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.

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.

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 2002 essay by Wilson and Peterson may be a bit dated, but it is one of the few broadly reflective essays I found on the anthropology of online communities. It is not a "how to" for online teaching, but I think an occasionally more critical, reflective piece can be very useful both for understanding our place in broader social processes related to online learning and in piercing through some of the enthusiastic corporate-talk through which these technologies are presented by our universities. I have included the abstract below. The URL is to the JSTOR site, which you probably need to access through your Emory account. I was not sure how to add a link here that would get you in directly, and that is something I need to follow up on with Leah. Abstract: Information and communication technologies based on the Internet have enabled the emergence of new sorts of communities and communicative practices-phenomena worthy of the attention of anthropological researchers. De- spite early assessments of the revolutionary nature of the Internet and the enormous transformations it would bring about, the changes have been less dramatic and more embedded in existing practices and power relations of everyday life. This review ex- plores researchers' questions, approaches, and insights within anthropology and some relevant related fields, and it seeks to identify promising new directions for study. The general conclusion is that the technologies comprising the Internet, and all the text and media that exist within it, are in themselves cultural products. Anthropology is thus well suited to the further investigation of these new, and not so new, phenomena.

This article talks specifically about the applications of the ADDIE model and the Dick & Carey Model for teaching about culture and intercultural communication. While the authors talk about an English as a Second Language course in Vietnam, their instructional design can be used for any course looks at cultural norms, including languages, linguistics, anthropology, sociology, and human health. Also, while their plans are not specific to an online course, their ideas transfer to an online or hybrid course quite easily. I was really pleased to find this article, especially as it supports my own ideas about using a hybrid of these two models to teach about intercultural communication. It makes concrete the theoretical assignments and organizational tips that I had in mind. I know I will come back to it often.