This post features a collection of carefully selected resources specific to teaching online; geared to educators seeking skill development for creating meaningful online discussions, communicating effectively with students, and providing constructive feedback.
This is the second article in a series featuring select instructional resources—I’m in the process of building a bank of resources accessible from this blog geared to educators seeking skill development in facilitating and designing online courses. Over time I’ll be adding to the Resources section with the goal of sharing high-quality, relevant and helpful resources. This post includes resources grouped by topic with a brief description of each, and an icon indicating its type. For the list of previously featured resources and/or for the icon legend please refer to the resources tab of this site.
IV. Personalized Instructor Feedback and Interactions with Online Students
The level of instructor involvement [or not] in online learning environments is a controversial topic in the education sector. With automated grading programs and LMS platforms that provide automated, yet ‘personalized’ feedback based on student response scores, log-on and key stroke patterns, a growing camp of educators are convinced that learning is not comprised in the absence of an instructor—and is even improved with programmed feedback. Intuitively, I disagree. I see the need for personal interaction and support from an experienced and interested educator. In this section I’ve included a collection of resources that support the premise that interaction and feedback are critical to student success.
1. This literature review paper explores far more than instructor feedback and interaction in online learning spaces, yet it is worthy to include here given it addresses current research concerned with online learning effectiveness in terms of learners’ interactions with their instructors and classmates. The specifics can be found on pages five through eighteen: Learning Effectiveness Online: What the Research Tells Us, Swan, K (2003).
2. Giving feedback and interacting with students in the online classroom is no less important in the virtual realm than in face-to-face; yet doing so requires instructors to be strategic and purposeful in their communication with students, and requires a different perspective. This three-minute clip, Interact with Students featuring the program chair from Penn State World Campus, summarizes how and why faculty involvement with students online differs from, and is just as crucial as in face-to-face classrooms.
3. I wrote a blog post, ‘Speaking’ to Students with Audio Feedback in Online Courses about providing feedback to online students using audio feedback for student assignments in place of written feedback. The idea came from a communications professor that I follow on Twitter who had great success with this method; her students loved it. Apparently so do many other students [and instructors] based upon the feedback and reaction from readers. The post explains how-to give audio feedback and what tools to use. The comments within the post are also helpful.
4. This web article provides three solid strategies for communicating with online students, as a class and individually. Though not specific to skill development for educators, there is helpful information here including how to use a rubric for structuring feedback for students: How to Provide Fair and Effective Feedback in Asynchronous Courses, Gruenbaum, E. (2010).
V. Fostering Asynchronous Student Discussions
1. Asynchronous discussions that are incorporated into curriculum for online courses can build student engagement and support higher levels of achievement and learning. However in order that forum discussions are successful and not viewed as busy work by students, discussions must be thoughtfully planned before the course begins, and need to be facilitated and monitored once the course is underway. This peer-reviewed article provides the foundational knowledge that educators require to construct the conditions, parameters, and student guidelines for successful and meaningful synchronous discussions: Essential Elements in Designing Online Discussions to Promote Cognitive Presence — A Practical Experience.
2. This six-minute video, Conducting effective online discussions from the COFA series Learning to Teaching Online, provides educators with skill development and strategies for managing and facilitating effective online discussions and how to engage students in the process. I can’t say enough about this series from COFA—skill development in a concise format, honed to specific topics, that can be accessed easily by educators for their own skill development when needed.
3. There are several essential elements inherent to successful asynchronous discussions, and this web article, 5 Tips for Hosting Online Class Discussions, summarizes the five core elements, including the need to grade student contributions. From my experience, assigning a grade for discussion contributions is necessary to foster participation in for-credit classes, including using a rubric that outlines expectations which increases the chances for a higher quality level of contributions.
Closing
As mentioned previously, this is the second post where I’ve shared a set of resources, and I’ve been encouraged by the number of positive responses and excellent suggestions. Thank you! There’s more to come, and in my next post that features resources, I’ll share ones specific to instructional design and pedagogy.
Online Learning Insights 
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Hi Debbie, very good point about getting the public involved. Without some clear notion of what education is “for” or how it displays itself and enriches society there will be no pressure on policy makers to stop pushing administrators to cut costs and increase efficiencies. With the hard evidence formula of education equals income enhancement slipping away there’s a need to emphasize the soft values which are much harder to promote. Maybe we could drop the “you’ll understand why knowing this is important later” warning to get students to pay attention and explain why it’s important now? That way students could understand why using their mind matters and has a positive effect on their lives. Might make them better adults too.
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Pingback: OTR Links 08/31/2013 | doug --- off the record
Thanks for the resources. If we expect people to perform beyond repeating procedures it’s important to add the human back into the learning mix. The trick is to get the public to understand that extra that deepens understanding. Where I live it seems education is perceived as a filing cabinet full of instruction manuals on the proper assembly of a “needed skill.” Higher education features thicker manuals but never goes beyond the doing-the-job level. It’s an empty system but very efficient at running in circles while advancing the cause of sameness. I’ve heard that the fewer people involved in the process of transferring knowledge the lower the probability that curiosity will break out and spoil the orderliness of the whole project.
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Hi Scott
Great to hear from you! I agree — getting the public involved in what is going on in higher education is critical – yet one of the problems appears to be getting people (policy makers, other stakeholders etc), what the purpose of higher education is, what it means to be educated, what are the options etc. I agree to that the system appears mired in sameness, at least in terms of resisting change. Interesting perspective too your thought on the transfer of knowledge.
Thanks for you comment Scott.
Debbie
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