Cheryl Rogers

I learned that when I am writing a reply to a student's email, it will be more effective if I acknowledge the student's presence, emotion, thought, and concern. This will increase the student's satisfaction with the educational experience.

I have learned from this module that social presence is essential for an instructor of an online course. The instructor should provide frequent, prompt, meaningful feedback to students.

I learned about new forms of plagiarism than what I previously encountered. One is that I learned students can use AI to evade plagiarism-detecting tools.

This is fascinating research that quality faculty-student alliances impact retention rates. In my own college experiences, there was hardly a moment that I encountered faculty members who had a positive or interested approach toward students. It seemed they valued being aloof and disinterested. Perhaps they even thought insulting and disparaging students would motivate them to try harder, and their view of retention responsibility seemed to rest all on the shoulders of the student. How far we have come as an academic community in researching better and evidence-based ways.

In this module I learned that an online instructor should do all s/he can to reduce student attrition by helping invite students' participation so they won't feel alienated as well as giving tips for technological success and tips for time management and sorting personal priorities.

This module taught me that for online learning, critical course content should generally be delivered in an asynchronous rather than synchronous format. The same guideline applies to assessing learners' knowledge as well.

I learned that projecting your professional presence includes such items as posting a short biography of yourself and inviting learners to do the same, as well as sending a personal outreach email to each student.

From this module I learned that students need online support from the teacher as well as online support in technology in order to be successful in an online course without undue frustration.

I learned that self-paced online learning can be a benefit for a student with good self-mastery and time management skills, as it allows them to work ahead and possibly finish their program in a shorter timeframe. But simultaneously, self-paced learning can also be a challenge for a student without these skills, as they can fall into the pitfall of procrastination, leading to poorer quality work and needed revision time.

What I learned is that students may say they are familiar/comfortable using technology but not realize that the technology they use is very different from technology that will be utilized in the course. So an instructor will need to provide helps and guides for the technology s/he uses in the course.