Jonathan Musci

I learned alot over the course of this particular section. Quality online courses need to have structural integrity, navigational simplicty, active learner centered learning, and intellectual interaction.It is all incredibly true. Online course can be effective, but they need to follow certain criteria and meet certain standards. I also feel the image provided of a graph showing positive learning gains from a combination of quality media and the level of interaction, really shows the formula can be simple for successful online learning.

While student input is valuable. Multiple stakeholders will need to weigh in before altering one of my courses.

Meaningful feedback is even more important than the assessment itself! Students need to have steps forward that are applicable, and approachable. 

It is so critical to remember that the online classroom environment requires more than simply the online tools. Students must buy into the classroom community with their fellow peers and the instructor.

I think maintaining your online formats and having some consistency really saves time as an instructor. It makes the experience from each time teaching the course more uniform and effective.

A good reminder from this section was that students will still come with their various learning styles and behaviors regardless of the fact that it is a virtual setting.

Whether asynchronous or synchronous, conversation and communication are key to successful and effective online learning. The instructor needs to effectively facilitate conversation with various students over virtual platforms.

Regardless of space or distance it still remains important for an online instructor to continue to assert their influence, presence, and authority as a teacher. It is important to still build that relational capacity with students, even in a virtual setting. Having students creat bios is one way of begining to accomplish this goal. 

When I first began as a virtual or online professor I definitly was learning on the fly as it was mainly due to the global pandemic. Previously I had been completely in person. I think this section emphasized the importance of the professor reviewing, understanding, and becoming an expert on the delivery methods, and other important details, of not just the course itself but how the students are recieving the course in a virtual setting.