I have been teaching at the university level in the classroom in excess of 13 years and August 2013 will mark my one year anniversary teaching online. What I have discovered during the past year teaching online, and what I learn from this course is that presentation of course materials in a concise and consistent manner is a very effective tool, in addition to the depth of the information to be presented to the student. Since the end result is to get student to learn, online instructor must be at all time cognizant not to overwhelm the learning community. Providing supplemental material is critical but there certainly is a fine line when determining the correct amount of information-the length is important, too long and you will loose the attention of the student.

There have been several confusions as to how online instructors should be evaluated to determine instructional effectiveness. Among the reason is the fact that students are not fully participating on such evaluations. Should institutions make student/instructor evaluation mandatory and as a part of their grade for the course?

Instructors have started to include YouTube technology among their teaching tools to enhance student learning. Is YouTube technology becoming very relevant in online education, why?

Of the problems listed with maintaining students I think that a heavy workload is the most challenging to deal with. From personal experience the workload should be inline with the material that will be learned, relativity of the material and the credits earned. The courses that I have taken have all been reasonable with the exception of one. It was a World Literature course and the per- reading assignments and course reading assignments alone were discouraging. Prior to the start of the course I re-enrolled into a different global course that was more manageable. Because this course was a general studies class I could not justify the hours that would be involved in being successful.

I have found that dependent students are the most difficult to engage. These students, I feel, tend to lack confidence so they tend to look for one-on-one help. During online discussions they seem to stay away from the "meat" of the subject to avoid making an error. Their replies can be vague. As an online instructor it is imperative to follow up with an engaging and direct question that initiates engagement.

In a classroom students and instructors have several ways to communicate as this module points out. Online we can lose the voice tone and expressions that help people connect and learn. I feel that because of this we need to be more in tune with discussions and take additional steps to engage and lead the class. Staying involved and attentive are a good beginning but posting questions that initiate thinking and research is what draws the student into learning. Students love to provide information that is accurate and helpful to others in the class. The best evidence I personally have of this is my own online music class. Never having taken music I enjoyed reading the posts of those students that had experience and the follow up questions of the instructor. I would research those topics and become involved and educated.

I believe that one of the key components of a successful online student is communication with the instructor. This module discusses building a relationship and I know from my own experience as an online student I felt more involved when the Instructor was engaging and responsive. I find with students my management of the course is easier and more successful the more involved I am. Students respond better and remain responsible to their assignments when they sense my presence. This is easier to manage and provides for a higher quality of education.

The courses I teach can be taken either synchronously (attending the Online class Webinar) or asynchronously (reviewing the recorded sessions and completing the assignments). Participation accounts for 20% of student's Grade. During Webinar's there is voice over PowerPoint content delivery, discussion questions and an opportunity for Q & A. Additionally, discussion questions are included in the weekly lessons. What are some of your "Best Practices" for evaluating participation Grades? Thanks. Jack

I have never built an online class from scratch but I am looking at developing one and so the information on the three main questions before getting started will definately help me. They were: 1. How will content be delivered? 2. How will students receive the content? 3. How will students be assessed in their knowledge of the content? a. What do students know? b. What can students do? Does anyone else have any suggestion on how to approach getting start with a new course. It feels a bit overwhelming a the moment.

Hi everyone! I am required to reach out to at risk students several times throughout the course to try and get them to engage in the course more actively. However, the problem is that even when I do reach out to the students, they rarely (if ever) respond to my outreach. Have any of you had any luck in successfully getting students to respond to outreach attempts? If so, what were your strategies? Thanks! Hannah

One of the thing I do for my online course is to keep a list of activities that is available in the course. I try to rotate between different activities and assessments to keep the course interesting for my students. For example, if week 1 has a written assignment,week 2 could be using a graphic organizer to assess their learning.

Twice a year I hold program advisory committees with peers in the medical field. They review the books currently being used, course syllabi, preview teaching techniques, power point etc. This feedback is reviewed by our curriculum chairperson and modifications are made as needed.

Last semester my college's system completely crashed. Fortunately I had kept hard copy grades for all of my students. (The system was eventually able to recover the information, but I was able to have all my final grades turned in on time because I had the back up hard copies.)

The composition of discussion forum questions is extremely important when trying to engage students. The discussions have to be easily understood while at the same time broad enough to allow many different perspectives.

I've found one of the most frustrating aspects of grading online discussion comments is getting the students to elaborate responses to include more than, "I completely agree" or "good point".

I learned early in my online teaching career that it is imperative to have hard deadlines for assignments. My second semester teaching I had 34 students in my communications class. Each week students had to complete three assignments as well as participate in three discussion boards. Assuming I could structure the homework deadlines similar to my campus classes I allowed students to hand in assignments late but they received a two percent grade deduction. The morning before I had to have all assignments graded I logged on to find I had 130 assignments waiting to be graded. Needless to say that weekend was a nightmare and I learned a very valuable lesson.

In the learning material they mentioned not to provide unrelated web links to students and I agree with that but I do provide a number of links to articles that are current events, related to the topics that we are studying. I find that students really enjoy this because we are applying concepts in our textbook to things happening in the econony, many times with companies that they recognize. I have found that the discussion postings increase because the students are interested.

The course gave us many good strategies for providing feedback to students and one thing that I do in every class is post in the announcements when I will complete grading. I typically let them know via announcement and chat sessions, that I plan to grade by Wednesday and if there is any problem and I'm not able to grade by Wednesday, I'll post an announcement. I also post announcements when I'm done grading so students don't wonder and worry. I've notice that this cuts down on the number of emails I receive. Are there strategies that you've developed in this area that you would like to share?

During the instruction I read the challenges with online instruction and noted the following list: 1. Lack of in-person contact with students. 2. Lack of interaction amongst students. 3. Little pride in work. 4. Limitations in some LMSs effectively discourage any form of critical thinking. 5. Too much grading and too much responsibility 6. Limited technological skills of students I really wanted to comment on #5 because I find grading to be very time consuming. I know how important substantive feedback is to students but it takes so long to grade individual assignments. I teach accounting so typically if the student gets a problem incorrect, I need to find where they went wrong and then give them guidance on how to correct their error. I have developed strategies like Word templates for each student senario so at least I don't have to start from scratch each time but I'm looking for suggestions. If you have any, please let me know. Thank you.

I really liked the idea of starting a FATQ - Frequently Asked Technology Questions. The suggestion in the training material included if a course is being taught for the first time, as students ask technology-based questions, the instructor should post the question and answer in the FATQ section. The second time the course is taught, the instructor can simply refer the students to the FATQ section to review questions; however, if additional questions occur, they can be added at that time. This is easy to do and would be a great time saver over multiple classes. Has anyone used this idea in practice? Was it helpful to students and did it save the instructor time?