27 Teaching Practices to Consider in the Online Environment
27 Teaching Practices to Consider in the Online Environment
While space does not allow for a comprehensive discussion of online teaching practices, following are several practices to consider [1] [2] [3]:
Design
- Rigorously connect content to core concepts and learning outcomes.
- Design experiences to help learners make progress on their novice-to-expert journey
- Allow for student agency by providing opportunities for students to direct their own learning, e.g., multiple content formats, choice of assignment type, self-reflection, student-led discussion, or student-found content.
- Design and facilitate learning tasks and activities that are grounded in authentic problems.
- Use cases or scenarios to pose problems that engage students’ interest and curiosity.
- Provide opportunities for students to reflect on their learning.
- Select and use content resources that are available in digital format and that are directly supportive of your learning goals.
- To help improve the quality of your learning design, ask learners for informal feedback at multiple points, e.g., early in the term, mid-term, and end of term.
Online presence and community
- Be present in the course site.
- Create a supportive online course community.
- Provide explicit expectations for your learners and yourself as to how you will communicate:
- Ask learners to post their content-focused questions in a public space on the course site (e.g., a discussion forum) so they can view and answer each others’ questions. These queries and responses will benefit all learners.
- Communicate what your response time (e.g., within 24 hours) to student’s questions will be.
Online assessments, activities, assignments
- Consider how to achieve the three basic interaction patterns [4]:
- Faculty to student
- Create module introductions and mini-lectures via audio podcasts or video
- Send online announcements that remind, coach, suggest.
- Interactions with the students (via email, forums, live classroom events)
- Provide frequent, timely, specific feedback to learners.
- Student to student
- Utilize small teams for collaborative problem solving and/or writing projects
- Peer learning (reviews, evaluations, assessments)
- Online group discussions (including peer-led)
- Student to learning resources (content)
- Indicate how much time students should be working on the course each week.
- Provide guidance on how to successfully navigate learning resources.
- Provide links to review and/or advanced level resources.
- Provide clear, consistent instructions on how to interact with learning resources.
- Faculty to student
- Use a variety of large group, small group, and individual work activities and assignments
- Include both synchronous and asynchronous activities
- Prepare discussion prompts that invite responses, questions, discussions, and reflections. Suggestions include [5]:
- Create open-ended questions for learners to explore and apply the concepts they are learning
- Model Socratic-type probi