Errol Sull

Okay -- while "You are bloody brilliant!" is a bit over the top the point here is that we, as online educators, must use every trick and educational strategy available to keep our students engaged, interested, and active in the course. If not the ugly word "attrition" comes into play, and it can hurt us by there not being enough students to have us teach a course. The Quiet students are the ones most likely to drop out, and we have to quickly prop them up -- they are like balloons that have come to our classes already partially deflated;… >>>

Reality-based education is a term I came up with several years ago, and it speaks to using the real worlds of the students to teach the subject matter. If a student is taught subject matter only with the thought of doing well in the course --to what end has that student learned the material? But when the student is shown how the subject of the course relates to his or her world of employment and personal life that two-dimensional course material becomes three-dimensional -- and the student has a much better chance of retaining the information because it has now… >>>

The heading for this thread is meant to draw attention to a crucial problem found in all subject areas in many online courses: the inability of supervisors, web and course developers, and administrators to put together courses that read well – i.e., good English – and stocked with a logical, clear, and easy-to-access set of assignments, lectures, discussion boards, et al. Again and again students will wander through a course and discover poor grammar and punctuation, spelling and proofreading errors, and vague content; assignments that are missing components, are not easy to understand, or don’t seem to match the readings;… >>>

We teach our students via a computer; at the other end students react to what we write, our suggestions, our presence, and our enthusiasm. These last two items -- presence and enthusiasm -- are especially critical, for these form the critical "blood supply" that keeps that umbilical cord pumping away between instructor and students; when the flow of this is weak or non-existent the students' interest, engagement, and excitement for the course soon dies, and thus their online learning experience becomes one that is wasted. We can write and suggest all over the place -- that's easy -- but to… >>>