"Effective online instructional practices may be applied to online and blended college courses. Carefully orchestrated online discussions support learning well beyond the limited face-to-face course time. Students gain greater depth of academic understanding and leadership skills if cooperative learning groups use research-based process and structure ."
"The following post was created as a way to introduce online instructors to some general best practices when beginning a course. Grounded in educational research literature, the practices and descriptions below offer an overview that will help instructors reinvigorate their beginning of semester activities."
"Students need much more support and feedback in the online environment than in a traditional course. This is because the potential threat that students feel alienated is quite high in the Virtual Classroom. Using effective feedback strategies will enable the instructor to identify and meet individual student needs as well as encourage students to participate and continue to participate at a high quality level. Here are strategies for providing feedback in the Virtual Classroom:"
Engaging the Learner & Building Community, Online Discussion, Promising Teaching Strategies, Teaching Critical Skills, Assessment, Testing & Grading and Web 2.0 Tools
"This Blended Learning Toolkit is a free, open resource for educational institutions interested in developing or expanding their blended learning initiatives."
"This table presents examples of the kinds of activities that can be used to assess different types of learning objectives, and the ways that we can analyze or measure performance to produce useful feedback for teaching and learning. The categorization of learning objectives is taken from the revised Bloom’s Taxonomy."
"Assessment need not take time away from learning; assessments can be learning experiences in themselves. Active assessment strategies enhance student content understanding and promote skills that will be beneficial to students throughout their lives. The ability to see the big picture, develop effective oral and written reports and the ability to work cooperatively with their peers are skills that are promoted by active assessment. In this module you can access the following Assessment strategies:"
"There are a variety of teaching strategies that instructors can use to improve student learning. The links below will show you some ways to make your classes more engaging. "
As distance education becomes increasingly popular, instructors and administrators are working hard to improve students’ online learning experience. Although, the dynamics of online learning experiences in an educational setting have been well studied, the use of virtual teams presents a set of problems in relation to how physical, temporal and social separation of learners affect learners’ learning processes. This paper is a case study reporting an action research project investigating the experiences of using virtual teams in a new Organisational Psychology unit at a regional Australian university. Online group challenges were identified with potential solutions to these challenges trialed during the action research cycle.
research papers on teaching composition online- asynchronous synchronous discussions