As I begin another online course...

As I begin to design and teach another online course this spring, I am reminded again of how important it is to make each course interactive. By interactive, I mean that each part of the course must involve the participant/student and encourage them to continue and explore. If the course site is dull and uninteresting, the student must force themselves to return to the site. This negative experience not only affects their school work, but undermines your effectiveness as the instructor. At the end of the course, it may also affect student evaluations of you and your course. Here are some of my online teaching tips, which I am re-reading before I begin creating the structure of my new course:

• Design a welcome page with a photo of the instructor and a voice-over (audio file). This gives your course a personality and makes it more inviting.
  
• Make sure EACH part of your course site has clear, precise directions (duplicate them in several areas).
• Create different options for students with differing abilities (See the information on Universal Design principals).
• First determine the content you wish students to learn; then create assessments which will show those learning outcomes.
• Ask questions and get comments from other instructors! Peer Review!
• Add a weekly student survey to your course site....this will help you see what your students may be missing each week and then you can change your course to meet their needs!

If you add these notes to your course design practice, you may notice a difference in student learning.
mej:)

Ten Core Principles

I recently had the pleasure of attending a Webinar hosted by Dr. Judith Boettcher entitled Ten Core Principles for Designing Effective Learning Environments: Insights from Brain Research and Pedagogical Theory. While some Webinars can become a bit dry, Dr. Boettcher kept her large audience interested by addressing principles and examples with which most college instructors can identify. The core principles are listed here.

1. Every structured learning experience has four elements with the learner at the center.

Dr. Boettcher calls this the LeMKE framework or Learner, the Mentor/faculty member, the Knowledge, and the Environment (Boettcher, 2003). To quote her explanation of this framework, “This principle can be captured by envisioning a learning experience featuring the learning “on stage” actively learning under the direction of the mentor/faculty member using a set of resources containing the knowledge/content/skills to be learned within an environment.”

2. Every learning experience includes the environment in which the learner interacts.
3. We shape our tools and our tools shape us.

To understand this principle, Dr. Boettcher reminds us that learning only occurs through an “interaction between a person and a learning environment.” In the past, this interaction occurred in a limited environment; the instructor lectured and the students took notes. Now with wireless, mobile hand-held tools, and Web sites, these tools change the communication patterns and relationships between students and faculty.

4. Faculty are the directors of the learning experience
5. Learners bring their own personalized knowledge, skills, and attitudes to the learning experience.

As faculty know, today’s instructional course designs build on what the students already know and then attempt to take them to the next level.

6. Every learner has a zone of proximal development that defines the space that a learner is ready to develop into useful knowledge.
7. Concepts not words; concepts are organized into intricate knowledge clusters
8. All learners do not need to learn all course content; all learners do need to learn the core concepts.
9. Different instruction is required for different learning outcomes.
10. Everything else being equal, more time-on-task equals more learning.

If after reading this review you wish to see Dr. Boettcher’s article on these principles, please download her PDF from Innovate online at: http://www.innovateonline.info/index.php?view=article&id=54