Dawn Davies

While education is a two way street, it is essential to be clear and provide appropriate guidance.  Help as much as possible with time management, giving concrete guidelines as to how to manage time.   Tell students not just the assignments but the expected time for each assignment, by week if possible.  Help with communication as much as possible.

Social media is different than social networking, which can be useful in online learning.  Just because a student says they have the technical skills online to work in your course does not actually mean that they do.  Having a screener for technical and online skills is a good idea, even if you might consider the skills to be basic.   

Communication must be CPA Clear Professional and Appropriate.  Model this and expect your students will spend more time reading and writing in an onilne class than they would in a F2F class.   Consider an exit ticket at the beginning of a synchronous class so students will focus on contributions to the class.   Develop a learner community that is more hands on and allows for experience of the participants to be a contributing factor. 

Teachers need to personally assess their skills and develop compensatory strategies.  One hour online of instruction typically takes 10-20 hours of preparation offline.  Expect students to set aside 3-5 hours per week for readings, and other contributions to an online class.  Be creative in how you support special needs students.  Student motivation is the biggest factor in online success so praise early and often and make the first few assignments those they can easily accomplish.

Rubrics are concise easy to understand ways of communicating expectations of student communication.  Don't make them too heavy or they could stifle communication.   They work with ranges of points 01 for low, say 2-3 for medicum, 4-5 for high in each area.  The rubrics should be published early.   A community of learners can ask each other questions that relate to their backgrounds only when they are feeling comfortable, and that is often the sign of a community.    Communication and collaboration are hand in hand and the two levels to consider in communication.

Most students in online classes already need to be good communicators and good with time management and have strong executive functioning skills.  Online courses may be more convenient, but they are not, generally speaking, easier.   Make clear if you can up front what the time commitment from the course is expected to be.  Then students need to find a way to carve out that time from their own schedules.  

Having a pattern of communication makes the communication transparent to the students.   Explicitly state what you expect the communication to look like, up front, and what value appropriate communication might add to the student's grade.    Rubrics can be useful for that, but at least a statement about what is expected, clearly, is important.   Make clear when you will check email or other communication, including whether you are available on weekends.  

I have never used social media, because I have children who would not be able to use it effectively.   However, it can be useful as it has already the structures in place for an online classroom, for instance, to be created.  But blocking unwanted intruders might be tricky.  There are platforms that are classroom replicators on Adobe Presenter, but the communication is lagged.  VoIP migh be used as a classroom tool, but there is lag time there as well. 

Remember to holld onto the course history, but I disagree with the course conclusion that the appropriate storage site is the LMS.  What if the LMS is no longer available?   Lot of us are taking opportunities for free courses, but what happens at the end of, say, 90 days, when the costs of those services start?   That can be a surprise to many.   

How you handle student communications is vital to the success of the course.  Let students have their conversations, but ensure you re only askingthe open ended questions, not monitoring every response.   Students need to be guided, but given flexibility.  Emails are for supplying information about the structure of the course.  Discussion boards should contain more substantive material related to the coursework.