Education for a Digital World Advice, Guidelines and Effective Practice from Around Globe, 2008a

24 – Evaluating and Improving Your Online Teaching Effectiveness
Making changes for the future
Once you have the summative feedback, you can let it sit
for a while, or immediately begin revising the online
course for the next iteration. Changes might include
being more flexible in the teaching approach, having a
better attitude towards students and their ideas, using
more appropriate assessment methods, adding more
real-world applications, and so on. Since the new students
most likely did not see the previous version of the
course, you are free to do anything, from making minor
changes here and there to completely starting over. Usually
it is somewhere between the two.
In one personal example, using the Moodle Glossary
tool, I will revise the short-term vocabulary list solution,
described above, to be a communal glossary assignment.
Each week I will ask the students to generate glossary
terms that they do not understand from my lectures and
from the readings. If multiple people add the same term,
then I will know it is a concept that requires more attention.
Other LMS solutions, like WebCT, have a Glossary
tool as well.
Most importantly, do try again. Regardless of how
you feel about your first attempt at online teaching, it
will get better each time you try. Online course offerings
provide students with more flexibility. Hybrid, or
blended learning, courses can combine the best of both
worlds. Online environments that supplement fully faceto-face
instruction can help students to stay on task, to
plan ahead, to access resources at any time of day, and
more. In all three types of online learning, the pros outweigh
the cons. Most students will appreciate your efforts,
which is a good thing to remember if you ever
question why you are teaching online in the first place.
Summary
“The educational value of war stories has been
grossly underestimated”. – Schank & Cleary (1995)
Maintain your sanity by keeping the short-term solutions
on a small scale. Unless it is based on feedback
given before the course, or right after it begins, it is a
good idea to wait until after the course is over to institute
a major revision. If there is a good reason to make a
major change, communicate clearly and often with your
students about what is going to happen and how it
might affect them.
I hope I have given you a wide array of possibilities
that will help you evaluate and improve your online
teaching effectiveness. Do not feel like you have to do
everything listed in this chapter! Treat this chapter like a
buffet that is open all day, every day. You can put as
many, or as few, items on your plate as you like. You can
always come back for more. You should chat with other
instructors at the buffet to see what they liked and did
not like. When you sit down at the table with your peers,
take a look at what they are doing and tell them about
how your own choices worked for you.
If I rename the modified classroom assessment techniques
as “online assessment techniques,” then I say “It’s
always a good time to sow your OATs!” This is corny, I
know, but it leads me to my last bit of advice: Keep your
sense of humour. At times, it can be tough to go through
the online teaching process, to hear or read student
criticism, and to make adjustments to your carefully
planned course. If you can laugh at yourself and remember
that the students are on your side, then you are
on your way to teaching effectively online.
Glossary
Formative evaluation. An ongoing process used to
determine the relative success of an activity or course at
specific points throughout the activity or course.
Learning preferences. Items used in the metacognitive
process—learners learning about their own learning
process in order to improve learning success. Learning
preferences are often broken into categories (e.g., sensory
input, perception, organization, processing, understanding)
to enable comparisons and to make it easier
for learners to associate with one or more in each category.
Some learning preferences are also called “learning
styles.” Learning preferences can also include attitudinal,
social, environmental, and physical preferences, as
well as brain hemisphere dominance.
Mid-semester evaluation. An activity designed to
give formative feedback to the instructor, with enough
time to make minor changes or improvements to the
course that will improve the chances of learning success
for current students.
One-minute paper. An activity used to collect participants’
reactions to a reading, event, or activity.
One-minute thread. An online activity based on the
principles of the one-minute paper. Variations include
allowing students to give feedback to one another about
what some students did not understand. This feedback
must be moderated by the instructor, but creates a sense
of community.
One-sentence summary. An activity used to determine
a learner’s ability to synthesize a complex process
or a large amount of information. Learners are asked
376 Education for a Digital World