"This chapter provides a set of ten best practices to help you on your
journey in developing expertise in online teaching. We selected these ten from
teaching and learning research studies and best practices that have been
developed over the past fifteen to twenty years of online teaching and learning.
Instructors who follow these practices will increase the probabilities of
providing an effective, efficient, and satisfying teaching and learning
experience."
Tomorrow's Professor Msg.#1091 Ten Best Practices for Teaching Online
Folks
The posting below looks at best practices for teaching online. It
is longer than most postings but I felt it best to give you the complete
description of all ten practices. I highly recommend the entire book. The
posting is from Chapter 3, Ten Best Practices for Teaching Online, in the book,
The Online Teaching Survival Guide: Simple and Practical Pedagogical Tips, by
Judith V. Boettcher and Rita-Marie Conrad. Published by Jossey-Bass , A Wiley
Imprint. 989 Market Street. San Francisco, CA
94103-1741-www.josseybass.com-.Copyright © 2010 by Judith V. Boettcher and
Rita-Marie Conrad. All rights reserved. Reprinted with
permission.
Regards,
Rick Reis
reis@stanford.edu
UP
NEXT: Higher Education and the New Society - Review
Tomorrow's Teaching
and Learning
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Ten Best Practices for Teaching
Online
Ten Best Practices for Beginning Online Teaching
Table 3.1 sets
out ten best practices to guide your initial online teaching
experiences.
TABLE 3.1
Ten Best Practices for Teaching Online
Best practice 1 Be present at the course site.
Best practice
2 Create a supportive online course community.
Best practice
3 Develop a set of explicit expectations for your learners and yourself
as to how you will communicate and how much time students should be working on
the course each week.
Best practice 4 Use a variety of large group,
small group, and individual work experiences.
Best practice 5 Use
synchronous and asynchronous activities.
Best practice 6 Ask for
informal feedback early in the term.
Best practice 7 Prepare
discussion posts that invite responses, questions, discussions, and
reflections.
Best practice 8 Search out and use content resources that
are available in digital format if possible.
Best practice 9 Combine
core concept learning with customized and personalized learning.
Best
practice 10 Plan a good closing and wrap activity for the course.
Best
Practice 1: Be Present at the Course Site
Being present at the course
site is the most fundamental and important of all the practices. Over time, we
have learned to quantify what it means to "be present." The best online faculty,
according to students, are faculty who are present multiple times a week, and at
best daily. No matter how expectations are communicated regarding faculty
availability, the default mode is twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week.
Students expect online faculty to be present when they are there, no matter the
day or the time, unless explicitly told otherwise.
Thus, one of the most
important expectations for online faculty is-if at all possible-to be present in
some way every day. These expectations can be modified, and students will be
very accepting if their faculty clearly states personal policies on presence and
provides notice if family or professional events cause deviation from these
policies.
Liberal use of tools, such as announcements, discussion board
postings, and faculty blogs, lets students know just when the faculty member
will likely be present for fast turnaround on questions and potentially
available for live interaction by phone or collaborative online tools. These
same tools can communicate when the faculty member may be away for an extended
time-say, two days or more. Strategies such as assigning a student or a team of
two students to monitor question forums or blogs can also be a good stand-in for
the facility presence for a day or two and create community support and
networking connections.
Why is presence so important in the online
environment? When faculty actively interact and engage students in a
face-to-face classroom, the class evolves as a group and develops intellectual
and personal bonds. The same type of community bonding happens in an online
setting if the faculty presence is felt consistently. Regular, thoughtful, daily
presence shows the students that the faculty member cares about who they are,
cares about their questions and concerns, and is generally present for them to
do the mentoring, guiding, and challenging that teaching is all about. In other
words, text and audio presence compensate for the physical remoteness of online
learning and the lack of face-to-face presence.
One posted message from
students that you do not want on your site is the question, "Is anybody there?"
Such a posting would be made only by a student who is feeling abandoned, alone,
and isolated-a clear and unambiguous signal that not all is well.
The
concept of daily presence may be alarming to you as it might fuel the widely
reported perception that online courses take significantly more faculty time
than classroom-based courses. One way to create a sense of presence without it
consuming too much time is to focus discussions on the course site and avoid
one-to-one e-mails. Time-released announcements that remind learners of
assignment due dates and prepared audio containing additional content that can
be swiftly uploaded midweek are other ways to let the learners know you are
there.
Of course, there is the danger that too much faculty presence will
stunt the discussions as well as delay the development of learner
self-direction. So while you may check in to the Web site daily for a few
minutes to see if there are questions, by no means feel that you have to add
significant daily comments to the course site.
Research on faculty
presence suggests that there are three types of presence: social presence,
teaching presence, and cognitive presence. (Garrison, Anderson, & Archer,
2000). More about these types of presence are in the tips in Part
Two.
Best Practice 2: Create a Supportive Online Course
Community
Nurturing a learning community as part of an online course is
almost as important as being a significant presence. A learning community in a
face-to-face environment often develops spontaneously as students generally have
more opportunities to get to know one another and develop friendships outside a
particular course. More explicit nurturing and planning is required in the
online environment for a learning community to develop.
Community
building is the focus of much research in online learning (Brown, 2001; Rovai,
2002; Shea, 2006). Some of the research seeks to define a community; other
research examines the stages of a community and the faculty and student
behaviors that facilitate community building at these different
stages.
Here's how to get started with designing community into an online
course. (Many more ideas are in the chapters with tips in Part Two.) A good
strategy for developing a supportive online course community is to design a
course with a balanced set of dialogues. This means designing a course so that
the three dialogues of faculty to learner (F-L), learner to learner (L-L), and
learner to resource (L-R) are about equal (Pelikan, 1992). In one online course,
the F-L dialogue might be accomplished with three types of communications: short
mini-concept introductions, twice-weekly announcements, and interactions with
the student postings. In another course, this dialogue might be accomplished
with a combination of announcements, discussion postings and monitoring, written
mini-lectures, or audio/video podcasts.
Encouraging the L-L dialogue can
be done with one or more of these strategies:
• Launch the class with a
personal introduction posting so that students get to know one another and you
get to know about the students and their interests. The types of information
often shared by faculty and students at the beginning of a course touch on
professional experiences and personal data such as family, friends, pets, or
hobbies, often supported by a photograph or two. It is not uncommon to see
pictures of learners with their dog or car or engaged in a hiking, kayaking,
skiing, or another activity. Faculty also often include information about their
teaching philosophy and current work or research projects.
• Encourage
the use of a general open student forum for students to post and request help
and assistance from each other through the various peer-to-peer tools, such as
discussions and help areas. Learners can use this type of space as a first place
to go for help from each other. Think of this place as a student union or coffee
shop where students can collaborate, brainstorm, and support one
another.
• Divide a larger class into small groups of four to six,
similar to a study group, that students can depend on for supportive networking
or mentoring, including help in identifying resources or clarifying key points
of a class assignment.
• Set up problem-solving forums or discussion
boards, and assign students or student teams to monitor and support direct
questions.
Not all learners will respond to these strategies for
encouraging the building of a learning community. Learning within the setting of
an online course community will work better for some students than for others.
Some students may choose not to participate very actively at all; others find it
is the best way for them to learn. The point is that for students who need it,
it is an essential part of how they learn. Vygotsky's theories remind us of how
much we learn as social beings within a social context. The online community is
part of what makes this happen for many students.
Best Practice 3:
Develop a Set of Explicit Expectations for Your Learners and for Yourself as to
How You Will Communicate and How Much Time Students Should Be Working on the
Course Each Week
This best practice cannot be overemphasized. It
clarifies, specifies expectations, and reduces uncertainty. Develop and post
prominently on your course site a set of explicit expectations for how students
are expected to communicate online and how you expect them to communicate with
you. For example, some faculty have a rule that they do not answer
content-focused e-mails. This is a good practice because content-focused queries
belong in one of the many public spaces of the course site. Queries and
responses posted in open course spaces benefit all the learners, as students see
both the questions and the responses, and you can develop expectations that
students can answer each other's questions. Of course, e-mail remains a good
choice for personal and confidential communications.
What about a policy
on response time for questions posted on a course site or to e-mail?
Institutions have varying policies on this question. Some institutions with
large online programs have a policy that faculty are expected to respond to
learners within twenty-four hours during the week. Expectations for responses
during the weekend can vary, but as most working professionals work on their
online courses during the weekend, faculty should establish a general rule as to
weekend windows of opportunity.
Another common effective practice is for
online faculty to schedule special virtual office hours, being available by chat
or live classroom, e-mail, or phone, particularly when learners are likely to be
working on an important assignment. In the interests of time and community, it
is best to use a communication tool where responses and content can be shared
with everyone and archived for flexibility in access and review.
This
basic expectation of response time can easily be modified as long as the change
is communicated to the students. It is easy to develop your own policies or
rules of thumb if the institution does not have them in place. Think about the
students as family for the duration of a course or program. Students are very
accepting of a faculty member's time and life requirements if they know what is
going on. And students often step in and help each other even more when they
know a faculty member is sick, traveling, or engaged in significant professional
or family obligations. Often students can agree to monitor course questions
posted in the open forum or in the discussion boards, for example.
Online
learning is just as intensive as learning face-to-face, and time to do the work
needs to be scheduled and planned for, just as if one were attending
face-to-face classes. Being clear as to how much effort and time will be
required on a weekly basis keeps surprises to a minimum.
How much time
should learners be expected to dedicate on a weekly basis to an online course? A
good rule of thumb is six hours of productive learning time that is used for
activities such as reading and processing content, as well as participating in
online discussions. For many learners, it can take ten hours to achieve the six
productive hours.
Best Practice 4: Use a Variety of Large Group, Small
Group, and Individual Work Experiences
A learning community works better
when a variety of activities and experiences is offered. Online courses can be
more enjoyable and effective when students have the opportunity to brainstorm
and work through concepts and assignments with one or two or more fellow
students. Of course, some students work and learn best on their own. Building in
options and opportunities for students to work together and individually is
highly recommended.
Teams are particularly effective when students are
working on complex case studies or scenarios for the first time. Early in a
course, students may like to get to know one another by working with just one or
two other students in teams of two or three. Later in the course, with more
complex projects, groups of three or four can work well. It is also important to
build in whole class activities such as discussion boards or events with invited
experts.
Best Practice 5: Use Synchronous and Asynchronous
Activities
When online courses were introduced, they were almost totally
asynchronous-an updated version of the correspondence distance learning courses
so widespread in the middle of the twentieth century. Now we have course
management systems, virtual live classrooms, spontaneous collaboration tools,
and an almost infinite number of Web tools and smartphones that support
synchronous chat, video messaging, and more. These tools make it possible to do
almost everything that we do in face-to-face classrooms. In addition, we can
often engage learners in more extensive collaborative and reflective
activities.
Sometimes there is nothing better than a real-time
interactive brainstorming and sharing discussion; at other times, the
requirement to think, plan, write, and reflect is what makes learning most
effective for an individual. The variety of activities now possible online makes
it easy to create many types of effective learning environments. For example, in
financial and statistical courses, real-time problem-solving and
question-and-answer review sessions can be effective learning strategies. While
working professionals often choose to complete advanced degrees online so that
they can make use of the asynchronous, anytime, anywhere features of a program,
these same learners enjoy getting together at a specific time to interact in
real time.
Best Practice 6: Ask for Informal Feedback Early in the
Term
Course evaluations have been called postmortem evaluations because
they are done after the fact, and nothing can be changed to increase the
satisfaction of the students making the comments. Early feedback surveys or
informal discussions are effective in getting students to provide feedback on
what is working well in a course and solicit suggestions and ideas on what might
help them have a better course experience. This early feedback is done in about
week 3 of a fifteen-week course so time is available to make corrections and
modifications while the course is ongoing. A request for informal feedback is an
easy opening for students who might have comments, suggestions, or questions. A
simple e-mail or discussion forum asking one or two of these questions works
well:
• How could your learning experience be improved?
• What do
you want or need help with?
• What are the top three to five
understandings you have learned thus far?
Best Practice 7: Prepare
Discussion Posts That Invite Responses, Questions, Discussions, and
Reflections
One of the primary differences between the online teaching
classroom and the classroom of the campus-based course is how students and
faculty communicate and the range of tools that they use to do so. After all, we
don't see the students; rather, we get to know them by what they write and say
in the discussion boards and their assignments and, to a lesser degree, in
e-mail, phone, and collaborative online classrooms.
The communication
tool that is the heart and soul of the online course community is the discussion
board. This is the primary place where faculty talk to students and students
talk to other students. This is also the place where students and faculty get to
know one another and the tool that helps a widely dispersed group of students
and faculty become a learning community.
Discussions in an online course
are the equivalent of class discussions in a face-to-face class. A key
difference, of course, is that these discussions are asynchronous, meaning that
students have time for thought and reflection. Another key difference is that
discussions, blogs, and other tools require written or audio comments that are
captured and become part of a course archive.
Discussions are often
designed for one of the following learning purposes (Painter, Coffin, &
Hewings, 2003; Goodyear et al., 2003, cited in Grogan,
2005):
• Providing an open question-and-answer
forum
• Encouraging critical or creative
thinking
• Reinforcing domain or procedural
processes
• Achieving social interaction and community building so
that students get to know each other personally and intellectually
• Supporting students in their own reflections and
inquiries
Here are a few hints for discussion postings culled from many
conversations with experienced online faculty.
• Create open-ended
questions that learners can explore and apply the concepts that they are
learning.
• Model Socratic-type probing and follow-up questions. "Why
do you think that?" "What is your reasoning?" "Is there an alternative
strategy?"
• Ask clarifying questions that encourage students to think
about what they know and don't know.
• Stagger due dates of the
responses, and consider a midpoint summary or encouraging
comments.
• Provide guidelines and instruction on responding to other
students. For example, suggest a two-part response: (1) "Say what you liked or
agreed with or what resonated with you," and (2) "Conclude with a follow-up
question such as what you are wondering about or curious
about."
• Provide choices and options. Providing choices for students
in questioning follows the recommended design principle of encouraging
personalized and customized learning. Working professionals are often grappling
with many issues; providing choices and options makes it possible to link the
learning more directly with their work experiences, interests, and
needs.
• Don't post questions soliciting basic facts or questions for
which there is an obvious yes-or-no response. The reason for this is obvious:
once one student responds, there is not much more to say. Specific fact-based
questions that you want to be sure that your students know are good items for
automated quizzes or for students to record in blogs.
• Log on to your
course a minimum of four days a week to answer e-mail, monitor discussions, post
reminders, and hold online office hours. For higher satisfaction for you and
your students, log in every day.
Best Practice 8: Search Out and Use
Content Resources That Are Available in Digital Format If Possible
If
content is not digital, it is as if it does not exist for most students. This
means that students will more likely use content, resources, and applications
that are online, digital, and readily available. They want to be learning
anywhere, anytime, and often while they are doing other things, such as driving,
taking care of children, or exercising. Carrying around large, heavy textbooks
feels like an anachronism to them.
Book publishers are now making more of
their content available digitally. Some institutions are running pilot programs
with students using the new larger-screen Kindle from Amazon or one of the Apple
iPod series. Selecting a textbook available in multiple formats can be a boon to
students, particularly working professionals who may have heavy travel
schedules. For many courses, however, textbooks are not yet available in digital
form, but publishers are responding. This best practice can be applied to
supplementary resources and library resources. A reference document with
instructions on remotely accessing library resources is a must for online
courses. In addition, a key member of the instructional team is the library
reference person assigned to support online learners.
Students enjoy
seeing how what they are learning links to current events. Thus, building links
to current events into discussions, blogs, and announcements supports the
exploration stage of early grappling with core course concepts. So this best
practice includes encouraging students to make good use of Internet resources.
You might want to consider enlisting student assistance in identifying
high-quality content that is available online. This can include tutorials,
simulations, and supplementary material. The number and quality of tutorials in
complex concepts in physics, chemistry, engineering, and business continue to
grow. Students enjoy searching and testing these resources and often engage more
deeply as they use resources that they may have found themselves.
Best
Practice 9: Combine Core Concept Learning with Customized and Personalized
Learning
This best practice combines a number of basic learning
principles, many of them addressed in more depth in the tips in Part Two.
Briefly, this principle means that faculty need to identify the core concepts to
be learned in a course-the performance goals and learning outcomes-and then
guide and mentor learners through a set of increasingly complex, personalized,
and customized learning activities to help learners apply these core concepts
and develop their own knowledge structures. Vygotsky's principle of the zone of
proximal development includes the concept that the learning experiences ought to
pull students' learning forward, always in advance of development (Del Rio &
Alvarez, 2007).
In practical terms for online courses, it means designing
options and choices within learning experiences, assignments, and special
projects. Supporting learners with their personal and professional goals that
are closely linked to the performance goals of a course and even beyond the
course parameters is a win-win situation for the learners individually and as a
group. It enhances the meaningfulness of the learning and infuses learner
enthusiasm in completing the assignments.
Another key principle that aids
in concept learning is also inspired by Vygotsky (1962, 1978). He noted that
concepts are not words, but rather organized and intricate knowledge clusters.
This simple but profound principle means that while we must teach in a linear
fashion, presenting concepts individually and in small clusters, we need to
continually reapply core concepts within a context, such as those in case
studies, problems, and analyses.
Effectively learning concepts, as we
know from studies of novice and expert learners, requires a focus on patterns
and relationships, not only on individual facts or vocabulary.
A popular
new teaching and learning suggestion advocates making students' thinking visible
(Collins, Brown, & Holum, 1991). Making our thinking visible requires
students to create, talk, write, explain, analyze, judge, report, and inquire.
These types of activities make it clear to students themselves, the faculty, and
fellow learners what they know or don't know, what they are puzzled about, and
about what they might be curious. Such activities stimulate students' growth
from concept awareness to concept acquisition, building in that series of
intellectual operations that Vygotsky believes is required for concept
acquisition.
Discussion forums, blogging, journals, wikis, and similar
social networking type tools provide excellent communication channels for
engaging learners in clarifying and enlarging their mental models or concepts
and building links and identifying relationships.
Best Practice 10: Plan
a Good Closing and Wrap Activity for the Course
As courses start coming
to a close and winding down, it is easy to focus on assessing and grading
students and forget the value of a good closing experience. In the final weeks
of a course, students are likely to be stressed and somewhat overwhelmed by the
remaining work. In this state, they often do not pause to make the lists and do
the planning that can help reduce stress and provide a calming atmosphere. A
useful image for reducing stress is in David Allen's book, Getting Things Done
(2002). Allen notes that making a list helps us to clear the "psychic RAM" of
our brains so that we feel more relaxed and more in control. Once we have made
lists and prepared our schedule, we don't have to continually remind ourselves
of what needs to be done and when.
End-of-course experiences often
include student presentations, summaries, and analyses. These reports and
presentations provide insights into what useful knowledge students are taking
away from a course.
At the same time, these learning events can provide a
final opportunity for faculty to remind students of core concepts and
fundamental principles. These end-of-course experiences are a good time to use
live classrooms, YouTube, and other synchronous collaborative
tools.
Conclusion
Traditional courses have long focused on tools
and techniques for presenting content. Traditional concerns of faculty focused
on covering the material, getting through the book, and meeting expectations so
that faculty in other courses wouldn't muse and wonder, "Didn't you learn these
concepts from faculty X? And didn't you study the work and contributions of
[fill in your favorite who]?"
A major drawback with course designs that
have content as a priority is that it often focuses attention on what the
faculty member is doing, thinking, and talking about and not on the interaction
and engagement of students with the core concepts and skills of a course. Recent
trends in higher education are encouraging a focus on learners as a priority,
resulting in many publications such as launching a Learning-Centered College
(O'Banion, 1999). This movement refocuses instruction on the learner and away
from the content, a shift that encourages faculty to develop a habit of asking
questions such as, "What is going on inside the learner's head?" "How much of
the content and the tools can he or she actually use?" "What are learners
thinking, and how did they arrive at their respective positions?"
We have
much to learn about teaching and learning, and specifically about teaching and
learning in the online environment. The good news is that we now know much more
than what we did when online learning started in the early 1990s.
Summary-and
What's Next
This set of ten best practices is really the tip of the
iceberg in developing expertise in teaching online, but we hope you find it a
useful set of practices as you get started. The next eight chapters provide many
tips and examples for teaching online, as well as summaries and themes for what
is happening in the four phases of a course.
