Learning to Teach and Teaching to Learn: April 2018

Creating community can be a hurdle when teaching fully online classes. I’m a huge proponent of good online teaching. Online courses can be amazing. But I would definitely agree that creating community in distance learning means, not necessarily more work, but perhaps working outside our usual comfort zone.

Here are a couple of thoughts/tips for creating community and good practice in online teaching:

Encourage students to contribute to an introduction discussion post. As an instructor, I start the ball rolling with my own introduction and make it pretty light. I make sure to respond to each student’s introduction, even though this takes a bit of time but the pay off is huge.
Consider creating a “Coffee Shop” discussion thread where students can go to share their successes and struggles, and support and encourage each other.
Hold online office hours – choose a weekly time, even just an hour, when you will be available online to them. Most learning management systems (LMS), like Moodle or Blackboard, have an integrated video conferencing software. If you are comfortable with it, you can also use a chat tool (this is available in Moodle).
Poll your students early on. Create a survey for gathering general course evaluation information. Again most LMSs have a built in tool for this, for example, Moodle has the Feedback tool that works for this. Institutional course evaluations are great tools for moving forward with the next offering of the course but taking the temperature of the course early on can help your current students. This doesn't have to be overly complicated, for example, in F2F teaching, I use the snowball activity to gather information about one thing that is working and one thing that can be improved on as well as print survey. You could easily set up an anonymous Discussion post, where students can answer what is working well for them and one thing that can be improved on. It does take courage asking for feedback but often a little thing can easily be adjusted.
If you feel comfortable with this – try some video lectures. They don’t have to be super fancy, they can be quite simple, even a voice-over PowerPoint. This gives a more personal feeling to the class than just text on a page.
Try to build in some student collaboration – even if it’s just a simple assignment or project. I personally don’t make my group work grade heavy but I do encourage them to work together.
Think about standard assignments in a new way. In one class that I supported as instructional designer, the instructor had her students give a presentation using video conference. It wasn't any different than the webinars that many of us attend for professional development and allowed the students to hear each other and thus build connection.
Chris Riedel, in 9 Tips for Creating Sense of Community for Distance Learners, suggests creating a “compelling first impression” of creating a “course trailer” like a movie trailer. I like this idea. You don’t need a bunch of fancy tools for video work, most smart phones will make a simple video. I would encourage you to create a “script” of sorts beforehand though.