Faculty Perspective
Faculty who teach online apply these principles and others in their online courses. Following is a summary of advice to new online instructors shared by faculty currently teaching online:
Experiences
- Take an online course to experience the student point of view.
- It gets easier as you gain experience.
- New instructors need to be motivated and willing to go the extra mile sometimes. If students aren't motivated, it will take a very motivated instructor to get the class rolling.
- Be careful not to commit to a course enrollment that is too large to pay individual attention to students.
Expectations
- Prepare of “bullet-proof” syllabus.
- Be prepared for student difficulty understanding expectations for assignments – it's more difficult to gauge understanding when you can't see their faces.
- Be patient and don't assume knowledge on the student's part.
Structure
- Provide structure to your classes.
- Focus on the student. What does the student see?
- Set up the course to require students to login and contribute to discussions on a regular basis.
- Keep the students on the same content at the same time.
Community
- Let students know who you are and try to find out who they are.
- Get involved in class discussions.
- Be visible in the class and give plenty of feedback.
- Grade things quickly.
- Be prepared for the occasional disgruntled student; workload is an issue for many students who have families and work full time.
- When students contribute regularly it enhances the sense of online community.
One of the biggest challenges for faculty in the online environment is time management. Here are some tips from online faculty regarding time and effective practices for teaching online.
Timesavers
- If you use groups, copy and paste a comment you've made in one group to another group.
- Keep instructor comments to use from one semester to the next. It gives you a base of comments to work with rather than composing new comments each time.
- Read and grade discussion items daily.
- Develop grading forms or rubrics to make grading easier.
- Good communication in the News tool can reduce the number of email message you need to answer for individual students.
- Stay ahead of the game. Read email and discussions right away instead of letting them build up. If you get behind it's harder to catch up.
- If you like to track progress outside D2L, use a chart with student names to track assignment submissions and discussions each week.
- Students like quick feedback. Set due dates and times when you will be able to correct assignments in a day or two. Also set a turn-around time for grading and feedback so students know when to expect it.
- Be frank that you are not available 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Set specific times when you will be available.
Other timesavers include:
- Use the “track changes” or “add comment” features in Word to collect your comments and return the edited file the student.
- Use the printing features in the Discussion area to print discussions and read them offline.
- Use the bulk download in the dropbox.
- Keep News items from one semester to the next for reuse.
- Use the Overall Comments box in the Gradebook or use the News tool to give overall feedback to all students for an activity.
- If one student has a question, others may too. Answer appropriate questions publicly with the News tool or in the discussion area.
References
University of Wisconsin Extension – Learning Innovations (2005). [Online faculty survey]. Unpublished raw data.