“Online teaching can be a bit of a juggling act,” says Oliver Dreon, PhD, associate professor in the School of Education at Millersville University of Pennsylvania.
Instructors must be able to handle student concerns, subject material, and delivery modality to create an interesting, engaging course.
In Six Practical Strategies to Improve Your Online Course, Dreon offers proven ideas for taking your online course to the next level and avoiding common student complaints about issues that impede true learning. This seminar explores:
Designing for social interaction
One common student complaint about online courses is a lack of interaction. Students get bogged down in uninspired reading and PowerPoint slides with little or no contact with the professor or fellow students. Dreon suggests providing multiple modes of interaction and making yourself available to students to encourage and facilitate communication in the course.
Establishing clear expectations
When students share their complaints about their least favorite online classes, one involves incomplete expectations, such as losing points for arriving at the correct answer to a problem but using a nonstandard method for getting there. Dreon discusses ways to give more complete explanations to students so they are clear on how points will be awarded.
Varying your assessment techniques
Students protest when classes are a never-ending series of clicking and responding after reading or viewing videos. Overusing the same approach can be boring for students and impede true engagement with the content. Dreon recommends several potential strategies for keeping students engaged during assessments, including giving students choices among several assessment types when appropriate.
Dreon discusses a total of six strategies in depth, giving examples and a sampling of student concerns to bring the challenges of the online classroom to life. Learn more about Six Practical Strategies to Improve Your Online Course. Now available on-demand.
