Faculty to Faculty – Tips For Teaching Online
This new segment features online teaching tips from some of the UF’s finest faculty. This edition of “Faculty to Faculty” features tips from Dr. Rusti Brandman, Professor Emeritus from the College of Fine Arts. Dr. Brandman has just finished teaching the online pilot of Dance Appreciation for the 21st Century which was re-designed through the Provost’s E-learning Initiative.
Teaching online courses presents both challenges and opportunities. During the course of the semester of building and teaching DAN 2100 Dance Appreciation for the 21st Century, we discovered many of each. Here are some ideas for instructors of future courses.
Building Before You Teach
First and foremost, build the course as completely as possible before teaching it.
- Much more detail must be put in writing or other permanent form than for the conventional course.
- Online, it is highly desirable to have all the information ready to go before the class gets to the lesson to head off the myriad of questions via email, etc.
- If you build while you are teaching you will have little time to monitor discussions and the like and you will only get to “know” the students that have the questions. It also means that you won’t have the opportunity to trouble shoot course materials, tools, etc before the fact and will have to spend a lot of extra time putting out fires.
Responding To Students
Set up times when you will be on the course website to address questions as well as to grade, etc.
- Let the students know how soon they can expect answers to their questions. Students appreciate prompt replies and it helps them to complete their assignments on time.
- Since we were building while teaching there were lots of issues to address at the beginning and I was on line all the time and dealt with student questions as often as possible to avoid having them fall seriously behind right away.
Progress Reports
For any long term project, I’d recommend a provision for progress reports or turning in components along the way. We didn’t do this and I found it onerous to check up daily to see if the groups were getting underway.
Choosing the Right Format For Quizzes
In setting up quizzes, double check the questions. I recommend making them all multiple choice or true false. The quiz self-grading for short answer will take case and punctuation into consideration and it is often difficult to predict exactly how the question will be correctly answered. (E.g.; answer is Isadora Duncan but you would be happy to accept Duncan. The test will count it wrong if it does not appear exactly as you have written.
If you want some short or long answers and can deal with hand grading, don’t set the quiz to randomize so that you can find the question that needs your attention.
Grade Book Tips
When creating an assignment, etc., I suggest NOT checking release to student /create grade book column until you are sure that you have everything set the way you want it. The E-Learning grade book columns can be difficult to modify.
Decide on a format for naming the columns/assignments, etc., make the names short enough to see the whole thing in the column and be consistent.
Create a calculated total column that allows students to see their point totals quarterly. This lets students know whether they are in trouble before it is too late to save their semester grade.
Conclusion
Perhaps most important, you, your students and your department chair/school director need to realize that just as much time is required to actually (as opposed to observe/monitor) an online course as a conventional one.
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Tags: Instructional Design, Teaching Online
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Posted on Thursday, February 5th, 2009.