Online Teaching Strategies, Presented at ELI Meetings

The presentation will give a development perspective to incorporating a virtual field trip into a newly created online entomology course. The field trip in the traditional course took students to a local farm to uncover the varying species of bugs at the farm, as well as where they lived and what they ate. As the course went online, the 3D virtual environment enabled virtual students to share experiences similar to those of the traditional students while learning the same content.

To enhance the learning experience of a term paper, students were required to publish their papers in Wikipedia. Publishing for a large audience provided authentic feedback and encouraged students to do their best work. Using Wikipedia also allowed students to connect with a vibrant community and share their knowledge by making their papers publicly accessible.

Critique_It is an online virtual classroom critique system originally developed at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in Croquet and ported to Second Life. The critique is a rudimentary instructional methodology in the arts that can be applied to most other disciplines. Critique_It provides an environment for simulating authentic learning strategies and allowing the possibility for feedback from peers and experts from outside the campus.

An online virtual case-based management system was developed to provide an interactive learning portal using simulated case scenarios, collaborative learning, decision support, and real-time assessment of student motivation and decision skills. Learn how to dynamically create and implement online case scenarios using virtual characters, speech, and other media-rich content.

The use of blogging in education has become a hot topic. This presentation will demonstrate how blogging was used as a learning tool in an online literature course and discuss how the use of blogging supports current online learning theories.

This session will provide an overview of a collaborative model for the design and support of effective online courses developed by a faculty member, an instructional designer, and a librarian. Find out how collaboration can draw upon and enhance individual expertise, model positive social presence, and facilitate the development of effective cognitive and teaching presence as described by Garrison, Anderson, and Archer’s community of inquiry framework.

- An instructional design model which incorporates the availability of re-usable learning objects, while emphasizing faculty 'ownership' of learning design and feedback for their students. Learning tasks are the design focus, with lectures, online learning objects, etc. as topic and tool resources for creating task deliverables.
- A workshop series for faculty to develop their initial online learning tasks and to think through the implications for redesigning class time for enriched interactions. The workshop includes a 'before and after' snapshot to show how the workshop itself was re-organized with online learning tasks to enhance face-to-face time. This builds on work at the University of Notre Dame by Barbara Walvoord and colleagues.
- An online learning support system to embed current courseware management features within the instructional design model as an organizing framework for both faculty and students. This work in progress builds on the NLII'02 session by John Harwood and Ali Jafari, How to Solve the 'Not-Invented-Here Syndrome'.

This approach is the converse of less demanding approaches to mainstream faculty, for example those focusing on 'Low Threshold Applications'. We will contrast these approaches and discuss 'what works when'.