The main takeaway for me is in an online course we need to strive for opportunities where students can interact with the material. I was around when online learning first started, and it mainly consisted of reading static PDFs or books and writing responses on a discussion board. There was a need for engaging activities such as interactive labs and simulations to peak a student’s interest. These engaging activities not only improve student success metrics and mastery of the course learning objectives but increases retention and graduation rates. One helpful thing I have seen as an administrator, instructor, and student is video feedback in addition to written feedback. It is a monotonous task to simply post a response to a discussion question and then a few forced responses to classmates. This is not active learning and more of a situation where the students are checking a box to earn their points.
