December, 2005

Online Classroom - December 2005 - Full Issue
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Reduce Online Learners’ Isolation Through Vicarious Immediacy
If you teach the same course face to face and online, one way to reduce your online learners’ feelings of isolation is to record interactions with your face-to-face students and incorporate these recordings into the online course.

Tips from the Pros - Why Communicate with Your Students?
By Emily Stephens
Teaching online for the past few years has taught me that students learn faster and retain more if you communicate with them often. That is why I make it a point to provide timely feedback on assignments and exams.

Project-Based Learning: A Natural Fit with Distance Education
The Buck Institute for Education’s definition of project-based learning—“a systematic teaching method that engages students in learning knowledge and skills acquired through an extended inquiry process structured around complex, authentic questions and carefully designed projects and tasks”—shares many of the same tenets as online learning. However, little has been written about the links between the two or about how to incorporate PBL into an online course.

Learning Style Considerations are Important to Teaching Critical Thinking
Online courses offer several advantages over face-to-face courses when it comes to teaching critical thinking (analysis, evaluation, and deduction), according to according to Linda Armstrong, science professor at Sullivan County Community College in New York. The challenge is to engage students by addressing various learning styles and to find ways to build in critical thinking throughout the course.

Writing Learning Objectives That Help You Teach and Students Learn (Part 2)
By Patti Shank, PhD, CPT
One of the most critical online teaching skills is designing good content and activities so that students can learn. In the last article (Part 1), I described how instructors too often do not put enough effort into considering the learning objectives for their courses, resulting in potential for mismatch between course content, activities, and assessments; less-than-optimal learning; frustrated students; and poor evaluations.

Developing an Effective Resource Pool: An Important Tool for Teaching
By Errol Craig Sull, PhD
It makes no difference what the class subject we are teaching: each of us can always use to-the-point, effective, and credible online resources. We all have them, of course, and harvest them from a variety of sources: colleagues, magazines, journals, our own online searches, newsletters, and newspapers. But to develop the most effective resource pool takes planning, creativity, and effort.