Icebreakers can help promote the important social component of online learning. Common icebreakers have students share information about themselves with the idea of creating a bit of conversation and perhaps provide fodder for course-related discussions ...
Autonomy is a key ingredient of motivation. Students are motivated by the ability to choose how they accomplish their learning goals. However, not all students are used to having autonomy, which is why it's important ...
A well-organized syllabus is essential for any online course, particularly large online courses. Peggy Semingson, associate professor of literacy studies at the University of Texas at Arlington, teaches online courses to groups of up to ...
A common approach to generating discussion in an online course is to have students post a response to a prompt and then respond to the posts of several of their classmates. While this approach can ...
New learning technologies offer many potential benefits to online learners, but these same technologies can create an additional burden for students who lack the requisite digital literacies to use them effectively. The need to learn ...
How much of an online course should be standardized? It's a question that has important implications for institutions, instructors, and students in the online space. In an interview with Online Classroom, Melanie Kasparian, Online Experiential ...
Central Washington University offers an information technology administrative management program in an online format aimed at place- and time-bound working adults. The following are three ways the program works to improve student retention.
Students enter online courses with various levels of knowledge, experience, needs, and expectations. It's important to get a sense of what students already know in order to provide the appropriate levels of support and challenge.
Clearly written goals and objectives serve several important functions in an online course. They provide students a “successful pathway to learning,” indicate to the instructor teaching points to hit when teaching the course, and suggest ...
Online course content should be challenging, but the course itself should be straightforward and include “purposeful redundancy” to aid navigation and provide multiple ways to learn, says Michelle Manganaro, who teaches online education and communications ...
Icebreakers can help promote the important social component of online learning. Common icebreakers have students share information about themselves with the idea of creating a bit of conversation and perhaps provide fodder for course-related discussions later in the course.
Curt Bonk, professor of instructional systems technology at Indiana University, has gone beyond this traditional approach. “I've gone from that social icebreaker to being a little more course-focused now in having people post their commitments to the course and their expectations within the course,” he says. “If they post their commitments and expectations, there's less likelihood they're going to drop, because everybody has read their commitments. They want to save face.
“Everyone wants to save face. When you've posted your commitment [to the course], you've enacted a plan, a strategy for success. You've set that goal, that end state.”
In addition to getting students to think and interact about why they're in the course, Bonk brings in former students to talk about what they've accomplished in the course. These former students often say things like “Dr. Bonk's class was really hard that first week, but hang around after the first week. It lightens up.”
“If you hear from peers—not just instructors—you are more likely to commit and succeed,” Bonk says.