By Christopher Gentile, PhD
The new semester has started and again you’re teaching an online course that was put together during the overnight pivot to online teaching in response to the COVID pandemic. You have learned a lot about teaching and learning online since then, but sadly, your course does not yet reflect it. You dread the thought of teaching it again in its present state but are pressed for time to revise the course.
Sound familiar? You are not alone. You know it’s time to revise your course, but the task seems overwhelming. Take heart, with a few relatively easy changes you can give any course a new life, and it doesn’t have to be done all at once. Remember, online courses are dynamic entities that are forever morphing to fit changing times, student needs and circumstances. Here are some tips for changes you can make that won’t stress you out.
1. Boost Your Social Presence
Social presence of faculty and students in online learning is critical to ensuring everyone is actively engaged in the teaching and learning process. Without it, students feel isolated and detached from the learning experience and bored. Fortunately, there are some easy ways for you to refresh your social presence from the get-go.
Tips
Add a welcome video to introduce yourself and personalize it in a way that will grab your students’ attention. Don’t be afraid to let students see your personality.
Update your welcome message to students. Make sure its tone is warm and inviting. Whether it’s a post on your LMS or a personalized email to your students, a welcome message is a great way to form an immediate connection and make your presence known.
Be sure your LMS includes a profile picture of yourself and encourage students to do the same.
Use the course announcement page to add glowing reviews or testimonials from students who took the course in the past. (A little marketing never hurts).
2. Transform Your Online Syllabus into a Roadmap
A typical syllabus for a face-to-face course may not be enough to keep online students on track. In online courses, students can easily get lost without the instructions the teacher would verbally provide in a face-to-face classroom. To overcome this, turn your syllabus into a document that can be used as both a course menu and the homepage that serves as a roadmap for directing the student to everything they need to be successful in the course.
Tips
Make sure your syllabus is thorough and detailed. Add any and all directions and technical instructions students will need to complete the activities and assignments.
Insert links to material mentioned in your syllabus so students will not have to search for the information. Remember to check the links each semester to make sure they still work.
If you’re making any changes to the course content or its organization, make sure your revised syllabus aligns exactly to the course structure in your LMS.
Post the syllabus up front in your course so it’s easy for students to find and refer to regularly.
3. Amp Up Your Student Engagement Strategies
This may be the single best way to refresh and improve your online course!
Engagement is a key factor for student success in eLearning. Engagement strategies work because they involve active rather than passive student learning. Ask yourself, do your students find your course engaging or do they seem disconnected? If it’s the latter, it’s likely a sign that your course lacks opportunities for meaningful student interactions with the content, teacher and other students. You can overcome this and enhance the learning experience by incorporating meaningful and multiple ways of interacting with your students and encouraging/requiring students to interact with each other and the course content.
Here’s how to diagnose the potential problem:
Take a look at student evaluations and student performance from the last time you taught this course. Is there data to suggest which instructional activities and assessments worked or didn’t work? Does the feedback or performance data suggest that students were engaged with you, the teacher, the course content and each other?
Review your course’s instructional activities and ask whether they are promoting active learning or are they limited to mainly passive activities such as pre-recorded video lectures and readings?
Determine whether your course’s assessments and assignments incorporate elements such as discussions, blogs, group work, peer review and other social learning strategies that support student engagement.
Tips
Experiment with designing activities that promote or require student-student and student-content interaction:
Design assignments and assessments around discussions and blogs. Not only is this a way for the student to engage directly with the course content, it’s also important in developing critical thinking skills and reinforcing peer collaboration.
Create instructional activities where students are required to work in teams or groups. This is critical for students in developing social presence and promotes collaboration through the use of a variety of different media. Most LMS’s have tools for creating and managing groups online.
Set up groups for your classes on social media platforms and let students have free rein. Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and Instagram are all great platforms for collaboration. This will go a long way to creating a sense of community which enables students to form positive social relationships and close ties with fellow students.
Build a student discussion forum within your LMS for off-topic discussions that may be important for students. During face-to-face classes, off-topic discussions can be a normal part of course discourse and helps to establish community.
Post a collaborative wrap-up activity at the end of the course. It’s a great way to share feedback within the group and bring closure to the course.
Leverage technologies that encourage faculty-student interaction:
Leverage multiple channels of synchronous communication, e.g., chat features and IM to communicate with students. It connects you to your students and let’s them know you’re there.
For longer communications, email your students directly.
Use Zoom, Google Hangouts, Skype and the collaboration features of your LMS to promote synchronous video communication.
Use your LMS’s course announcement page to post frequently.
Final Thoughts
Relax! This doesn’t have to be done all at once. Try experimenting with some of these strategies and as you see results you can either scale up or scale back their use. Refine your teaching approaches based on student feedback throughout the course. You don’t have to wait until the course ends to gather that data. And don’t forget to give yourself permission to be a student too – to learn over time.
Christopher Gentile, PhD is a recognized senior leader and industry influencer with over 20 years of experience in digital education product vision, strategy, development and management. He is the principal partner at Cognizeo, a full-service education technology group that provides expertise to the K12, higher education and adult learning markets.
Comments