These three different types of engagement (instructor-student, student-student, student-content) are essential for any meaningful learning in an online course. An online course can feel very lonely and isolated. Working to foster these different types of engagment can help mitigate that feeling.

This is one area that I feel like I could do a better job in my online course design. Many of the tools that I select are natively more accessible (speech to text, text to speech, etc) however, I don't call out explicitly those accessiblity features. This is one area I woudl ike to improve in.

I think having a wide range of online instructional strategies is so improtant. An online course can easily feel very repetative. I know that is feedback that I have recieved for online courses that I have facitilated. Having a wide range of strategies for allowing students to interact with the content is importatant.

I used to use a lot of checklists and feedback stems for peer evaluation. I found that these helped to make the quality of the feedback that students gave to one another better.

I have mixed feelings about contracts. They can be useful for motivating students, but they reinforce this "points race" mentality that some students have rather than having students focus on mastery.

I do really like portfolios because they require a lot of reflection from students. Students really have to have mastered content at a really deep level so they know whether or not their work is a great example of the mastery of a standard or concept.

This really sums up two of the most important aspects of formative assessment for me: formative assessment should happen during the course of instruction and teachers should make adjustments to their instruction based on students performance on formative assessment.

This is the single most important part of the learning progression learning that we have done. When you find the sub-skills that are needed for students to get to the large skill, you know where and what formative assessments need to be built in. It also helps you stay focused on what the formative assessment should be actually assessing. This helps you keep the formative assessments short and focused and makes the feedback manageable.

This is a really great practice. Write the learning intentions (targets) in student-friendly language and then provide students with a model of mastery (an non mastery).

I totally agree with this point. The rubric is only useful to the student if they understand the performance indicators. That is why it is so important to put the rubric in student-friendly language.

I have had this experience with student writing. I feel like when I give them a rubric, I get back cookie-cutter essays that sound and look the same.

This is one of the most important supports that any teacher trying something new can have: an administrator that understands learning is not a quiet process. Learning requires students to talk and collaborate and the room will not be silent.

I love this idea! It is so much planning up front, but it allows you to have small-group or individual conferences. I feel like this is much more meaningful to student learning.

This is very true! I have tried giving students a very wide open option of what they could do, but that was paralyzing for students. Students someetimees need a small list of options or some coaching around a topic or idea of their own to make it viable.

I love this passage so much - the mass customized learning and reference to Orwellian doublespeak are fantastic. I do think that personal learning does become somewhat bastardized when you focus so heavily on the platform, or the program, or the technology that is going to make thee learning happen. That is not personalized learning, that is algorithmized learning or learning that measures me against some predetermined set of criteria but doesn't take into account what I am interested in, what dispositions I have, etc. It is kind of a double edged sword though becuase in order to efficiently make learning personal (given our current human resources constraints in our current models of education - 1 teacher, 31 - 150 kids, prepping for multiple classes/subjects) you need to have some kind of technology to help support.

I think this is really interesting becuase I never really thought about how necessary it is to have a basic understanding of web design when one is an online instuctor. I guess it makes sense becuase you have to figure out ways to visually represent content to your audience. It seems as though the best online instuctors wouldn't necessarily be those with the best understanding of threir content, but rather the best understanding of how to communicate that content in an effective, visual manner.

I think this is a really important expereince for an online teacher to have, and maybe one that is taken for granted. Online teacher need to have the experence of what it is like to be an online learner to understand what works in online instruction and what doesn't.