Catherine Romeo

As an instructor, you must consider multiple sources for evaluating and improving your courses to truly accomplish creating meaningful courses. 

Without meaningful feedback from instructor to student after they submit an assignment or assessment or even a project, you can't expect them to improve.  Just giving them a grade isn't enough; they need to know how and why of the grade so they can include information that's required, and it helps them feel their efforts are worthwhile and notices as they progress and succeed.

I've learned that instructional delivery is key to a successful attempt at student engagement online in an ever changing environment as continuing education and higher education move into a virtual learning world.

It's important to have courses consistent in how they are set up, with clear learning objectives so students don't get frustrated trying to navigate around to figure out where to go next to complete assignments and assessments and learn the content they need to do that successfully.

How can we better reach students who, under all circumstances, never seem to want to engage in online learning?  How do we appeal to the 'YouTube' and 'TicTok' generation that wants a faster, more entertaining way of getting information that deem as useful?

I think this course pushes me to think about every assignment my students have in each course and evaluate it for effectiveness from an online engagement aspect.  Are we giving them just 'busy work' to fulfill a course requirement so they can just earn a grade and move on, or are these assignments including student engagement that is meaningful and leads to real and useful learning after graduation once in their field?

Making sure you students know you're present, engaged and care about their success in learning is key to retention.  Students respond better to quicker turn around times like grading assignments in a timely way and with feedback, answering their emails and messages promptly, and helping them find solutions to their barriers so they don't give up.

Asynchronous discussion allows students to participate and respond when they can, after work, on a lunch break. It's a great form of online discussion for a vast number of course topics and has the potential to be interactive because it gives the participants many opportunities to interact and respond without missing a window of time.

I like to highlight my professional experience through examples throughout the lectures and their learning and draw on theirs so they don't think I'm taking a superiority approach to their experiences. 

Most popular course design, course management systems, factors that lead to student frustration and why different instructors take different methods to their goals.