I learned the basics of how an online course is set up. This course also reinforced the idea that I must have a good understanding of the material in my online courses before beginning any type of instruction. Without a good handle on how the CMS works prior to starting with the students, questions that arise as we proceed will be much more difficult to answer than they would be with just a little bit of extra prep time. I feel that it’s also necessary to make sure that any technical questions that arise on my part are better answered during my preparation because tech-support is typically asynchronous communication and not really able to be answered “on the fly“. I did like the tip on knowing how the different chat functions work so that you can remove people from the chat if they continually stray off topic or become problematic in someway. This can happen at times with online learning, and can be difficult to deal with if you have a good rapport with your students already.
