Key concepts are ensuring that students know they can apply the information they are gaining to their own lives and know its importance, and the reason for its necessity. Engaging students more often with the content, such as using Exit Slips, discussion boards, or group projects, as well as reiterating and teaching effective and complete comunication skills are crucial.
Students need plenty of opportunitites to practice skills like reading and writing in an online envorinment.
Making sure students know about plagiarism and what is or is not plagiarism. Communication must be clear professional and appropriate.
It's important we are clear professional and apprpriate with our students in our communication. We also need to convery the importance of being part a good online citizen, and how we each contribute to that.
The non-technical skills (effective communication, community of practice, reading and writing) needed to succeed in an online course are descrbied here. It is important to note that these skills are more important in an online setting than in a traditional F2F setting.
When teaching students make sure your teaching material has been understood by the learners. You may ask students to regurgitate what is learned by asking them to elaborate on what they have learned.
listen learn, post, ask, teach, it is all the same.
Communication in any form is essential for on line learning . Many student will miss the interaction of a F2F environment and through the various ways of communication you can help them develops learning skills.
Communication and clear instructions are vital.
Communication is important and using your own work and not copying or rewording other people's work.
Plagarism is more complicated when instructing online.
The importance of effective communication is even more critical in the on-line learning environment than the F2F environment. Methods to expand, improve, and refine communication between students and instructor and students and students is an important focus of attention for an on-line instructor.
I find that some students actually thrive during online discussions. I've had some students both exclusively F2F or only online. A few students were very shy F2F, even though they were participating actively in online discussions. During Canvas Conferences, they felt more safe speaking out then in F2F meetings.
Good reading and writing are skills that are essential when taking on line courses. Good communication skills are necessary for sucess.
Participating in an online class and engaging in the learning process is essential but can evolve into more of a Community of Practice (CoP). Helping students be involved in a Community of Practice enhances their learning experience and helps them begin to construct their own learning. Hence, a CoP is based on the theory of constructivism.
Non-Technical Skills ('NTS') are interpersonal skills which include: communication skills; leadership skills; team-work skills; decision-making skills; and situation-awareness skills.
Online learners need basic technical skills to succeed. These include the ability to create new documents, use a word processing program, navigate the Internet, and download software. Most online schools have new student orientation programs.
Communication should be concise, professional, and appropriate and modeling that will help encourage students to do so as well.
As and Online Instructor Communication needs to be Clear, Professional, and Appropriate (CPA) to the students, student to student, and student to teacher. This forms a Community of Practice (COP) that engages everyone in the Online Classroom process. Reading and Writing are very important for students to know that their learning is up to them and by establishing strong Academic Honesty Policy (AHP) gives students the tools needed with helping everyone to be successful in Online learning.
In this section, the most important or interesting theory I picked up on was the idea of student participation and engagement in the course. If a student does not participate or engage they will not be as successful as the student who does. I always had the theory that accomplishment, development, and growth are not solitary events. It is important to use your community and support to achieve. I will work on improving the online community of my courses to encourage student participation and engagement.
