Going Online

Published by Kim Johnson on 16.03.2020

With COVID 19 now a worldwide pandemic, many of us have had to move our live classes online. Hopefully your university has provided you with adequate tools and education to perform your work in a different environment. As many of you know, online teaching is very different from live teaching. Even synchronous classes in a videoconferencing environment are different from live classes.

We have compiled a few tips and resources for those of you that are new to working in this environment. We assume that some of you will provide classes pretty much the same as you always have but deliver lectures via video rather than in person. For others, you may have to move to an online learning platform and offer your course in an asynchronous manner. Whatever your platform, or technology capabilities, engaging students in an online environment is very different; some would say it is much harder. Good luck and share your stories with me johnsonk@icuddr.org .

There is an online learning consortium that might be useful to you: https://onlinelearningconsortium.org/ They have a webinar on March 26 on how to quickly switch from live to online learning: https://onlinelearningconsortium.org/webinar/how-to-survive-your-hurried-switch-to-online-delivery-using-udl/ .

Here is advice from 17 professors experienced in online teaching for those who are new to the concept:

https://www.insidehighered.com/digital-learning/article/2017/11/15/peer-advice-instructors-teaching-online-first-time. This advice is from Inside Higher Ed which has many other helpful and interesting articles to help academics survive these tumultuous times. (We are reading about how to move your conference online, just in case we still can’t travel in July: https://www.insidehighered.com/advice/2020/03/16/how-shift-your-conference-online-light-coronavirus-opinion . ) They also have an online instruction guide and links to a number of publications: https://www.insidehighered.com/digital-learning/article/2017/07/12/7-guidelines-effective-teaching-online .

Here are some highly cited academic papers regarding engaging students in online courses:

Angelino, L. M., Williams, F. K., & Natvig, D. (2007). Strategies to engage online students and reduce attrition rates. Journal of Educators Online, 4(2), n2.

Dixson, M. D. (2010). Creating effective student engagement in online courses: What do students find engaging?. Journal of the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning, 1-13.

Anderson, A., Huttenlocher, D., Kleinberg, J., & Leskovec, J. (2014, April). Engaging with massive online courses. In Proceedings of the 23rd international conference on World wide web (pp. 687-698).

Kauffman, H. (2015). A review of predictive factors of student success in and satisfaction with online learning. Research in Learning Technology, 23.

We have posted these articles to the resources section of our website