Instructors in face-to-face courses can roughly gauge how well students understand the material by facial expressions and audience response systems. This immediate and informal feedback enables them to adjust their teaching in real-time. But this is not the case in asynchronous courses. Students have to
I am a political science professor. And we are in the middle of a hotly contested presidential election campaign. My classes are going about how you’d imagine: students are excited, sometimes talking over one another, and occasionally throwing out wild hypotheticals.
Many research studies have underscored the importance of teaching presence in asynchronous online courses, with the benefits including higher student satisfaction, reduced isolation, and enhanced emotional engagement (Oyarzun et al., 2018).
The Hyflex teaching model has been a polarizing concept since Brian Beatty introduced it at San Francisco State University. On the one hand, it offers students the flexibility to attend class in person or at a distance. On the other, many instructors who have tried
There can be a certain inertia to teaching online, especially asynchronously. You and your students never see each other, don’t feel very connected, and by the middle of the semester may have unintentionally begun a slow slide toward phoning it in.
Whether you love it or hate it, online higher education is here to stay. In the 2022–2023 academic year, more than half of all college students in the US enrolled in at least one online class (Coffey 2024). Of course, this is much lower than
For online faculty, I think it’s more important than ever to be conspicuously human in the classroom, finding ways to lean into the distinctive capacity for emotional engagement and meaningful interactions that each of us brings to the table. But I’ve
For me, the move from in-person teaching to asynchronous online teaching took place over decades, but it still presented a challenge that threatened fundamental aspects of my identity as an educator: the dynamic exchange of energy between me and my students and the importance of
Traditional slide decks for hosting content in live videoconferences have the major drawback that the content is static and fixed ahead of time. Students can only watch passively and respond through the chat box on the side, and their comments are easy to miss if
We associate artificial intelligence with text-generating systems like ChatGPT. But AI can also produce content in a variety of digital formats, including images, videos, and audio. These tools allow instructors and instructional designers to create custom content that enriches their online courses without high-level technical
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