Category: Course Design

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 ...

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 ...

More and more instructors are turning to blogging as an alternative to LMS-based discussion. The instructor assigns each student a blog where they are expected to make postings. This shift fundamentally changes the dynamics of ...

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 ...

Participating in team projects offers students the chance to develop interpersonal communication skills (Figueira & Leal, 2013), build relationships with classmates, and increase the level of collective competencies as each group member brings something different ...

The online classroom can sometimes feel like a lonely place due to a lack of presence of the instructor and other students. This lack of presence can negatively affect learning and lead to student attrition. ...

Project-based learning is a hot topic in education, but most faculty do not understand how to incorporate it into their teaching. The principle is simple: Students learn best when they learn in the process of ...

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 ...

A person will attempt to complete a task in an unfamiliar environment until frustration hits a critical level, according to user experience research. Frustrated online learners may abandon assignments or drop courses. This is why ...

When Annie Hough-Everage, professor of education at Brandman University, surveyed her graduate-level online students about what factors helped and hindered their learning in the online classroom, she was surprised by their teacher-centered rather than learner-centered ...