Application of classroom good teaching practices to an online faculty ...

students also to do so (Graham et al., 2000;Nelson, 2000). Communication policies needto be clear and issues which need to beaddressed through private emails should beclarified. If teachers do not hear from students,they should be contacted to see if there is aproblem and personal interaction may besought if required.Principle 2: Encourage cooperationamongst studentsCooperative learning promotes positiveinterdependence, face to face interaction,personal responsibility, collaborative skills andgroup processing (Johnson et al., 1990).Some of the suggested methods to encouragestudents to work collaboratively in onlinecourses include designing collaborative groupwork, providing a number of milestones andgood examples, making participation indiscussions mandatory, providing ‘weaving’comments when needed, and making surethat students know that you are ‘present’ andavailable for help (Conway, 2003).Principle 3: Encourage active learningActive learning can better be viewed as asituation, where the ‘students are doing thingsand thinking about things they are doing’(Bonwell & Eison, 1991). Some of the methodssuggested in the literature to encourage activelearning include making students constructdeep explanations, justifications and reasons,developing question-response-clarificationcycles, challenging students to developreasoned responses, and making studentspresent their work to the rest of the class(Graham et al., 2000; Hacker & Niederhauser,2000).Principle 4: Give prompt feedbackStudents need to constantly monitor theirunderstanding in order to make meaningfulprogress. Without an explicit understanding oftheir progress, students become anxious andmay lose their path (Conway, 2003). Electronicmedia allows instant and timely feedback.However, there is a need to make feedbacklearner-centric rather than teacher-centric.Principle 5: Emphasize time on taskIf we view learning as encoding of knowledgeand skills, then the information to be encodedhas to be first attended to and processed byworking memory, before it can become a partof long term memory (Cooper, 1998). How istime on task emphasized in online situations?Suggested methods include providing specificdeadlines, providing intermediate milestones,emphasizing regular work and sound selfpacing, using asynchronous communication toreduce stress on time, and making resourceseasily accessible (Graham et al., 2000). In ourdiscussion, the overall task was broken downinto smaller ones, each with specificdeadlines.Principle 6: Communicate highexpectationsIn general, if teachers set high, but attainablegoals, these are generally met by the students.Goals should be high enough to make thestudents stretch, but low enough for them toattain. Literature also suggests that studentsprefer difficult courses, where they have towork hard (Cashlin, 1988; Cashlin & Slawson,1977). Literature suggests the followingmethods to communicate high expectations inonline courses: modeling appropriateinteraction, requiring students to becomeactive learners, publically calling attention togood performance, and basing evaluations onquality rather than on quantity of posts(Graham et al., 2000; Weiss 2000).Principle 7: Respect diverse talents andways of learningThere have been a number of reports onlearning styles and their implications forinstructional design. However, as Coffield etal. (2004) in a review of the availableevidence on learning styles aptly state,‘learning styles are not as much concernedwith matching instruction for individual studentbut providing a variety of methods in thelearning basket’. In online forums, Graham etal. (2000) suggest the following methods torespect diverse ways of learning: encouragingstudents to express diverse view points,consider possible time-zone differences,limiting the use of contextual language, idiomsand colloquialism.Let us now take an in-depth look at theprocess followed in our online learning model.The CMCL-FRI Online Learning MethodAn online learning activity was planned for theparticipants (known as the “Fellows”) of theFRI using the listserv on the ECFMG server.The participants included 15 Fellows and 10faculty members. Fellows were included onthe listserv using either their existing email IDsor a new dedicated web-based email ID (sincethere is a large volume of data inflow, weencouraged them to use Gmail or any otheremail with large storage space). Any mailaddressed to the listserv was sent to the mailboxes of all the Fellows. Similarly, any replySouth‐East Asian Journal of Medical EducationVol. 4 no.2, 201015