May 2005

Online Classroom May 2005 full issue PDF
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Planning an Online Course With a Storyboard
Does this scenario sound familiar? You go through training on your institution’s course management system and begin converting your face-to-face course for online delivery. The support staff is helpful and shows you how to upload course materials, create multimedia elements, and use the various features of the CMS. It’s a lot of work, but it will be worth the effort because once the course is created, you will be able to reuse it (with minor modifications) semester after semester. But halfway through your first semester of teaching the course you realize that things aren’t going as well as you would like, and it seems there are problems with the design of the course a frustrating revelation given the hundreds of hours spent creating the course and the prospect of having to make major changes to it.

Tips from the Pros
The minute paper is a good way of doing an informal assessment to determine whether students understand the material presented during class. Traditionally, these have been done at the end of (face-to-face) class periods individually. But Debra Vredenburg, a professor at Millersville University in Pennsylvania, uses BlackBoard to have students interactively discuss online what they learned during class.

Personal Relevance, Diverse Groups Encourage Discussion
If you are having trouble getting students to engage in productive online discussions, perhaps you should consider the roles that personal relevance and group composition play.

Active Online Learning Prepares Students for the Workplace, Reflects Changing Learning Style Preferences
Changing workplace demands and student learning style preferences require that instructors rethink their courses. No longer can students passively absorb knowledge. They must become active learners — interacting with peers and designing and implementing the learning, says Jane Legacy, MBA/MBE chair at Southern New Hampshire University’s School of Business.

Planning and Facilitating Academic Discourse in Discussion Boards
For the most part, threaded discussions that rise to the level of academic discourse do not happen by chance. They require thoughtful consideration of learning objectives, course content, community building, and expectations before the first topic of discussion is proposed.

H-OEH: An Online Network to Help Bring Humanities Online
By Jennifer Patterson Lorenzetti
Much of the work in creating effective online education is focused on the disciplines considered more difficult to put online. Laboratory-based science courses, experiential engineering courses, and discussion-heavy professional training all have all been the subject of examination as to how these traditionally face-to-face fields of study can be effectively put online. The assumption is that humanities courses, with their intensive focus on printed materials, may be the easiest disciplines to study online.