Education 2.0 & 3.0

Allowing for greater flexibility, a HyFlex teaching model enables higher student engagement and options as opposed to completely hybrid or in-person learning.

A part-time professor is one of many at Point Park taking innovative approaches to boost student engagement during COVID-19.

One of the perks of teaching online is that there are so many great tools that make facilitating an online course easier. For example, not having to manually grade and enter grades for online exams since most learning management systems can automatically evaluate student responses and submit scores to a gradebook without the instructor needing to do a thing. 

With the ability to automate so much of an online course, along with the physical separation from your students, it can be challenging to find ways to let your personality, teaching style, and personal touches shine through in the online environment. 

Here are three easy strategies that you can begin trying and implementing in your teaching today to bring a bit more of your personality to your online courses. 

When hundreds of spring and summer undergraduate courses were abruptly moved from onsite to online delivery in the wake of COVID-19, several faculty and students nationwide reacted with panic and uncertainty. Currently, instructors are busy preparing for the 2020-2021 academic year where several students will continue taking courses online. At my institution, fall academic courses will be primarily virtual (along with several others across the nation), with some in-person and hybrid instruction for performance-based, clinical, and laboratory courses, and some students living on campus.

The discussion board is certainly not new to the online classroom. In fact, some may argue that the discussion board is one of the most well-known and used tools in online courses. While the discussion board is ubiquitous within the different Learning Management Systems (LMS) that exist, and is consistently included in online courses as a way to collect formative assessment data and engage students, its use could be elevated by aligning Bloom’s Taxonomy of Educational Objectives (Anderson, Krathwohl, & Bloom, 2001) with discussion board prompts. Focusing on the cognitive knowledge domain, Bloom’s Taxonomy provides a hierarchical framework of learning outcomes that instructors can use to create more interactive, diverse, and impactful ways for students to experience deeper learning (Mehta & Fine, 2019) and meaningful discourse surrounding course content.

The perfect class discussion can feel like something of an alchemy. From the instructor’s preparation to the students’ personalities, many ingredients can enable or challenge the social construction of knowledge in a class community. As Jay Howard suggests, quality discussions require a great deal of planning and an understanding of social, emotional, and intellectual dynamics (Howard 2019). As we begin one of the most unusual semesters in the history of higher education, with institutions implementing a combination of remote, hybrid, and in-person instruction, it’s urgent to consider how we can facilitate meaningful discussions in virtual environments. In particular, if instructors used video conference software during the emergency remote teaching of the spring and summer, they may have experienced a ghost town of student reticence and awkward silences, and the occasional shuffle of video boxes like virtual tumbleweeds..

The primary focus of any instruction should be to focus on the learning outcomes or capabilities you are trying to achieve. Bloom (1956, 1964) identified three types of learning outcomes: cognitive (knowledge), affective (attitudes, emotions, and values), and psychomotor (skills). For each outcome, instructors should also consider the level of outcome they are trying to achieve. So, if you are teaching cognitive skills, such as mathematics or language, you should determine if you need your students to remember (level 1), understand (level 2), apply (level 3), analyze (level 4), evaluate (level 5), or create (level 6) (Krathwohl, 2002). Once you have determined the level(s) of outcome, you should align your assignments to those levels. A multiple-choice exam can assess level 1 and possibly level 2 outcomes, but it will not assess students’ abilities to apply, analyze, evaluate, or create. Consequently, you will need to devise more challenging assignments to elicit higher levels of performance from students, using essays, problem-based learning assignments, and case studies, for example.

Online course evaluation is crucial to the improvement of future courses, although carrying it out is difficult. Here are the three basic steps to it.