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Mapping Success: Essential Elements of an Effective Online Learning Experience

Danielle Hathcock, "Faculty Focus" September 5, 2012

"An online course is like walking into a foreign land with an entire map laid out, but having no sense of the land's origin or how to navigate the terrain. How the instructor formats and interacts with the class will ultimately determine the student's travel experience."

It is important to integrate the elements of an online course to form a cohesive whole that creates easy travel based on instructor presence, appropriate feedback, and easy navigation for students.

Instructor Presence - The Mapmaker
Instructor presence is vital to create in an online course, because without it, the class becomes an impersonal experience guided only by text and the other electronic medium.

Instructor presence can be created in a variety of ways:

• having a welcome announcement and faculty bio providing an initial presence


• having consistent formatting


• putting photos in the faculty bio and on the main introduction so that students could put a face to the instructor's name


• having the instructor provide his or her own icebreaker and having students relate theirs to it


• providing clear objectives for the course (and relating those to each lesson so that the expectations are clear)


• having the instructor take part in the discussions

Instructor Feedback - The Tour Guide
Instructor feedback is one of the most vital elements of an online course. Feedback helps the students recognize that there is an instructor that is monitoring their progress. Feedback adds an interactive component that brings warmth to the experience.

Feedback can be found in many areas.

• grades


• discussions - giving reinforcement as quickly as possible


• giving a quiz with a function that produces immediate correction.


• Email communication: let students know the time frame for answering emails


• online office hours

Last Thoughts
The feel of the course and the experience for the student will chiefly rest on the instructor's ability to provide a succinct, clear, accessible, course with guided direction--in other words, an accessible map made by a mapmaker who serves as the tour guide.

Danielle Hathcock, "Faculty Focus" September 5, 2012
http://www.facultyfocus.com/articles/online-education/mapping-success-essential-elements-of-an-effective-online-learning-experience/

"Twitter has come a long way since it first began back in 2006. From such humble roots as "found some fluff in my navel this morning" to "had cornflakes for breakfast, rather soggy", it is now the default source for news networks looking for a quick "public opinion" as well as the place where news actually breaks first before the established networks get a hold of it. Journalists and politicians now also consider it absolutely essential to have Twitter accounts so they can inform everyone of their opinions and what they're up to.

Twitter can be quite addictive but you have to do it the right way to get the most out of it."

http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/infographic-twitter-effectively/

How to Twitter Poster:
http://digg.makeuseof.com.s3.amazonaws.com/how-to-twitter.png

The Complete Guide to Twitter:
http://www.makeuseof.com/pages/download-guide-twitter

In this month's episode of Tech Therapy, The Chronicle's monthly technology podcast, Ronald A. Yaros, an assistant professor specializing in mobile journalism at the University of Maryland at College Park, describes an iPhone app he developed for his courses. He also talks about his vision for helping students prepare for a business world in which smartphones will very likely be the norm.

http://chronicle.com/blogs/techtherapy/2011/05/04/episode-83-teaching-students-to-be-smartphone-literate/

Info 3.0 App

If you are thinking of adding streamed audio and/or video presentations to your blended or online course, here are some things to consider.

1. Post complete text versions of the audio portion of the streamed presentations. My limited study suggests that student learning is most enhanced when students can study both streamed presentations and transcripts of the audio. You should encourage students to study both the presentations and the transcripts and advise them to avoid studying only the presentations.
2. Keep your presentations relatively short. I suggest keeping them under 15 minutes. If this is not sufficient to cover all the content for a given topic, then the content should be chunked at appropriate spots into several presentations. Each presentation should come with a table of contents that students can click on to navigate within the presentation.
3. Plan out the slide or video portion of the presentation first. This will allow you to focus on the main ideas that you want to emphasize, and it will provide you with an outline for developing the narration. You should make use of images to illustrate and represent ideas and arguments. This will allow you to present content in several modes.
4. Write out a script of the narration. Doing this will help you to organize your thoughts. It will also result in fewer audio mistakes, since you can add the narration by simply reading the script. Writing out the narration beforehand will also provide you with a text version of the narration that you can post to the course website.
5. Choose presentation software that allows you to easily edit the separate video and audio portions of the presentation and that in a few simple steps converts the presentation into a format for streaming over the Web.

By: Jerry Kapus, PhD in Asynchronous Learning and Trends

The four things that every professor can do "THIS WEEK" to make each course more student-friendly include:

1. Ensure that all readings, articles, presentations and videos (all course material) are available in the course management system.
2. "Create a weekly reading assessment that asks students to formulate or discuss the most important things you wanted them to get out the this week's articles."
3. "Make your syllabus a living document and let students know about changes via class emails - it will put your class in the forefront of their minds."
4. "Use technology to help students engage with one another - create peer review groups for papers or discussion groups online."

Lucretia Witte's research on Technology and Teaching:
http://www.insidehighered.com/blogs/technology_and_learning/a_student_s_views

How do we transform current teaching-centered practice to learning-centered practice, using the technologies of today?

The 10 rules included in this "Campus Technologies" article suggest the depth of change that's occurring on campuses right now.

1) Re-examine and adopt the move from teaching to learning.
2) Re-visit the accountability measures on your campus (student learning outcomes).
3) Make a corollary change in assessment.
4) Insist on teaching only in technology-enabled classrooms.
5) Make sure your students have technology management tools of their own.
6) Insist on faculty having management tools for their own professional development.
7) Do not discard the lecture or class discussion approach when appropriate.
8) Make sure your students have a digital repository of some sort (portfolio, wiki, blog, etc.)
9) Require your students to interpret their collected online evidence at regular intervals.
10) Make the collection of evidence the primary work in the course.

Read the entire article and comments.

You know when you do a Google search for something and the first hit comes up as a Wikipedia link . . . what do you do? I find that I read that page first. It gives me something to begin with, and usually, there are all kinds of links to useful resources on the subject.

Here's an article about using Wikipedia in the classroom that appeared in the Faculty Focus e-newsletter on May 26, 2010:

Wikipedia in the Classroom: Tips for Effective Use

By John Orlando, PhD

Most academics consider Wikipedia the enemy and so forbid their students from using Wikipedia for research. But here's a secret that they don't want you to know--we all use Wikipedia, including those academics.

There's a reason that the Wikipedia entry normally comes in at the top of a Google search. Google relies heavily on inbound links to rank a site, and Wikipedia is one of the most commonly linked sites on the Internet. Here's another secret--Wikipedia is vetted by volunteer academics. Wikipedia's motto is "no original thought," meaning that everything must be cited, and uncited material is quickly removed. In fact, studies have shown the Wikipedia is about as accurate as Britannica.

Here are two ways to use Wikipedia to improve learning outcomes in your classes:

Have Students Build Articles
In the Spring of 2008, Professor Jon Beasley-Murray at University of British Columbia had the students in his class "Murder, Madness, and Mayhem: Latin American Literature in Translation" create articles for Wikipedia on the books that they read. He transformed his students from learners to teachers, which improves outcomes. Plus, creating public work improves motivation as well as performance.

Importantly, the students were instructed to make contact with the Wikipedia editors--called the "FA Team"--to receive feedback on their work for revisions. The instructor had effectively enlisted outside academics as reviewers for his class. Wikipedia also has a quality ranking system that assigns "Good Article" or "Featured Article" status to exceptionally good works. About 1 in 800 articles reach Good Article status, while 1 in 1,200 reach Featured Article status. The instructor guaranteed his students an "A" for Good Articles, and an A+ for Featured Articles.

The results? The students, who worked in groups of two or three, produced three Featured Articles and eight Good Articles, an exceptional result given how few articles achieve these levels. These articles receive thousands of hits per month, demonstrating to students the value of their work. Now more than 20 universities have projects in Wikipedia.

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Host a Course on Wikiversity
Wikimedia--the non-profit foundation that created Wikipedia--also hosts nine other wiki projects, including: Wikibook (free textbooks), Wikispecies (dictionary of species), and Wikiquote (compilation of quotes). One interesting site is Wikiversity, which provides a space for hosting courses or other content. An instructor can build a course page with syllabi, lesson plans, and other material for the students to access whenever they need it. That page can also be linked to other educational material such as videos.

Best yet, students can be given editing access to the page to add their own material. Groups can be assigned to add material to the course, such as resources for further exploration of the topics. Another option is to have the students build self-tests on the material using free web-based quiz functions for future students. This will enlist the students in an ongoing project of developing knowledge that outlives their particular class and is passed on to future generations of students.

Resources

The Latin American Literature Project

Guide for university projects

Listing of university projects

Guide for peer review of articles

Wikiversity

John Orlando, PhD, is the Program Director for the online Master of Science in Business Continuity Management and Master of Science in Information Assurance programs at Norwich University. John develops faculty training in online education and is available for consulting at jorlando@norwich.edu.

Asynchronous learning, or teaching and learning that occurs when the interaction between the instructor and students is not constrained by time and place, can cause feelings of isolation, resulting in disappointment and low retention rates in online classes. Below are links to proven collaborative learning techniques you can use in the online classroom to promote social interaction and have a positive influence on learning, motivation, and problem-solving.

• Considerations for Your Wiki Projects
• Three Ways to Increase the Quality of Students' Discussion Board Comments
• How Wikis Streamline Student Collaboration Projects
• Should You Let Students Lead Discussion Boards?
• Synching up with Your Asynchronous Learners
• Questioning Styles for More Effective Discussion Boards
• Understanding the Instructor's Role in Facilitating Online Discussions
• Eight Tips for Facilitating Effective Online Discussion Forums
• How to Engage Online Students in Meaningful Discussion
• Promoting Early, Active Discussion in Online Courses

This information and many other useful tips and techniques for faculty can be found at Faculty Focus: http://www.facultyfocus.com/