online learning

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Furthering Higher Education Possibilities through Massive Open Online Courses

Mesquita, Anabela; and Peres, Paula
IGI Global, 2015

Book Review

Tags: higher education   |   massive open online courses   |   MOOCs   |   online learning
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Reviewed by: Jin Han
Date Reviewed: December 12, 2017
Twelve articles clustered in four sections under this ambitious title evince a desire to promise revolutionary changes that have been associated with Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs: term-based courses available to the mass free of charge via online media). The authors are truthful to this vision, offering vast ranges of topics including distance learning, open learning, innovations, academic administration, business management, and educational technologies. The book includes a detailed table ...

Twelve articles clustered in four sections under this ambitious title evince a desire to promise revolutionary changes that have been associated with Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs: term-based courses available to the mass free of charge via online media). The authors are truthful to this vision, offering vast ranges of topics including distance learning, open learning, innovations, academic administration, business management, and educational technologies. The book includes a detailed table of contents that provides a concise synopsis, and each chapter concludes with an extensive list of references and other resources.

Section 3 offers two articles with case studies. The first features a MOOC that deals with the problem of bullying in schools. It reflects on the use of test cases and finds that timely feedback is critical. The second examines LMOOCs (language MOOCs) that facilitate foreign language acquisition with the aid of mobile platforms. In LMOOCs, mobile devices function not only as a portal to the course site but also as a gateway to real-world language environments. The final section, which contains one chapter, outlines a planned course on mechatronics in a hybrid format, combining the benefits of the face to face approach and a MOOC.

The major strength of the book is that it provides guidelines for the implementation of MOOCs in practical terms, away from the clichéd terms (such as “revolution,” “hype,” or “innovation”) that are often associated with them. While the MOOCs revolution is rumored to be coming to an end, the authors assign to the movement a role that could still be made to higher education. To this end, the book calls for pedagogical refinements as well as a clear analysis of the financial viability of MOOCs.

Parenthetically, most of the authors assembled in this volume hail from social and geographical locations with European hues. It leaves one to wonder whether claims in this book would have been different if it also included North American or other global contexts, where the movement of MOOCs was born and is still growing.

Best Practices in Online Teaching Online Teaching: Best Practices (8:52)
This video summarizes 10 Best Practices for online teaching. What distinguishes the presenter’s approach is that she provides multiple ways to employ each individual practice.

How to Design Your Online Course (5:43)
Detailed discussion of how to apply 3 key principles of backward design to online teaching: Identify desired results, determine acceptable evidence (assessment), plan learning experiences and facilitation.

Online Classes: Tips for Success (10:48)
Engaging summary of what students like about online courses, why distraction challenges student learning online, factors that detract or contribute to online learning, and some ways to increase odds of success. Recommended for prospective online students as well as teachers.

Evaluating Discussion Boards (6:39)
Three professors describe the rubrics they use for grading contributions to discussion boards.

Using Blogs in Online Classes as a Learning Tool (10:52)
Why and how to use collaborative and “individual writing network” blogs as an alternative to discussion boards. The presenter suggests guidelines for integrating blogs into online teaching and enumerates the benefits she’s observed.

Creating an Interactive and Personal Course (8:22)
What student posts in discussion boards tell teachers and how to use this knowledge in “announcement links” to interact with the class. Other purposes of general comments from the instructor through these links are outlined as well. Presenter discusses the advantage of blogs over discussion boards for personal interaction with individual students.

VoiceThread in Online Courses (15:39)
A thorough introduction to using VoiceThread: what it is, benefits of using it, challenges it presents, and how to overcome them.

How Students Cheat (8:13)
Situates student behavior along a “continuum of cheating” and explains forms of cheating less commonly classified as such in order that professors can take steps to minimize these behaviors.

Using Weekly Video in Your Online Course (7:06)
A professor’s musings on why weekly video posts to students enhance online teaching and learning.

Group Discussions in Online Classes (6:23)
Strategies for stimulating online small-group discussion of readings and presentations.

Teach Online

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Tags: online learning   |   online teaching strategies   |   teaching online   |   formation online   |   assessment online   |   video   |   video playlist   |   ASU

NOTE: Use the playlist button located in the top left of the video window above to switch between episodes.

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Best Practices in Engaging Online Learners Through Active and Experiential Learning Strategies

Budhai, Stephanie Smith, and Skipwith, Ke'Anna
Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group, 2017

Book Review

Tags: experiential learning   |   online learning   |   teaching online
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Reviewed by: Ryan Korstange, Middle Tennessee State University
Date Reviewed: March 29, 2017
“Learning in the 21st century has drastically changed how learners access and process information” (1). The authors of Best Practices in Engaging Online Learners begin by describing specific changes in higher education that directly impact student learning. This change is obvious. Several technologies are changing the landscape of higher education: electronic textbooks, learning management systems, large-scale institutional data, social media – each of these changes impacts student experience, and benefit from intentional ...

“Learning in the 21st century has drastically changed how learners access and process information” (1). The authors of Best Practices in Engaging Online Learners begin by describing specific changes in higher education that directly impact student learning. This change is obvious. Several technologies are changing the landscape of higher education: electronic textbooks, learning management systems, large-scale institutional data, social media – each of these changes impacts student experience, and benefit from intentional pedagogical usage. These changes are more thorough in distance learning than in face-to-face contexts it seems. The authors present an idealistic call towards engaging and developing rigorous online education that harnesses its possibilities. As such, they advocate active and experiential learning that is high on transfer and reflection.

To a certain extent, this book seems to be incorrectly titled. Calling itself Best Practices in Engaging Online Learners leaves the reader with the expectation that the book contains examples of best practices. What the book does in actuality is to categorize several trends in pedagogy and in the scholarship of teaching and learning research. The focus is almost entirely theoretical. The book surveys experiential learning (13-33), project-based learning (36-39), scenario-based learning (39-43), gamification (47-57), cooperative learning (61-71), and assessment strategies (73-89). The summaries of these areas of pedagogy research are accurate and centralize much of the current research, but the most essential questions remain: how does an instructor take the content they need to present and make it engaging for students? How do instructors engage students in the learning process? What specific strategies empower students to have a higher degree of retention and transportability of what they have learned? On these questions, theory only gets us so far.

Having said this, the volume has some utility, particularly in that it provides an efficient summary of various mainline innovations in pedagogy research. For this reason, it would be valuable for an instructor new to teaching, or one looking to start making progress towards learning-centered instruction. It also might be worth discussing in a faculty learning community – provided that more seasoned instructors can flesh out the theory with examples from their teaching. The utility of this volume dramatically decreases for the seasoned teacher who has done reading or research into effective teaching practices.

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Visual Design for Online Learning

Davis, Torria
Wiley, 2015

Book Review

Tags: online course design   |   online education   |   online learning   |   online teaching
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Reviewed by: Fred Glennon
Date Reviewed: November 30, -0001
Anyone who has developed an online course knows how important the design of the course is. Poorly designed courses make the course navigation difficult, causing unnecessary frustration and limiting the ability of students to achieve learning outcomes. The author of this book understands these difficulties. Drawing upon her own negative experiences with initial online offerings, she provides readers with important lessons on designing effective online experiences for both teachers and ...

Anyone who has developed an online course knows how important the design of the course is. Poorly designed courses make the course navigation difficult, causing unnecessary frustration and limiting the ability of students to achieve learning outcomes. The author of this book understands these difficulties. Drawing upon her own negative experiences with initial online offerings, she provides readers with important lessons on designing effective online experiences for both teachers and students.

Davis suggests, rightly, that the reader should use the text like a workbook, drawing from the ideas presented in the text as the reader creates her/his own course in the platform the reader uses. She encourages readers to draw upon the backward course design model: begin with learning objectives, discern appropriate ways to assess those objectives, and then generate online learning activities that will enable success in the course. Such alignment will promote student success.

The author provides an acronym, L.I.T.E., for the design framework she encourages. Readers should be sure to create clickable links to external content (L), integrate well the multimedia included (I), use typography and white space to enhance the legibility of the course (T), and embed the content at the point of need (E). She identifies four types of content pages that should be part of the design: landing page, navigation page, instructional page, and assignment submission page. Of course, most learning platforms will provide these. The key, she contends, is to create them in a way that achieves the course objectives and is user-friendly for the student.

The remainder of the chapters illustrate how readers can develop the various components of a good online course, including images and videos, integrating multimedia, facilitating instruction and interaction, and the all-important assessment. Davis provides helpful hints regarding the tools included in software such as PowerPoint, like using it to download and edit images or to incorporate online media. She also points to a number of free online tools one can use to develop a course, such as the presentation tool Brainshark, and the interaction tool VoiceThread. At the same time, she cautions users not to incorporate too many technologies into the course. The focus should be on learning the content of the course, not on overwhelming students with too many technologies.

As with any text, there are some limitations. Parts of the book require knowledge of html language. Many faculty do not know html language because they use software to develop their courses that does this automatically. In addition, for a book that emphasizes visual design, many of the illustrations are difficult to read, leaving the reader to wonder how well the text follows its own advice on legibility. Yet over all, the text is a useful step-by-step guide for developing an online course or for improving the visual design of existing courses.

 

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