Interaction

Kick off an online course with an asynchronous goal-setting icebreaker where students can form community and intentional goals for the course. This activity can be extended with goal progress check-ins throughout the semester for continued engagement.

Online discussion forums provide students an opportunity to engage with one another and with their instructors on topics relevant to the course. They can be effective in creating community and can reassure students that their contributions to the class are of value. Additionally, they provide a space in which students can be experts, sharing their…

Description Developing oral communication skills is included as a learning objective for many general education programs and courses, however, implementation and assessment of such skills varies by course and instructor (Sapia et al., 2020).  Different forms of oral communication are incorporated into online introductory or upper-level courses. These include synchronous discussions as well as more…

Adult online learners are often non-traditional learners. They juggle multiple life demands, often multi-tasking. Many are returning to school after time away. They have varying levels of digital literacy, and a vast array of life experiences. While online learners may appear to be too diverse to have common goals and learning obstacles, this assumption is…

Online learning activities using shared documents to promote collaborative work is one approach that may facilitate student engagement and learning. By creating shared templates for students to complete in groups, students collaborate with classmates to apply learning and ultimately contribute to a shared outcome. While a great deal of academic work is produced independently, this…

Faculty seeking a dynamic lecture-recording method for their online, hybrid, or flipped classrooms appreciate the Lightboard strategy. A Lightboard is an educational technology tool with a glass writing surface embedded with LED lights, allowing instructors to face the camera and create engaging instructional videos. LED lights and fluorescent markers make the writing highly visible on…

Building community through food poetry is a strategy that can be applied across curriculum and for online and blended teaching.

College textbooks provide highly specialized content and are expensive whether they are in hard copy or digital format. The average cost of college books (see graph below) declined in the 2020-2021 academic year, in part due to an increased rate of textbook rentals and use of digital course materials such as OERs (Hanson, 2022). The…

Shifting from a lecture password to a lecture question presents an opportunity to bridge the gap of lost humanization due to video scanning behaviors.

As an online instructor, do you feel frustrated when students do not read your course announcements, discussions, e-mails, or other written communication? What if we could capture attention by borrowing online marketing copywriting secrets designed to cut through life’s distractions? Online marketers are copywriting masters. Copy is text-based content that persuades readers to act (Dodds,…