July 6, 2021
Description Learners in synchronous course meetings benefit from the opportunity to engage in rich, performance-based tasks that allow opportunities to collaborate with their colleagues and apply/refine their understanding of course content (Garrison, Anderson, & Archer, 2000; McBain et al., 2016). Benefits for Students: Collaborative performance-based tasks during synchronous online learning allow for educational experiences that…
July 6, 2021
Meeting the needs of students in online courses is essential in today’s educational landscape. When asked about aspects of online courses that are important to them, students repeatedly indicate that features that help them feel comfortable with the structure, format, and expectations of the course are of utmost importance (Hixson, Buckenmeyer, & Barczyk, 2015; Ralston-Berg,…
June 10, 2021
Planning synchronous classes, such as Zoom sessions, can be challenging, especially for instructors who are accustomed to on-campus instructional interaction with their students. To facilitate planning synchronous sessions, we developed four example “lesson plans” that illustrate strategies to promote interaction and engagement. The examples draw on McAlpine’s (2004) four-part model for designing instruction: engagement, informing,…
June 10, 2021
With instruction shifting from face-to-face to online modalities, instructors at all levels are lecturing synchronously using video-conferencing platforms. As an unintended result, instructors and students alike have reported feeling overwhelmed and drained due to the amount of time they have spent on these platforms (Wiederhold, 2020). In fact, the term “Zoom fatigue” has been coined…
June 7, 2021
Discussions in asynchronous online courses provide an opportunity for students to share their thoughts and learn from classmates in a fashion emulating in-class discussions. This allows students to contribute their thoughts and take time to respond to classmates’ comments. In a large enrollment online course, dividing the class into groups provides the opportunity for students…
June 1, 2021
Education in nursing has evolved from traditional classroom and clinical rotations to integration of simulated experiences. Simulated experiences that mirror clinical situations, are a pedagogical approach for enhancing knowledge, skills and self-confidence, thus positively impacting the learning process (Araújo et al., 2018). There is a growing interest to integrate virtual reality (VR) in nursing education. …
March 5, 2020
Description The digital powerups strategy provides an innovative way for instructors to engage students in higher-order online discussion by humanizing and personalizing the discussion. This strategy should be used to allow students to engage in online discussions in relevant and authentic ways. Online discussions can “allow students to participate actively and interact with students and…
March 2, 2020
Description Case-based learning is often used in social science classes, as well as in other disciplines. This can be challenging to implement online. By dividing a class into smaller groups, and assigning a separate discussion board to each group, the groups can do their planning asynchronously and completely online, while the instructor has a complete…
March 2, 2020
If one of the central goals of higher education is “deep and meaningful learning” as Rourke, Anderson, Garrison, and Archer suggest (1999), it is important to consider how to best capitalize on the ease and abundance of interaction in online courses to facilitate this type of learning (p. 3). In their Community of Inquiry Model,…
February 20, 2020
Description Student introductions are a high-impact practice: they build community within the course, set the stage for more substantive forms of student-student and student-instructor engagement, and can reveal unknown issues or strengths on the part of students (Dolan, Kain, Reilly, & Bansal, 2017). Building community in online classes (Nelson & Goodson, 2018) through introductions helps…