Online High-Impact Practices

Center for Teaching Excellence

Online HITPs

 

Just because you teach online - even asynchronously - doesn't mean you cannot engage your learners with instructional best practices.

Adapting best practices to an online setting can require some creativity, but there are also some benefits to an online classroom that make some teaching approaches more powerful!

General Resources/Overview

 

 

Synchronous Teaching HITPs

  • Conduct Engaging Meetings
  • Use Zoom Features

    Break-out rooms, chat, and the whiteboard are all features you can use to your advantage to engage learners during synchronous meeting times.

    Boston College offers several ideas for using these features and more.

  • Follow-Up with Asynchronous Assignments

    Use time during online class meetings to prepare students for upcoming course assignments - either by helping them become famliar with the content or to get started on the assignment itself.

    However, allow time for follow-up asynchronous work - either alone or in groups online.

    For example:

    • Set up small group discussions to discuss most important points from the class meeting and take next steps from there on an assignment
    • Add supplemental reading to extend the conversation that is discussed asynchronously (in a discussions feature or a social-media-style feature such as Perusall)
    • Post a worksheet for individual completion that asks deeper, follow-up questions from content shared in the class meeting, and then builds upon it with new material

 

Asynchronous Teaching HITPs

  • Make Videos Impactful

    Supplying videos for student viewing/learning online is a common practice. However, much like an in-class lecture, it can risk being a passive learning method without adaptations.

    Build ways for students to engage with videos and their content:

    • Pose complex questions for students to consider and respond to upon viewing the video.
    • Have students generate and submit questions they have about the forthcoming video material, for which they will seek answers upon viewing. (You can set video access as conditional upon a dropbox submission.)
    • Ask reflective or evaluative questions following (or during!) the video, such as "What is the most important take-away you would share with someone else?" or, "How would you apply this information to [a specific situation/your life]?"
    • Build assessment questions into the video, using Panopto features. The video will not advance until the questions are answered.
    • Post the video within a "social discussion" app, such as Perusall. When viewed within Perusall, students can flag spots in the video where they make comments or post reactions. Others can see and respond to those responses, leading to a social-media-type discussion. Perusall can be linked from D2L, discussion quality can be auto-assessed, and you can have those scores automatically loaded into D2L's gradebook. Check with the CTE for more info!

    This article provides key principles for effective videos in an online setting (for the feedback item, remember that D2L has ways to provide feedback on incorrect question responses): Designing and Developing Video Lessons for Online Learning: A Seven-Principle Model

  • Make Course Organization Clear

    To understand the importance of this as an instructional best practices, take a look at 4 different online courses. You will see that they can be very differently organized! Student must wrestle with these varied organizational structures from class to class.

    Thus, organizing in meaningful and easy-to-understand ways is imperative for student success in your online course.

    Consider:

    • Creating a guide to the course (where to find everything): A video or brief opening document.
    • Create a "Start Here" module that makes it clear where students should begin when the class starts.
    • Organize material into units or chunks of content ("modules"), instead of by assignment type. This allows students to follow along, in order, over the course of the semester - much like they might do in class.

    ETSU's Academic Technology Services offers guidance and support about course structure.

    Additional Resources:

     

  • Encourage Interaction with Reading Content

    Consider the use of Perusall or similar apps to permit students a social-media style of interaction as they read course content.

    Perusall is currently free for you and students.

    • If the textbook is used in Perusall, it must be purchased by students through Perusall for copyright issues. Cost is similar to bookstore costs.
    • Non-textbook resources can be uploaded for free.
    • You can use Perusall even without textbook purchases.

    Perusall permits interactive discussions throughout the ditically-posted reading. It can also be set up to grade posts by students on a number of factors: complexity, frequency, interactivity, and more. It can enforce a minimum number of required posts.

    Perusall can be embedded/accessed from D2L and grades can be synced to the D2L gradebook.

  • Give Discussions a Purpose

    Discussions need not be "post-once/reply-twice," which is often considered busywork.

    Instead, find ways to have the discussions be a stepping-stone to other demonstrated learning in the class. Consider dividing up students into smaller discussion groups to assist with this process.

    Ideas

    • Discuss a case study: What key course concepts are showing up (or not showing up)? What next steps should be taken? What pitfalls might occur?
      • A small group could submit their collective responses, and/or
      • Individuals could submit their thoughts on both key conclusions from the group and any group processes worth noting.
    • Conduct peer reviews: With clear guidelines or a rubric in place, provide one another with feedback on a work-in-progress in the discussion forum.
      • Perhaps this is done in pairs or groups of 3
      • Consider a single-point rubric with the expectation that both sides are completed on each point
      • Emphasize the supportive and learning nature of this activity; peer growth won't happen with shallow feedback
    • Ask students to lead discussions: Give clear leadership guidelines and allow students to either start the discussion (including drafting the questions to be debated) and/or maintain the discussion.

    Find more creative discussion ideas in this series from Faculty Focus:

  • Use Blogs

    Vanderbilt University says it best, so we'll link you there!

  • Make Thinking Visible

    Harvard's Project Zero introduces a number of "thinking routines" you can incorporate in your class to make thinking more visible and impactful for students.

    These routines are numerous and vary according to the goals you have for students as they approach their thinking about the material.

    The routines can be as impactful in online discussions as they can be as individual prompts or mini-assignments. They are great ways to follow-up some exposure to new material, permitting students to more actively process what they are learning.