June, 2005

Online Classroom - June 2005 - Full Issue
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Building Community in Self-Paced Online Courses
Geoffrey Rubinstein, acting director of the Independent Learning Division of Continuing Education and Professional Studies at the University of Colorado-Boulder, is challenging the conventional notion of community in online learning by exploring ways of building community in self-paced online courses.

Tips from the Pros: Understand Pedagogy and Yourself Before Teaching Online
Understand Pedagogy and Yourself Before Teaching Online

Measuring Online Community
What factors contribute to an online learning community, and how can they be measured? These questions are at the heart of a survey of 709 students from 63 courses at three universities over an 18-month period conducted by David DiRamio, assistant professor of education at Auburn University.

Creating Trust in Online Courses
In order to have a productive learning environment, the instructor needs to develop and maintain a sense of trust between and among the students and the instructor through good course design and facilitation, says Nancy Coppola, associate professor of humanities at New Jersey Institute of Technology.

Interactive Syllabus Improves Course Accessibility
As part of an Educational Quality Through Universal Design Principles (EQUIP) grant, Marge Mercurio and Laurie MacDonald, instructional designers at the University of Northern Colorado, asked UNC and Ames Community College students in focus groups what types of support would improve the learning experience. They got many answers, but the following three items were most common:

Using Synchronous Communication to Deliver Online Lectures, Create Community
Because synchronous online communication can be inconvenient for online learners, many instructors avoid using it for anything beyond optional online office hours or small-group collaboration. But by doing so, they are forgoing the sense of presence and community it can create.