Small Teaching Online: Applying Learning Science in Online Classes

by Flower Darby

[G]ood teaching does not spring naturally from a particular modality. A good course on campus is not good because of the location or traditional brick-and-mortar ambiance. Likewise, a weak online course is not weak because it is delivered via the internet. Good teaching in any learning environment requires careful attention to course design and facilitation. (Riggs, 2019, p. 4)

Good teachers always seek to improve their classes.

Summative assessments such as final exams, papers, and projects allow students to demonstrate their mastery of our course learning objectives. Formative assessments such as low-stakes quizzes or weekly reflections help us to know whether students are making good progress.

We can send emails, make announcements, and otherwise beg our students to pay attention to course requirements, but these methods may not be enough.

create an online activity in the first week that requires students to familiarize themselves with the final assessment and – more importantly – to do something with it.

In other words, when we give students a cognitive task at the beginning of the semester, before they have learned the skills they will need to complete it, we are creating that “fertile ground” for their learning throughout the semester.

Remember to provide captions, a text transcript, or a text-based outline for any videos in your online class (Tobin and Behling, 2018).

https://tilthighered.com.

Three Takeaways

Equip your students with the necessary tools and supplies to help them reach the final destination.

Using written instructions, video announcements, and weekly reminders, help students clearly see the purpose behind course activities and assessments.

Require an end-of-module or post-assessment reflection in which students evaluate how well they achieved module objectives, or what they might do differently next time.

Students in online courses, just like students in face-to-face courses, can have trouble both understanding the purpose of their assignments and course activities and managing them successfully.

Break down your big assignments into manageable chunks, help students pace their work, and provide meaningful feedback along the way. The quality of student learning will improve without a doubt.

Here's one way you can structure this process in your online class. Create an assignment at the beginning of each module, which is the only thing that students see in the module.

Some faculty don't engage in online discussion forums with their students, but doing so fosters both cognition and student engagement.

Create several mini-assignments that become the cumulative assessment in the class.

Create conditional release assignments that guide students' learning, let them know whether they've mastered course concepts, and help students discover connections between class activities.

Every decision you make in designing your online course should extend from the learning objectives you have designed for your course.

Their findings led to a strong recommendation that online class videos should be no longer than six minutes.

At the risk of overgeneralizing, many students will not watch even the most engaging, informative, or important video if there is no accountability for doing so.

Create short, three- to five-minute mini-lecture videos.

Online courses require deliberate attention to all three potential relationships in the course: the one you have with your students, the one your students have with you, and the one the students have with each other.

Vygotsky labeled the space between the student's current state of knowledge and the potential state of knowledge they might achieve with the help of peers as the zone of proximal development.

One of the simplest ways to make your presence known is by posting frequent text or video announcements.

Oops Token,

These separate but related issues – teachers not providing feedback in a timely way, and students not having clear avenues to request or receive that feedback – contribute to a regrettably common experience of online students: feeling unsupported, on their own, with no real sense of how they are doing or how to get their questions answered when they have them.

Nudge: Improving Decisions about Health, Wealth, and Happiness

Nudges are becoming more widely used, and studied, in teaching in higher education.

Goals Contract

Offer Choice in Online Discussions

Creating choice in online discussions is quite simple, though it requires a bit of creativity to devise multiple possible discussion questions for each module.

In some weeks I require students to record a video instead of writing their post. In other weeks, in line with Universal Design for Learning (UDL) principles, I tell them that they can choose whether to record or write.

Specs Grading

Specs Grading does,

Oops Token to be allowed to resubmit the task, and from then on invest a whole lot more effort to produce work that is up to snuff.

Specifications Grading

Provide multiple topics and questions in online discussion prompts.

Some teachers might view all of these connections to the lives of students as superfluous to student mastery of the content.

As an online instructor, you have to work more deliberately to create those moments of excitement and renewed energy for your teaching.

Center for Teaching and Learning.

Two of the current leading rubrics are the Quality Matters (QM) Higher Education Rubric and OSCQR, affectionately known as “Oscar,” the Open SUNY (State University of New York) Course Quality Review Rubric.

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