Michael Blue

I learned how to effectively manage noisy learners." Two possible ways of handling noisy learners in an asynchronous setting are: Send an e-mail to the learner advising him or her to remain on the existing thread until it is exhausted. Provide some personal attention by making a special request for the learner to provide some specific input into the discussion. If the learner continues to surf around, steer him or her back into the mainstream of the discussion." These can help me in the future.

Asynchronous discussions y help to maintain momentum in the course, by encouraging reflection, critical thinking, and more student involvement.

I learned "Four popular and effective ways of projecting your presence in an e-learning environment are: Initiate, lead, monitor, and manage synchronous discussion sessions. Oversee team projects. Participate in asynchronous discussion forums by offering your response to the discussion question and sharing with all participants a summary of their contributions. Answer student queries and provide informative and constructive feedback in a timely manner. A 24- hour turnaround time is generally acceptable." These are not unheard of ideas, this is a great reminder for myself.

I find it entertaining that the course tells one to familiarize themselves with the content prior to instruction, I hope we have not reached the point in education where teachers teach without knowledge......

"Online instructors should think about their role as a facilitator in active learning, and assist student in their progress towards being a critical thinker by giving guidelines, encouraging communication amongst students, and also by bringing different perspectives to class." This quote from the text gives an insight, after being an on-line student, and not teaching on-line it makes since why student engagement is so important.

The “flipped classroom.” The idea is inherently an active learning best practice for online education just as the text suggest. This also promotes students learning to teach the material which is more hands on!.

There are many misconceptions about on-line learning, one of them is that it is just easy, students do seem to expect to be force fed and given the answers. Making learning more active helps to correct both of these misconceptions.

On-line learning has many challenges and one of them is student engagement. This course has helped me to identify some areas in which I can improve my on-line teaching. On major part is that the students should interact with me more to improve their education journey.