Emory College Strategies for Online Teaching

This article applies Bloom's Learning Taxonomy to online teaching, suggesting concrete activities to promote each phase of student learning.

Love concrete activities :)

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.

Very short, clear and cute video about the principles of instruction by Dr. Merrill

snapchat on how to apply Bloom's Taxonomy

Universal Design in the ESL classroom

I like this list, Jane, though I feel the author Kregg Strehorn could have elaborated on some of the suggestions to explain more clearly what is meant and what a particular method entails. Maybe there was a strict word limit to which Strehorn had to adhere. In any case, some of the ideas are very interesting but also seem to be very time-consuming and potentially confusing. Don't get me wrong, I think it's wonderful that Stehorn reads and records some of the texts they are using in the class, reads and records and transcribes lectures, gives students different assignment choices, writes detailed class outlines and shares them with students, etc. All of these ideas make sense to me, but how do you have time as a teacher (and in my/our case instructor and full-time staff member) to do all that, unless you teach the same course over and over again? I am a great supporter and believer in universal design; plus, online classes in particular are, almost by nature, using a range of tools, thus serving students with different needs. Yet, Strehorn should discuss the amount of work involved in creating this course and should also address students' responses to this course as well as potential pitfalls in terms of student assessment. Perhaps Strehorn has done so in a different place.

Great comparison of some of the models with application

It seems to me that instructional design and course design models presume that every student in the class has to pursue the same objectives and should be taught in the same fashion; yet, as universal design ideas suggest, we may need to occasionally use different assignments and allow different learning approaches. And maybe, to take this idea a step further, learning in general should be personalized and course designs become more flexible. At least that's what some educational pioneers from Silicon Valley have declared. What follows is the introductory passage of a very recent New Yorker article, an article which is ultimately quite skeptical of the new models and of the role of technology in the classroom: "Seen from the outside, AltSchool Brooklyn, a private school that opened in Brooklyn Heights last fall, does not look like a traditional educational establishment. There is no playground attached, no crossing guard at the street corner, and no crowd of children blocking the sidewalk in the morning."

As the article goes on to highlight, the founders of the company AltSchool intend to break with traditional educational models. In the older model, the founder Max Ventilla asserts, the teacher is "an artisanal lesson planner on the one hand and disciplinary babysitter on the other hand." Not just that, the teacher also creates, following Common Core for example, standards and objectives for his or her class; one teacher quoted in the article claims that "by looking for standards to pull everyone up we are forgetting to address what the individual needs." This is where the AltSchool idea intervenes. This new school's approach "acknowledges and adapts to the differences among students: their abilities, their interests, their cultural backgrounds." How so? By monitoring students and collecting as much data about each student as possible, thus personalizing plans and projects for students (sound familiar? Ventilla worked for Google before founding AltSchool). While I think the idea of personalized learning is compelling, I also read with interest about the mixed results of AltSchool and other similar institutions - plus, the schools seem to be very utilitarian, focusing on what the student purportedly needs to succeed in the workplace (languages are supposedly rather useless, for example, because everyone will carry an electronic, speaking dictionary in 20 years from now). On a slightly different - and final - note, I was also intrigued by a quote from Daniel Willingham, education scholar at UV: "The most common thing I hear is that when you adopt technology you have to write twice the lesson plans. You have the one you use with the technology, and you have the backup one you use when the technology doesn't work that day." Congratulations! If you read this sentence, you have survived the challenge of reading this epic post.

Here are some more Classroom Assessment Technique resources!

Yes, yes, I know, the title suggests that this webtext is only relevant for a few people, perhaps only Jane and myself. However, if you browse this webtext - it is indeed not an article, but like all work published in Kairos, a multimedia artifact or well, a webtext - you will find a lot of important insights on student-professor-staff interactions in an online environment. The webtext highlights, for example, the importance of the lack of physical cues in an online class, a facet of online instruction that may necessitate a higher awareness of the effect our formulations, terms, and even typed characters can have in any written communication such as blog posts, emails, chats, and messages. We thus learn quite a bit about communicative techniques and etiquette in an online class (and in a virtual environment more generally). Another webtext in the same Kairos issue reflects upon teaching graduate students how to teach online: http://kairos.technorhetoric.net/20.1/praxis/bourelle-et-al/pedagogycourse.html. Leah, this webtext might be interesting for you - but it should be interesting for others as well because it also addresses questions about assignments and exercises in online classes. By the way, Kairos is an important open-access online journal that has existed since 1996. It publishes scholarship that "examines digital and multimodal composing practices, promoting work that enacts its scholarly argument through rhetorical and innovative uses of new media." ("The Kairos Style Guide", n.d.)

This article gives 6 practical tips to manage your time when teaching online

Thanks for sharing this, Simona. Skimming the article you highlighted and a few of the others in the journal, I noticed that some of the themes and suggestions were similar to the ones in the texts assigned by Leah (manage the students and their interactions actively and constantly/consistently, be empathic and explicit); I also appreciate the user-friendliness of these articles, as they include plenty of bullet-points for the busy reader ... Finally, I like that this journal is indeed international, including views on online teaching from around the world. Would be great if we could learn more about how online education functions elsewhere.

Researchers are saying the most pervasive learning disability in schools--and the major challenge for UDL--is emotional--changing the perspective of tuned out students.

High school students talk about what teachers do and don't do to engage them in learning.

Piece from _Kairos_, a flagship journal in writing studies, about how principles of universal design can make writing pedagogy "more flexible, more inclusive, and more challenging."

Great storage area for many videos and materials in the CAST domain.

@Erin Mooney

This article breaks down some terms and nuances of online teaching that would be helpful when designing a course.

I like the way this gives a lot of information but by using bullets makes it a quick and useful read.

This article looks at how Chickering and Gamson's Seven Principles of Good Practice in Undergraduate Education (1987) can be applied to the online classroom.

Here are some tips and tools for implementing universal design into online and blended courses.