Teaching Strategies and Techniques

Whiteboards as an Alternative to Discussion Forums

Online teachers generally assume that student discussion and collaboration should occur in a learning management system’s (LMS’s) discussion forum. But for certain uses, online whiteboards work better than the LMS due to their fundamentally different design.

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What Is the Purpose of Online Discussion?

Nearly all online faculty use discussion in their courses, often simply because everyone else does or their institution’s course development model assumes they do. But like any course content or activity, we need to ask about its purpose. There is no law that all online

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Google Earth icon on a smartphone screen

Using Google Earth in the Classroom

Google Earth is a powerful tool for linking curriculum to the real world. It can add a sense of place to historical events, and by creating customized maps, teachers and students can add pins to locations, providing additional information in the form of text, audio,

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Ways to Improve Interaction among Students in Online Courses

Have you ever wondered how to structure or strengthen a requirement for students in your online courses to interact with each other in meaningful ways? Perhaps you assigned discussion forum posts and responses or assigned team work only to notice that interactions devolve into superficial

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Addressing Common Issues with Online Group Work

It’s well known that group work benefits the learning process but also that learners can dread the idea of doing group projects. So, as online instructors, what can we do about this situation? Research shows that group projects in online courses are fraught with mixed

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