Excellent Online Teaching: Effective Strategies For A Successful Semester Online

best advice he could give to online teachers was to “read, reread, and then reread your syllabus [again].” Try to see your course through the eyes of your students. This may be difficult, so bring in another set of eyes to help you out: a friend, your spouse,

If you have certain office hours and are open to taking phone calls, let them know when you are available that week. Be sure to post your phone number in the course site or in the email. - If you receive a particularly good question from a student, post it as a course-wide email or put it in an Assignment FAQ page.

I’d recommend turning group mode off for this discussion; that way everyone in the course can see and reply to all the questions that students post. Most discussion boards allow you to subscribe; this way you get an email alert whenever a student posts a new question. Now, this can get overwhelming and is unnecessary for most discussions, but this

Here’s what the revised assignment looked like: A. He assigned four book reviews for his history course.

Consider deploying a mid-course evaluation. Now this takes some courage, but the feedback you receive will be more valuable than the typical semester-end course evaluation.

You might write: “If you ever find that you didn’t get the feedback that you needed on an assignment, then email me. Just be sure to ask me specific questions about specific parts of your assignment. This is an important part of the learning process, so engage me on this.”

Grading Threaded Discussions – The 20/80 Approach The 20% - When grading your discussions, only enter comments for the 20% of students who have the lowest scores, the ones who really need some direction for improving their posts. Let them know what they were missing and specifically what they can do better next time. If you are using a rubric (a gr

During those busy weeks when you know your students are working on a major project, send out an email to let them know you’re available to help them. End your email with, “Simply reply to this email if you have any questions.”

Somewhere between 10-20% of students in an online course will show patterns of absence or disengagement. If this pattern is not addressed early in the course, these students are likely to remain detached the entire semester, and become Emergency Students.