Emory College Strategies for Online Teaching

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,

Online Learning Journal Volume 20, Issue 1 March 2016 FREE PDF download for members Volume 20, Issue 1 - March 2016 Introduction Peter Shea, University at Albany, State University of New York With the announcement of our latest issue of Online Learning we report the achievement of a significant milestone.

The most up-to-date information and research of online learning and teaching.

Online teaching redefines the faculty member's schedule. The feeling of being a 24/7 professor can lead to frustration. Managing one's time as an online teacher can be a challenge. As the popularity of online education continues to grow, teaching faculty need to develop effective time management behaviors to be efficient and not just busy.

Thank you for sharing this! I find the tips all very useful. As one example, I am going to give the students a syllabus quiz, for sure. When I took the Zaption quiz Leah prepared during M1, I was a bit surprised by how much information my brain did not retain reading through the course guidelines. The quiz was obviously helpful.

Interesting article using powerpoint to enhance unfolding case studies for nursing education

Emory's own McKenna Rose explains how to integrate Infographics into the curriculum.

Teacher resources and professional development across the curriculum

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).

Curtis and Lawson (2001) looked for "evidence of good quality interactions among students who are not present in the one physical site from data obtained from students' online exchanges" (p. 21). They focused on the "depth of on-task activity" (p. 21) in an asynchronous situation, which they argue is the most common form of online courses, of a small collaborative learning group. They found that "the analysis of participants' postings reveals many of the behaviors associated with collaborative learning in face-to face situations" (p. 29). However, "the students spontaneously demonstrated a need also to use synchronous communication" (p. 24). Some did this via text or email, often when they did not agree with another student and some organized synchronous chat sessions. This shows that "there is a need to incorporate among the asynchronous interactions…opportunities for real-time interactions among students" (p. 29).

I found this article to be very helpful in providing a sense that it will be possible to control time use when teaching on line. It gives great tips on how to overcome the feeling that online teaching will be a 24/7 class rather than one that meets TTh 10-11:15 in White Hall 208! I like this one a lot.

This article seems a good (and brief) overview of issues we may encounter transitioning from face-to-face to online teaching. It is not limited to the question of workload, but it does report that online teaching takes up to 40% more time.

The 40% is for first time, and should decrease when we teach again.

This article has a follow up major piece in the June 24 issue of the Chronicle of Higher Education. I cannot send that one to you because it is "locked." However, this piece describes what two very famous psychologists, Gosling and Pennebaker, are doing at UT Austin with online psychology classes. They describe here a synchronous massive online course in which (as now described in the Chronicle, they have 1500! students registered. Twenty four students are invited to attend F2F classes twice per week and the rest are online live. This SMOC, as they term it, allows faculty to interact live with an audience while teaching but affords huge enrollments. This seems to me to be a way of maintaining the "feel" of F2F while benefiting from the usefulness of technology. This is a very interesting development and, with these two psychologists being so well known, teachers of large lecture classes will take notice. I would love to explore the idea further!

This is pretty amazing! I wondered to what extent this was also a flipped class - did students do their readings and watch lectures before coming to class, and in the synchronous sessions, mostly focus on solving problems through group discussion? It seems to require a lot of technological and instructional support: TV studio, laptops, apps, and tutors serving as group advisors, but the better learning outcome may make it all worth it! Of course, at 500 students a class, it could save cost in a big way, too. So, are we all prepared to face the camera? :)

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.

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.

Looking back on ID, here's another fun article on the topic, with lots of examples and rubrics. Article summary: "This section deals with creating effective instruction through careful planning and wise curricular choices. Materials are designed to be used by any educator - kindergarten through college; and novice or veteran."

Not an academic article, but a page to find several reflections on heutagogy. Everyone needs a community of practice!

Thanks Susan, I found these short and informal essays very helpful. I keep circling around this material feeling as if I cannot quite pinpoint why, even though I agree in essence with much that is said, I am resistant to the terminology and sense that this is a new revelation in educational theory rather than an articulation of what many educators have wanted to achieve for a long time.

Article summary: "This content is meant to do two things. It will, for the uninitiated, summarize the origins of heutagogy and the theories from which it was derived. At the same time we will have a look at more recent work and thinking from authors around the globe and see what they have discovered through using or thinking about heutagogical principles. The main theme is that people are naturally very efficient learners and that we can more effectively make use of this fact in our current education and training systems."

"Technology integration is the use of technology resources -- computers, mobile devices like smartphones and tablets, digital cameras, social media platforms and networks, software applications, the Internet, etc. -- in daily classroom practices, and in the management of a school." I found this article helpful largely because it just reiterated that we need to set educational goals and then choose technology which is helpful, not the other way round.