Tena Crews

Felicia, Your three important points all work together to develop an effective learning environment for an online course. The realistic course framework must include a dynamic syllabus and learning outcomes that are explained clearly to the students. Providing consistency throughout the course helps students achieve the learning outcomes as well. Nice job.

Jean, It is a great system when you ask students what should I "start" doing, "stop" doing, and "continue" doing? This "start, stop, continue" activity is an effective way to gather information from the students and change the way you interact with the students in the classroom (whether face-to-face or online). Knowing that students learn in a variety of ways and being able to adapt your teaching to deliver content in a variety of ways is also effective in the when teaching. Nice job.

Melanie, Nice job. It is important to start feedback to students with something positive they have done and provide specific details. It's also essential to provide constructive feedback so they can learn from your feedback and be motivated to improves. Excellent.

Luis, Thank you for your organized input. You are correct in that your feedback must be clear and timely. It is essential that you know your audience so that you provide feedback specific to your audience. Nice job.

Donte, You are right when you note that students must know when assignments are due and they must also know where to submit such assignments. Students must also be able to contact you and know how to contact you. It is essential to be open to the students and communicate on an frequent basis. Nice job.

Luis, It's good to hear about your experience. Many times that is how we learn best, by doing. Aligning with course outcomes allows students to understand "Why are we doing this?" Connecting the content to the real works and being consistent in your delivery along with the consistency in navigation witin the course are all important. Thank you for your input.

Tara, Using a variety of methods to get feedback provides more feedback. This is a good thing. Also, students may provide different feedback than your peers and it's good to get a variety of people to review different aspects of the course. The kicker is. . .you have to use the feedback! Review/update the course. It's a continuous cycle.

Eleni, Your input is on target. Meaningful feedback does come from students. It is essential to gather that feedback and make necessary changes to the course, syllabus, etc. I agree with you that student feedback helps the instructor become a better teacher. Nice job.

Jean, Thank you for your detailed input. As you provide information to students like this on dicsussion boards, you are serving as a role model to them. This is great. Trial and error does provide for learning, if you do learn from your mistakes. ;-) I like the connection you made between authoring the course and educational handouts. There is overlap: organization, pertinent information, learning objectives, etc. I also like the "awareness" you mention. Students are all different. We cannot assume. Nice job.

Valerie, Correct! You do learn about your students through student evaluations. However, make sure you are assessing them throughout the course (formative) because if you are just doing summative (at the end) assessments of your students, then you learn about them as they are heading "out the door" at the end of the course. Each set of students in each course are different. Thanks for you input.