Announcements: Finding the Balance Between Posting Too Little or Too Much

What if you entered a face-to-face classroom and found no instructor to welcome you to class, give you an overview of the semester, or guide you through your projects? Or what if your instructor made an appearance the first day of class, but slowly became less and less engaged as the semester progressed?

You’d be in the dark for most of the semester and probably pretty frustrated with your instructor, right?

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Creating Effective Rubrics

Wendy and Ann have often worked together on rubrics sent to them by instructors. Today they’d like to discuss the importance of effective rubrics and walk you through the process of creating one that visually communicates your expectations. Ann’s going to start by discussing the importance of rubrics.

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eLearning Feedback: Encouraging Learner to Learner Feedback

Throughout my eLearning Feedback series, we’ve looked at the significance of relevant, relational feedback and how instructors can enhance their feedback by providing it to their learners through various audio and video tools. In the conclusion of this series, we’ll explore the value of learner-to-learner feedback and how you can create opportunities for students to provide relevant, relational feedback to each other.

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eLearning Feedback: Enhancing Instructor to Learner Feedback

In my last post on relevant and relational feedback, I mentioned how adding a human factor into your online courses creates another dimension of building relationships with students. Constructive, relevant, and relational feedback helps students develop an awareness of their learning as well as the ability to recognize and address their weak points on their own. Today we’ll look at audio and video feedback tools you can use to build relationships with your students and help them take these important steps in their learning.

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eLearning Feedback: Make it Relevant and Relational

In my series on Keller’s ARCS Model for Motivation, I discussed the important role satisfaction plays in increasing and maintaining a student’s motivation to learn.

Students are satisfied and motivated to improve when teachers provide clear, constructive feedback and affirm and encourage them, both verbally and nonverbally. As classroom environments become more digital and asynchronous, we must find ways to improve instructor and student communication, especially feedback.

In this series, I’ll share practical tips for instructor to learner feedback and learner to learner feedback. We’ll look at tools to help you improve and enhance the feedback experience in online courses. Today we’ll begin with why you should provide constructive feedback.   

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Staying Relevant with Tech Trends While Meeting the Needs of Future Students

June 2018 marked my seventh year in the eLearning/Instructional Design field. In September 2018 I became a full time Instructional Designer. You would think that after seven years, I’d have all the knowledge, skills, and tools I need to do my job well.

Well, I’ll let you in on a little secret: I’m still learning.

Recently, I’ve been exploring and learning about the next generation of learners: Generation (Gen) Z.

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Communities of Inquiry (CoI): Cognitive Presence

Throughout this series, we’ve unpacked the three presences of Charles Sander Peirce’s Community of Inquiry (CoI) model. In my previous posts, we’ve looked at social and teaching presence. Cognitive presence, the final presence, combines both social and teaching presence. Today we’ll discuss how you can incorporate cognitive presence in your online course. Continue reading “Communities of Inquiry (CoI): Cognitive Presence”

Communities of Inquiry (CoI): Teaching Presence

In my last post, I introduced Charles Sander Pierce’s Community of Inquiry (CoI) model and discussed the importance of an instructor’s social presence in an online course. Continue reading “Communities of Inquiry (CoI): Teaching Presence”

Implementing the Community of Inquiry (CoI) Model into Your Online Course: Social Presence

As an online instructor, it can be challenging to create and maintain community with students in your courses. Last fall I discovered an education model that continues to help me create and maintain community, both as an instructional designer and as an adjunct instructor: Charles Sanders Peirce’s Community of Inquiry (CoI).

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Student-Teacher Relationships: The Key to Motivating Students

I recently concluded my Motivation in Education series, which explored Keller’s ARCS Model for Motivation. Each of the model’s components (attention, relevance, confidence, and satisfaction) share a common thread: the relationship between a teacher and their students.

Continue reading “Student-Teacher Relationships: The Key to Motivating Students”

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