Online courses offer increased flexibility and convenience
for college students who wouldn’t otherwise enroll. Since the online format can
make course engagement and communication challenging, here are a few tips to
make sure your students are able to maximize their success in your online or
hybrid course:
- Check in regularly and make clarity a priority. Make sure all expectations and instructions for the course are clearly communicated from the beginning. Regular and clear communication is more important when most or all of your interactions with students are online.
- Use multimedia content. Blackboard is capable of multimedia content like Mashups, videos, audio and more. Using different formats keeps content more interesting for students and considers the differences in how students learn effectively.
- Use Blackboard’s blogging feature to increase student engagement. Blogging increases student interaction with course materials and increases student-to-student interaction. As an instructor, by monitoring how students engage with one another online, you may have the opportunity to help them learn better online etiquette, something that will benefit them in their professional and personal relationships.
- Encourage online communities between students. It’s common for students enrolled in an online course to be from several different cities, making it hard for students to learn from one another in a course. Many social media outlets (Google+, Facebook, LinkedIn) have options for creating themed groups and communities that can be used for discussion and interactions that would traditionally take place in the classroom.
- Have online office hours. Use Blackboard Collaborate to setup online office hours. You can enable the video/mic option or just chat. The benefit of online office hours allows students to connect to the instructor in real time, ask questions, and share any issues they are experiencing.
