If you’re looking to improve threaded discussions in your online courses, consider using brief video clips as discussion prompts. When carefully selected and integrated into a course, these clips can lead students to higher-order thinking and appeal to auditory and visual learning styles.

In a face-to-face class, students have numerous opportunities to interact with their instructor and fellow students. Creating similar opportunities for collaboration in a web-based course is one of the biggest challenges of teaching online. Yet, opportunities for meaningful synchronous and asynchronous interaction are plentiful, provided you design and facilitate your online course in the correct manner and with the proper tools.

A discussion with faculty at South Dakota State University got me thinking about questions and how often we forget the power of a good question to stimulate discussion. When discussion plods along without much insight or inspiration, we are quick to blame students and they are not blameless. Some days (in some classes, most days) their motivation to answer questions registers right around zero.

Preparing students for the online learning experience and managing expectations are critical to student satisfaction, says Marie Gould, assistant professor and program manager of Business Administration, and Denise Padavano, associate professor and program manager, Information Technology, both of Peirce College.

The major benefit any conscientious professor seeks in course evaluations is in gaining useful student feedback. Yet most rating instruments generate vague, unjustified student comments. Quantitative scales provide ambiguous statistics for such generic instructional areas as preparation, fairness in grading, etc., but they don’t include any formative commentary. Open-ended questions ask students what things the instructor should continue to include in or eliminate from the course, and students list items but often without any kind of rationale.

You may recall that McGraw-Hill and Magna (the folks who bring you this blog and The Teaching Professor newsletter) are sponsoring a scholarly work on teaching and learning award. The first award will be given at The Teaching Professor Conference June 5-9 in Washington, D.C.

Have you tried implementing some active learning strategies in a large course only to find students resisting those efforts? You put students in groups and give them some challenging discussion questions, only to see most of them sitting silently while a few make feeble comments to which no one in the group responds.

When you assign your students to write a paper, do they know where to start? Upperclassmen surely do, but what about freshmen? Left to their own devices, they’ll likely turn to Google and Wikipedia as their main research tools, and may never even set foot in the library if they can help it.

Meaningful program assessment requires faculty participation. The challenge of getting faculty involved and staying involved lies in convincing them that the benefits of educational assessment are worth any additional work it generates.