Are you teaching online this year? Learn how to design your own online course and facilitate deep discussions. Two popular books on online teaching and learning are now available as e-Books.
Essential Elements: Prepare, Design, and Teach Your Online Course
by Bonnie Elbaum, Cynthia McIntyre and Alese Smith
“This book describes a process for designing online courses based on sophisticated learning experiences: guided inquiry, collaboration, community, and formative assessment. Its model will aid instructors in reconceptualizing their teaching to take full advantage of new interactive media.”
— Chris Dede, Timothy E. Wirth Professor of Learning Technologies, Harvard Graduate School of Education
University professors, secondary teachers, and corporate trainers are putting their courses online, or are getting ready to. Where do they start, you wonder. Where do you start, if you’re in similar position? Based on the authors’ experience helping to develop hundreds of online courses, Essential Elements: Prepare, Design, and Teach Your Online Course describes the process of putting your course online. With seventeen Essential Elements and countless tips to implement those elements, we show you how to create a high-quality learning environment for your students.
We present the Essential Elements in three sections — prepare, design, and teach — to help you get your course online in step-by-step format. First, we cover the necessary preparatory steps, from getting yourself ready to getting your course ready. You’ll create a course outline and consider issues around technology support and quality assurance. Next, we move to course creation and show you how to design collaborative online activities, plus how to locate appropriate course materials. Finally, we reveal online teaching strategies to engage participants, moderate online discussions, and assess participant work.
Facilitating Online Learning: Effective Strategies for Moderators
by George Collison, Bonnie Elbaum, Sarah Haavind and Robert Tinker
Online courses are now integral learning mediums in traditional education settings, business, and the new distance campuses. Educators often find that they need a new repertoire of skills or a new way of using old skills to be successful in the new medium.
Facilitating Online Learning is a groundbreaking handbook that lays out a systematic approach for creating a learning community in which the instructor moves away from center stage and from which a more collaborative learning environment is effectively fostered.
The goals of Facilitating Online Learning are to develop these skills:
- Increased capacity to build effective online learning communities
- Wider repertoire of strategies for sharpening the discussions related to course content
- New strategies for deepening online dialogue in order to enrich learning opportunities
Online learning has sparked a resurgence of interest in teaching technique and strategies and in the hows and whys of learning. Facilitating Online Learning offers the novice and the seasoned educator the opportunity to grow with this exciting new medium.