Instructional Strategies for Enhancing Learning in Online Courses

Teaching in an online environment often presents challenges to faculty members, especially for those that have limited to no experience teaching fully (and even blended/hybrid) online courses.  When online courses remove the face-to-face and seat time elements of traditional courses, faculty must re-think and assess the way they teach and engage adult learners.  Below, I present five instructional strategies to consider that have helped me make the transition to teaching online.

Vary the learning activities.  Implementing the same activity across lessons or units will quickly add boredom and disengage learners. Additionally, you will notice many students tend to duplicate their responses across discussions, assignments, and in their writing when using the same activities.  Consider switching between discussions, collaborative tasks, individual tasks, case studies, reflection papers and reading briefs, blog and journal entries, presentations, and end-of-module live web conferencing sessions.  For example, in one unit/module use a structured threaded discussion in your LMS (learning management system) where students are responding to posted questions and engaging in ongoing dialog with peers and the instructor.  Then, in a later unit/module, instead of a thread discussion board, have students post responses to discussion posting to a blog (i.e. WordPress, Blogger, Edublogs, etc.)