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"A student survey instrument was created that captures student perceptions of the instructional characteristics of their course, their learning, and their satisfaction with the course. The data collected from the student survey was merged with data from institutional student information systems (e.g., demographics and course grade)."

Article about a study of online class sizes: The bottom line is that larger class sizes are ok for courses with CLOs on the lower levels of Bloom's taxonomy, and smaller (s.

"an average student who participates in online discussion will score 25 percentile points higher on course exams than an average student who participates in classroom discussion"

"Specifically, students who reported being highly engaged connected ideas from other courses, changed their understanding of a topic or concept, found connections between their learning and societal problems, and had fun. . . . "What students in online classes seek is connection--to oneself, to others, and/or to course material."

A resource for translating seat time and credit hour requirements to online activities from Penn State

Excerpt: "Effective online STEM courses integrated active learning activities, interactive engagement strategies, and robust assessments. In particular, assessment design significantly impacted students' self-perceived learning and learning satisfaction for students of all populations. . . . Online STEM instructors are strongly encouraged to utilize the Universal Design for Learning principles."

Though this post refers to in-class activities, the techniques are readily transferable to online teaching and learning.

Key finding: "A strong majority of those who have taught online, 71 percent, say doing so has helped them develop skills and practices that have improved their teaching both online and in person. More than seven in 10 say online teaching has enabled them to think more critically about how to engage students with content, better use multimedia content and better use the learning management system."

Interesting article about how you might go about incorporating a virtual international exchange (VIE) experience into an online course; has the potential to significantly impact student learning in many ways; this article focuses primarily on language courses, but it could easily be adapted to other disciplines. (One of OSU's goals is to increase the international exchange opportunities students receive - this could potentially become one component of achieving this.)

An article shared with me by Aaron Lewis (COB); very timely; related to how online instructors can encourage civil conversations in their classrooms

Summarizes legal basis for accessible online educational materials and provides tips and key links to aid instructors in moving toward Universal Design for Learning.

"Students who completed the online homework activities performed significantly better on a common comprehensive final exam than students who did not participate. . . . These findings suggest responsive online homework in general, and a responsive-adaptive learning system driven by knowledge space theory in particular, has a significant positive impact on student performance in the first-quarter general chemistry course."

"The findings suggest that a new role, the life skill promoter, has emerged. Furthermore, analysis of the remaining roles (pedagogical, designer, social, technical and managerial) showed that: (i) online instructors are, first and foremost, pedagogues; (ii) the design of the particular online program influences the pedagogical and designer roles and; (iii) the managerial role has declined in importance over the years due to the development of more intuitive and transparent online scenarios from the beginning of the course onward."

"To humanize online teaching is to create a situation where strangers can meet by the campfire, discuss what is important to them, and depart with the sense of connection, despite the darkness, and a feeling of community. It is that feeling of authenticity."

As online courses continue to gain in popularity at colleges and universities throughout the country, knowledge about the effectiveness of this mode of instruction, relative to that of traditional, face-to-face courses, becomes increasingly important. (An update to the 2010 DOE report showing no significant difference).

"One of the biggest misunderstandings about online learning is that it has to be limited to things that can be done in front of a computer screen. Instead, we need to reimagine online courses as something that can enable the interplay between offline activities and digital augmentation. . . . We need to focus . . . more on finding ways to robustly capture evidence of offline learning that can be validated and critiqued at scale by peers and experts online."

"The case for learning out loud extends beyond the development of effective communication skills. An asynchronous, multimodal learning environment that invites students to verbally converse with one another has been shown to improve the social and emotional elements of learning." (also see http://www.slideshare.net/brocansky/learning-outloudsept2014)