Allowing time for small talk is crucial to providing a good online learning experience. Offering time for small talk at the beginning of class and closing remarks at the end will engage the students in a deeper more meaningful way.
Interaction is likely to be higher when learners are rewarded for their efforts than in situations in which no marks are awarded. Ensure that each learner experiences your presence in his or her learning experience. You should also seek feedback from students on a regular basis. Solicit student feedback about how the course is progressing. Are they getting out of the course what they want? Is the course fulfilling their expectations? Are there some things you are doing that they do not like?
Learning the difference between asynchronous and synchronous discussions. Knowing the different learning styles and how to apply them to students, and how to approuch students who start to fallback.
It was interesting learning the difference between asynchronous and synchronous discussions. This gave me a deeper understanding as to why synchronous discussions should not be utilized for critical course content. The list of learning styles was interesting and how to help the three types of learners that are avoidant, competitive and dependent. It was good to hear how to encourage and identify the shy learner.
I learned about the disadvantages of synchronous online discussions.
I have learned how to keep students engaged in discussions and how to properly provide feedback on those dicussions.How to figure what students are having difficulty in online discussions and how to address it.
Knowing a students learning sltyle or styles can help the instructor when it comes to participation. Strategies such as small group projects can help those learners with low participation.
I have learned from this module that it is important for the instructor to understand the population as well as demographics. Having a small bit of information about your student can serve as the conduit to promote participation among e-learners that may have an avoidant learning style. Moving forward, being cognizant of homeostasis of learner participation within the classroom is a priority.
Learning should be something that should be introduced as synchronous and asynthronous for each learning type. Each and every post should be considered important given the time and response they deserve.
It was interesting to review the different student learning styles. The learning styles are:
1. Avoidance
2. Competitive
3. Dependent
4. Collabrative
5. Participant
6. Independent
Clearly students have many different learning styles
I learned in this module that there is a clear difference between synchronous and asynchronous learning.
Clearly asynchronous learning is the best way for Online instruction
What I learned in this module was about the Bergquist and Phillips (1975) propose that student exhibit various learning styles. 1) Avoidant 2) Competitive 3) Dependent 4) Collaborative 5) Participant and 6) Independent. This information was very useful, because it taught me how to distinguish and be careful with avoidant, competitive and dependent student learning styles.
Engaging learners in the online discussion forum can be time consuming but exciting as an instructor. Reading all the posts, keeping track of student responses and who I have responded to (via excel spreadsheet), making sure their content is appropriate, relevant and applicable to course content, performing my own research about the topic discussed- this can all take time. However, probing students by asking additional questions, application questions, stating what I liked most about their response, etc. engages the students and improves confidence and promotes further discussion. This it the "meat" of the course.
When learning online, feedback allows the learner to assess their progress and determine potential areas of self-improvement. It promotes self-reflection, increases knowledge retention, and encourages constructive discussion with instructors or other online learners.
Sycchronous Real time and one on one Discussion.Very interesting.
We have a Weekly topic discussions and also I schedule a weekly Zoom Live lecture meeting with them and its recorded so for those students that cannot attend they may view and listen to it anytime. I find that students are very active on both.
Synchronous discussions work best one-on-one.
Asynchronus discussions are best used when involving all or multiple students. Synchronus discussions should be conducted with one student. Both are largely driven and motivated by the instructor.
Instructors need to have a solid understanding of how to facilitate asynchronous discussions. In my experience I have been both a student and an instructor in courses where the discussion boards were not robust leading to feelings of isolation. These situations increase failure and drop rates, and greatly influences retention and graduation rates in online programs. It would be ideal to have synchronous components to classes, which many schools are utilizing now, but there are disadvantages to this approach especially for the student that requires maximum scheduling flexibility. It is also helpful to identify the different learning styles of the students as well as their personalities. Some will be overbearing and very active while others do little more than lurk on the discussion boards. It is also vital for instructors to provide timely feedback to the student so they can incorporate that feedback into future assignments and posts.
We use Teams right now for cirtual teaching so we have a lot of synchrenous discussions becasue the entire class is on there at one time. If we were strictly on a LMS I would see the merrit of using discussion boards, however, we do our discussions face-to-face virtually.
