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.)

Just A Few More Common Mistakes to Avoid in Online Course Design and Development

As a follow up to my 5 Common Mistakes to Avoid in Online Course Design and Development and A Few More Common Mistakes to Avoid in Online Course Design and Development posts, I wanted to share a few more mistakes that I have been guilty of and observed higher education faculty face themselves in the online course development process.

1. Mistake #8: Not giving yourself enough time to build your online course.  Faculty members are busy.  Whether you're a graduate teaching assistant, an adjunct instructor, or tenure-track (or non-tenure track) professor, we are continuously upholding our teaching, research, and service responsibilities resulting in becoming overwhelmed.  You may even be tempted to delay building and designing your online course; however, doing so typically rushes course creation and causes quality to decline.  This frequently occurs during a learning management system (LMS) migration period or during the summertime when faculty are teaching an online course for the first time in the upcoming fall semester. 
   
   My suggestion:  Begin building your course 16 weeks or more before the course start date, and establish developmental benchmarks along the way.  By beginning the course development process early, it becomes much easier to focus on course quality and devote time to other to other priorities.
   
   
   

A Few More Common Mistakes to Avoid in Online Course Design and Development

As a follow up to my post 5 Common Mistakes to Avoid in Online Course Design and

Development, there are few more mistakes with suggestions that I wanted to share with you. 

1. Mistake #6: Responding to student email 24/7. We often hear the phrase "anytime, anywhere learning" when we read or discuss online learning with our colleagues. For many learners "anytime, anywhere" means just that. Learning and engaging in course activities can occur at 2 p.m in the afternoon or at 2 a.m. in the morning. Additionally, the instructor may be in Texas, but students may be in New York, Orlando, India, China, Spain, Nebraska, West Virginia and so on.  Many students in online courses will email instructors with questions regarding their grades, an assignment, the syllabus, etc. and expect an immediate (or very quick) response from the instructor.  The reality: instructors have lives and other obligations outside teaching their online class(es).  Instructors are not on their computers or smartphones 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.  With easy access to mobile technologies that surround us 24/7, we, as instructors, frequently find ourselves responding to student emails at home during family time, while running important personal/family errands, and so on.  This mistake can be easily avoided in several ways.
   
   My suggestion:  Clearly state, at least in your syllabus, a reasonable response time that you will respond to students' email inquiries. 

5 Common Mistakes to Avoid in Online Course Design and Development

In my 12+ years of teaching face-to-face, blended, and online undergraduate and graduate-level courses in higher education and current role as an instructional designer, I've encountered and observed many mistakes in instructional delivery, learning design, and student engagement.  The old saying "learn from your mistakes" has held true in my own instructional practices from my early days as a graduate assistant teaching technology skills in a computer lab to the later days of being a tenure-track assistant professor designing and delivering fully online graduate-level courses in instructional design from scratch.  Along this journey I've picked up many "do's and don't" of teaching online and engaging learners in online environments.  My main point...........we all make mistakes along the way, especially when teaching online.

Below, I outline common mistakes with online course design and development that I've encountered in my own instructional practice and continue to observe in my current instructional designer role.  Additionally, I provide suggestions on how you can avoid these mistakes.

1. Mistake #1:  Using too many new tools at once OR not using any new tools at all.  Instructors are frequently introduced to LMS tools and capabilities, LTI's (learning tool interoperability), blogs, Google apps, cloud storage, and many other online learning tools.  Some faculty will shy away or avoid these learning technologies all together while some faculty are ready to dive in and use as many tools at once.

Flipped Classroom Strategy 4: Muddiest Point (In/During Class Instructional Strategy)

Initial Thoughts and Introduction

In my continued research into flipped learning and its implications in the university/college

classroom, I'm amazed at the creative strategies faculty members use to engage the adult learner and make the best use of class time.  As a current instructional designer at my respective institution, I find myself reflecting on my own past teaching experiences as an educator (tenure-track professor, adjunct, and teaching assistant) in higher education and past leadership experiences as a technology integration administrator working directly with K-12 teachers.  More specifically, two themes begin to emerge in my mind from both higher education and K-12 sectors: instructional strategy and assessment.  In a recent presentation on flipped classrooms I delivered during a summer faculty institute, I used the appropriate term formative assessment in my discussion of how the higher levels of Bloom's Taxonomy applies to the section of both (a) instructional strategies and (b) assessment techniques to identify student understanding (or lack of) throughout the learning process.