I have been reading "The Online Teaching Survivial Guide" and it does a nice job of talking about these three types of interactions and how to build those into a course.

Module Introductions and mini-lessons (text, video, podcast) Announcments that remind, coach, suggest, and inspire Explanations and interactions with students via email, forums, and live events.

Opportunities for small group work that encourages student to student interaction could include problem-solving, gaming, or collaborative writing. One other thing that the book mentioned is to start student-student interaction casually. This allows people to get comfortable with each other and the processes of working as a group without having to wrestle with new content.

Climate and culture is important when asking students to engage in peer assessment.

Modeling and practicing feedback is critical. Otherwise it is very easy for people to provide very surface level feedback that doesn't give the learner much to go on in regards to improving. The learner gets frustrated because the information isn't usefule and the person providing the feedback because they don't see any changes.

I think that providing instruction and guidance in how to peer grade is key to ensuring that peer grading has meaning to the person receiving the grade.

By giving students the langugage to talk about thinking we open the door to them reflecting on their thinking and eventually refining it.

A writing assignment that is part of an authentic learning opportunity that the student chose to participate in might decrease the emphasis on simply meeting the criteria of a rubruc.

I tend to use the "multiply a dimension by 2" method of weighting grades. In writing a particularly like this because it allows you to address things like conventions, but at the same time emphasize orther aspects of writing.

White space on a page can make the really important content stand out. My issue is that sometimes, I have a difficult time finding images that allow me to hit the "right" amount of white space and the text I want/need to have on the page.

When I'm looking for something, the logo or branding is so important to me. I want to know immediately if I'm in the right spot. Logos help me do this. When I see the logo I'm looking for or that I expect to see, it puts me at ease, because I know I'm in the "right" spot.

Buttons or menus across the top of a webpage are very helpful when it comes to navigating a website. One issue I've had is that sometimes my buttons make sense to me, but to the new visitor the language I use to explain where it is taking the visitor doesn't make sense. Take for example, on our website we have something called "Instructor Center". This is the place our instructors who teach PD for us go to get information. To me this makes complete sense. That being said, I know that we consistently get questions about where to find instructor information. The label, "instructor center" doesn't resonate with the visitor. I have seen websites where there is a brief description appears on the screen when you roll over the button, but before you click. I'm not sure if these things help or if they add clutter.

I work with a lot of individuals/groups who want to take their f2f training to a online/self-paced lesson/training. I have had a difficult time explaining how content needs to look different online. The comparative lesson plan/template looks like a great way to make these differences explicit to the content experts and help them begin to see how they may need to adjust their content to fit the way in which it is being delievered.

While lesson planning may take some additional time upfront, does it streamline the time and effort it takes to storyboard and at the same time turn out a higher quality product? Thus, reducing the need to go back and "fix" things?

How much overlap should one expect to see between the content in the lesson plan and what goes on the storyboard? As I work on the lesson plan, I can see myself starting to write out the content for the actually storyboard and eventually getting lost in all of the content and loosing sight of the lesson plan.