Alysia Barraro

Most people who chose to take online courses are non-traditional adult learners. They like the easy, they are taking it part time, and they are probably doing it to further their career. Some adults need to re-learn how to be a student so its importatnt they focus on the 7 areas of problems to help they succeed. 

Retention matters if a students feels connected to their environment and to the people in the instituion. Its important to monitor and track students who are not involved or just doing enough to get by to prevent any losses. 

I feel like online learning can be a great experince for people as long as they have the right internet, techology, time, a quiet set up and any other supplemental materials that is needed in the course. The challenges come when these technologies don't work or you can't afford them and that really hinders their learnings. 

I think setting up a Second Life for online learning is strange. I see the benefits but it also seems to be too much extra work. However criticially thinking from the beginning of the course is so important at the college level. 

Critical thinking comes from being an active learning. Just learning facts does not help students expand and learn the material. Relating what you learned to the real world is how connections are made. Even though teachers should act as the director of the course, students should actively engange in the material and learn it. Help develop new ways with activities to help students interact with one another but don't make it too time consuming either. It's a fine balance. 

I can see if the instructor makes a course too interactive with too many active learning based activites students can become bored, annoyed, and not enjoy the expected engagment activities. Don't have these activites be too much or too time consuming. Students do take online courses for the easy and time convience. However, it is important to have them in an online course. Active learners will also need to develop criticial thinking skills and this is important to start to focus on in the beginning of the course. That way they can build upon these skills. 

The best thing I have learned in this section, that I wish I experienced, was taking a pause and asking students what they learned in the last 20 minutes of the lecture. This is a great way to see if students are listening, understanding the information, and able to recall what they have learned. Also adding a chat feature to bounce back ideas between learners can really help engage them in the information. 

Blogging is a great way to keep students enganged in the course work, give them control over information they share, and allow them to connect with the material more. 

Microblogging is a great way to keep the commucation going and having students involved.

Video sharing can really help explain harder concpets in the course and using it to share on a social platform is a great idea. Howeve rmake sure all videos and information that is shared is useful, and follows grading standards. Peer evaluations is great on rubrics.