12012

12/17/2011 11:44:59 AM

General Session - Conference Presentation Only (20 minutes, no formal paper)


 * Top 10 Ways to Increase Student Engagement in Online Courses**

The question is “how do we engage our online students?” How do we reach them? Hold them? Keep their attention?

10. Course content – Everything starts with the course content. Include quality content and keep it relevant to the course. 9. Online discussions, including instructor participation. 8. Instructor presence – Student engagement starts with instructor engagement. Instructor needs to be engaged if students are to be engaged. 7. Small group, project-based assignments - Learning by forced doing together. 6. "Incentify" learning activities for student engagement and performance. 5. Giving students a choice - Having students choose from different weekly assignments and course projects increases student creativity and engagement. 4. Instructor passion – Gotta love, or at least enjoy, what you do. And that has to come through, even if it’s online. 3. Web 2.0 applications – NOT Web 1.0 with its one-way nature, but 2.0 with its interactivity with users providing and sharing content as well as using it. 2. Add a F2F live component such as Elluminate for virtual office visits and class sessions to provide a F2F “feel.” 1. And the #1 suggestion on how to increase student engagement in online courses? Human touch – John Naisbitt in his book, Megatrends, from almost 30 years ago talked about “High tech. High touch.” We need on Online Human Touch.

All Audiences online discussion distance