Below is a summary of my conversation with a colleague who also teaches continuous entry courses at TRU. Q1. What types of courses do you teach? Ecology and more specifically Animal Behaviour and Evolution Q2. What types of assignments do you find encourage either interaction with you or between students, for example, on a blog? …
Category Archives: Exploration
OTL 301: Current Practice
In my first post for this course I described a teaching practice related to interacting with students at the beginning of the field research portion of the course. Reading the information on ‘teaching presence’ has not really changed my view of my teaching practice. I think my example is inline with the discussions on teaching …
OTL 301 Getting Started
Thinking about effective teaching practice reminds me of interacting with students when they are starting to plan their independent research project, which is part of their course. Students inevitably start to feel overwhelmed by the range of options of what they could study and once they get passed that then they have to figure out …
Learning Portfolio: Online Interactions
Ensuring appropriate online interactions is something I already do, but I am a strong believer in ongoing improvement. And…writing is an area I can always improve in. There are lots of resources out there on wording criticism and it is more than focusing on ideas vs. people. If I am going to get my course …
Learning Portfolio: Encourage Blog Use
This learning strategy is all about ways to encourage use of the course blog. I comment often and try to stimulate interest. Students are required to comment as part of their blog mark, but I find this often happens at the end of the course as task that has to be done to complete the …
Video Introduction
The task for this post was to create a video introduction or tutorial commentary that could be used for multiple courses. I think a video introduction is a great idea for an online learning course as it gives the students a chance to learn more about the course in a different sort of way and …
Learning Portfolio: Ongoing Interaction
One challenge with asynchronous learning is that with students learning at their own pace it can be a challenge to maintain ongoing social interaction, especially with students that go long periods between course activities. This strategy is about ways to improve ongoing social interaction. First, I will add to my welcome email how I will …
Learning Portfolio: Technical Assistance and Resources
In this episode of Learning Portfolio: providing technical assistance and resources to students. My course is already designed and includes clear tutorials for assignments and marking guides available for students and therefore, it is a bit of a challenge to find new strategies to employ in my online teaching. I provide technical advice one on …
Continue reading “Learning Portfolio: Technical Assistance and Resources”
Learning Portfolio Introductions
These series of posts are on strategies for online learning. The first is a combination of something I already do and a new one. I like sending welcome emails to students that introduce myself and give an overview of the course and some key things students will want to start by checking out. However, I …
Enhancing Social Presence
My first task in this post is to examine how my previous post should have enhanced social presence in my online course and how to improve upon that. A bio that shares information can help with social presence as it is a way to project your personality into the online environment and be seen as …