Kerrin McMahan's Best Practices for online teaching

 

5 best practices I have learned from teaching online for 19 years:

 

1.       Respond quickly to all student contacts.  Ideally, you shouldn’t keep them hanging more than 24 hours at most.

2.       Chase down students who aren’t participating.  Send them reminders.  Yes, this might be construed as babysitting, and yes, they should take responsibility.  On the other hand, do you want start off with 35 students and end up with 8?  Then leave them on their own.  Otherwise, stay on top of them.

3.       You can’t prevent cheating, but you don’t have to make it easy.  Don’t recycle assignments, and don’t rely exclusively on the publisher’s canned stuff.  Savvy students have learned how to access that.

4.       Be actively engaged in your course on a daily basis.  Don’t leave it to run itself.  That’s bad teaching, if it’s teaching at all.  Students will know the difference.

5.       Make it fun.  Throw in some low-stakes activities such as crosswords (you can find online sites that will construct these) or polls that let students see what their peers think about things.