Small Teaching Online Quotes

“I prefer scheduling either mandatory or as-needed conversations with individual students.”
― Flower Darby, Small Teaching Online: Applying Learning Science in Online Classes

“If you've ever picked up the phone to call a colleague after exchanging 12 emails without making progress on the topic, you'll know how effective it can be to have a quick conversation. When we talk to each other, we can answer questions, clarify misunderstandings, address issues, and reach consensus. Achieving resolution can take much less time when speaking by phone as opposed to a seemingly endless back-and-forth by email.”
― Flower Darby, Small Teaching Online: Applying Learning Science in Online Classes

“Jim has taken to dividing the comments on his students' major assessments into two categories, which are clearly labeled “This Time” and “Next Time.” The comments under “This Time” focus on assessing their performance on the completed assessment; “Next Time” comments give students instructions for how to improve. Similarly, Flower's categories are labeled “Strengths” and “For Improvement.” The comments under “Strengths” highlight what the student is doing well; “For Improvement” comments provide specific ideas for, well, improving.”
― Flower Darby, Small Teaching Online: Applying Learning Science in Online Classes

“The first kind of feedback relates more to summative assessments, which are the judgments we make about student performance; the second kind relates more to formative assessments, which are the opportunities we provide for students to try their hand at a task and get feedback on it before they are measured for their high-stakes grades.”
― Flower Darby, Small Teaching Online: Applying Learning Science in Online Classes

“It's not even enough for students to work with you. They must work with each other, too, to learn and succeed in our online classes.”
― Flower Darby, Small Teaching Online: Applying Learning Science in Online Classes

“The teacher begins by establishing her presence in the design of a learning experience through taking into account the actual learners who will be in the course, and builds into the structure of the course plenty of opportunities to engage with those learners through direct instruction and feedback. But a well-designed course will also provide opportunities (and incentives) for learners to interact with one another, both to help each other learn and to build that sense of community. When these two forms of presence have been established, the learners in the course are more likely to engage in the kinds of active, collaborative processes that help them construct new knowledge through their cognitive presence.”
― Flower Darby, Small Teaching Online: Applying Learning Science in Online Classes

“I can highly recommend The Online Teaching Survival Guide for a practical treatment of concepts and approaches we touch on in this text.”
― Flower Darby, Small Teaching Online: Applying Learning Science in Online Classes

“Don't bring in graphics except those with a substantive connection to what you are trying to teach. Pictures for pictures' sake make your lesson prettier, but less effective”
― Flower Darby, Small Teaching Online: Applying Learning Science in Online Classes

“ASU's TeachOnline website”
― Flower Darby, Small Teaching Online: Applying Learning Science in Online Classes

“Guo's research actually showed that students engage less with formal professionally edited videos. So set aside half an hour at your desk and record your own content without worrying too much about high production value or perfectly polished delivery.”
― Flower Darby, Small Teaching Online: Applying Learning Science in Online Classes

“When thinking about how to incorporate lecture videos, many online faculty imagine posting videos of their classroom lectures in the course. This is certainly one way to do it, and some institutions are investing in elaborate lecture-capture systems to facilitate this process. But lecture capture requires expensive tech and a team of skilled professionals. The small teaching way is to record short narrated slideshow videos or webcam-style videos speaking directly to the camera on your computer monitor. The key word here is short. “Traditional in-person lectures usually last an hour, but students have much shorter attention spans when watching educational videos online,” writes Philip Guo in a blog post about a study he and his colleagues conducted (Guo, 2013). The researchers compiled data from 6.9 million video-watching sessions to track engagement patterns of online students. Their findings led to a strong recommendation that online class videos should be no longer than six minutes.”
― Flower Darby, Small Teaching Online: Applying Learning Science in Online Classes

“Miller argues, some uses of multimedia in teaching have been shown to detract from learning, instead of supporting or enhancing it. For example, if you are showing a slide presentation to students, and narrating over your slides – as you might do for a simple video in an online course – the impact on student learning might well depend on how you decide to handle the content of the slides. Simply reading the words on the slides can produce what the research calls the redundancy effect, which will actually hurt student learning; but you can err at the other extreme as well, and interfere with learning by not paying enough attention to the slides. What works best – Miller describes it as the “Goldilocks” principle – is a close but not perfect relation between slides and narration, and when the narration occurs in conversational language (Miller, 2014, p. 154).”
― Flower Darby, Small Teaching Online: Applying Learning Science in Online Classes

“Noted educator and author José Bowen often makes the point that the tennis net doesn't grade your swing. I heard Bowen speak in November 2018 at the Professional and Organizational Development (POD) Network in Higher Education conference, and he discussed the importance of the kind of nonevaluative feedback that a tennis net provides. The net doesn't assign points based on your performance. It provides feedback. Either your ball sails over it or the ball hits the net and bounces back to you. But the net doesn't give you a grade (Bowen, 2018). You can use conditional release to achieve the same purpose: help students get feedback on their learning without necessarily assigning points.”
― Flower Darby, Small Teaching Online: Applying Learning Science in Online Classes

“Understanding by Design, Grant Wiggins and Jay McTighe propose taking a similar approach to the design of educational experiences. They suggest beginning the process of teaching a course by thinking about the end first.”
― Flower Darby, Small Teaching Online: Applying Learning Science in Online Classes

“We should make our small decisions about teaching based on the best research we have about how humans learn.”
― Flower Darby, Small Teaching Online: Applying Learning Science in Online Classes

“Aristotle famously argued, for example, that one grandiose virtuous action does not make a person virtuous; we become virtuous by practicing virtue on an everyday basis.”
― Flower Darby, Small Teaching Online: Applying Learning Science in Online Classes

“students who are organized, good at planning, good at managing their time, disciplined, aware of the need to seek help when appropriate, and resilient will fare better in asynchronous online classes”
― Flower Darby, Small Teaching Online: Applying Learning Science in Online Classes

“Good teaching in any learning environment requires careful attention to course design and facilitation.”
― Flower Darby, Small Teaching Online: Applying Learning Science in Online Classes