If you’re new to teaching online, the first week can be a little overwhelming. It can also be hard to tell if your students are doing anything until they start posting. Below are a few tips to help you get started. You may also want to refer to our Getting Ready for a New Semester post.
Gauging Student Engagement: Use the Performance Dashboard to check on student access to the course. If a student has not accessed the course in the first week, contact them immediately (by phone if necessary). It is possible that students are not using Lesley email or have neglected to link their private email to their Lesley account.
Managing Discussions: Familiarize yourself with an efficient workflow for monitoring, responding to, and assessing discussions or other group activities. A common work-flow for discussion management is:
Check in briefly each day to monitor activity. If students are not on-task, use the Announcements tool to guide them back on track. If private communications are necessary, use course email.
Consider your role in discussions. Keep in mind that too many posts by the instructor could discourage student interaction. On the other hand, do let students know that you are monitoring the discussion, even if your presence via posting isn’t necessary.
When reviewing discussions in detail, use the “Collect” tool to view all the text at one time. You also have the option to print the discussion text.
Use a printout of the students’ names, along with the text of the discussion board (electronic or paper printout), to assess the quality of interaction and postings.
For additional assistance and tutorials please visit our website or contact eLIS@lesley.edu
Atomic Learning has created the 12 Days of Learning, a series of articles designed to kick off resolutions to keep learning in the new year. We thought this was a great idea and have decided borrow (shamelessly steal) it and do our own. Today’s post looks at planning and designing an online course.
When designing an online course there are several key elements you will need to consider. You will need to reimagine your course activities focusing on pedagogy first and technology second. It’s important to align your learning outcomes to your assessments and activities and pay careful attention to the selection of technology to achieve those outcomes without having it become about the technology.
Planning Your online course
This video from the University of New South Wales in Australia walks you through some useful strategies to begin planning your online course.
Overview of the Course Design Process
This VoiceThread provides a brief overview of the eLIS course design process we use with Lesley faculty.
Atomic Learning has created the 12 Days of Learning, a series of articles designed to kick off resolutions to keep learning in the new year. We thought this was a great idea and have decided borrow (shamelessly steal) it and do our own. Today’s post (Day 5, if you’re counting) looks at Skype for Business.
Skype for Business is an online meeting tool where you can have class meetings, ad hoc conversations, advising or tutoring sessions or do group work. It includes text-based instant messages, audio and video chat, the ability to share Powerpoint presentations or even your desktop to demo applications or processes. There’s also a whiteboard for quick collaboration and a polling tool for rapid feedback in larger groups.
With new technology developments in education constantly increasing and changing, how do you keep up with the latest technology trends for higher education? How do you decide which technologies to implement and how to do this effectively? Where can you find examples of what other universities and faculty are doing? One option is to read the 2014 Higher Education Edition of the Horizon Report, an annual publication of the New Media Consortium (NMC), in collaboration with the EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative (ELI). This annual publication, released early this year, examines key trends, challenges, and specific emerging technologies or practices that are predicted to have a major impact on higher education over the next five years. An international panel of experts in education, technology, and related fields identify the topics that appear in the report.
The report identifies six key trends grouped by estimated time of impact, six significant challenges grouped by difficulty, and six emerging technologies grouped by estimated time of adoption (1 year or less, 2 to 3 years and 4 to 5 years).
To give some examples, the report identifies key trends such as the “Growing Ubiquity of Social Media” and the “Integration of Online, Hybrid and Collaborative Learning” as likely to drive changes in higher education over the next 1 or 2 years. Significant challenges, according to the report, include “Low Digital Fluency of Faculty” and “Keeping Education Relevant”. Technology identified as having an important impact on higher education for the 1 year or less horizon include the “Flipped Classroom” and “Learning Analytics”. To find out more about these and other trends, challenges, and technologies in the report, you can download a free copy of the report from the New Media Consortium (NMC) here. You can also find out more about the research process behind the report by checking out the Horizon Report’s wiki.
The Horizon Report encourages and inspires discussion and this past May I was able to attend a 2014 Horizon Report Symposium that was presented at NERCOMP (Northeast Regional Computing Program) in Norwood, MA. The symposium, organized and led by Bryan Alexander (one of the Horizon Report’s expert panelists), offered the chance to attend a presentation and to discuss the report and it’s implications with other higher education professionals, including educational technologists, instructional designers, IT professionals, librarians, administrators, and faculty.
The presentation was structured around Bryan Alexander’s wiki resource for the 2014 NERCOMP Horizon Report symposium, which includes links to related articles, websites, videos and more, as well as notes generated from the day’s discussion. Throughout the presentation, participants shared concerns, success stories, and even failures around the implementation of various new technologies. As is often the case, in the end more questions were probably raised then answered, but it’s always helpful to hear issues and examples from other professionals who are working with technology in education.
Following are some key takeaways from the event:
It’s important to use new technology effectively to meet learning goals, rather than just for the sake of the new technology (even the most promising technology can be used poorly).
There is a need to devise ways to support faculty in learning new technologies and help them to implement the technologies in effective and beneficial ways.
There is a need to make sure the use of the technology is of benefit to the students and the learning process (especially in the case of technologies such as learning analytics).
It’s also important to consider issues of concern, such as distraction (especially with social media and mobile devices), increased faculty workload, student privacy, and digital citizenship, among others.
If you’d like to explore how some of the key trends and technologies from the Horizon Report can be applied to your own teaching (trends such as “The Growing Ubiquity of Social Media” or “Integration of Online, Hybrid and Collaborative Learning” and technologies such as the “Flipped Classroom”), contact eLIS at elis@lesley.edu.
Source for trends, challenges, and technology examples mentioned from the Horizon Report:
Johnson, L., Adams Becker, S., Estrada, V., Freemam, A. (2014). NMC Horizon Report: 2014 Higher Education Edition. Austin, Texas: The New Media Consortium.
Structuring a feedback cycle in online course is in many ways no different than in a face-to-face one. For example, if you are using peer feedback, you may already be using some of these strategies:
Ask students to use a standard set of criteria and a protocol to guide their feedback
Set expectations – emphasize the value of giving feedback. Research shows giving feedback has a positive impact on students’ own work.
Make giving, receiving and using feedback part of assessment
Create a feedback loop:
Ask those whose work is being reviewed to point out to reviewer(s) what they’d like help with in particular. Encourage them to ask questions of the reviewer.
Ask students in final drafts to write a brief piece explaining how they used the feedback they received.
Some benefits of this feedback structure include:
Increasing student accountability for quality of feedback
Increasing skills in giving and using feedback
Streamlining final review of student work
Determine the success of the feedback system
Determine/improve students’ skills in giving and receiving feedback
Due to the lack of physical presence and changes in learning and teaching workflows, there are a few options that can improve that cycle.
Online Tools
Voice In addition to the suggestions above, online tools can strengthen feedback and in some cases save time in giving feedback. For example, using voice rather than the written word can deepen the quality and quantity of feedback. Consider that speaking for three minutes produces about 500 words at an average rate of speech. Quality of feedback can also improve because the tone and quality of voice is retained, and this can enhance the depth and clarity of information in a message. Voice feedback has an immediacy that text does not, increasing students’ sense of your presence. Tools using voice include Blackboard voice email and thevoice authoring tool that is available wherever the full text editor exists.
Video Blackboard’s Video Everywhere tool allows you to record yourself speaking to students. Consider whether your feedback would be enhanced by the use of video. In the case of online course welcome messages, video of the instructor can be very useful in establishing a sense of your teaching presence.
Narrated Movies Sometimes called “screencasts”, narrated movies can add a visual element to your feedback. For example, you may want to give feedback to the whole class, highlighting some key points in an assignment. Using VoiceThread, you can post a PowerPoint slide with bullet points and narrate those with a voice-over. You can also embed your webcam video directly into a slide. Using SnagIt, you can record a narrated movie of whatever is open on your desktop. This might include written or visual student work. With a tablet computer, you can draw on the screen as you speak, adding emphasis to the points you speak to.
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