Pedagogy: Moving from the classroom to the class without walls

The virtual classroom is no longer a concept of the future. Right now, professors lecture electronically to reach students not just across town, but across the country. Students have stopped lugging textbooks and instead log into the online library. Even working adults have found that education is no longer confined to a place, but instead is a process that fits conveniently into their life.

What does it take to be a successful online professor? Many of the same qualities that it takes to be gifted in the traditional classroom: care, patience, clarity, and ingenuity.However, you'll need to go one step further. You'll need to translate the classroom experience to a new medium. This means finding new ways of communicating and building a rapport with each student. You'll also want to encourage teamwork and collaboration. Here are a few tips to help you build a vibrant online learning community.

• Promote continuity by answering E-mail promptly, asking open-ended questions in bulletin board discussions, and posting to discussions frequently.
• Define the purpose or objective of each discussion. This will help members stay on a specific topic.
• Make sure it is easy to identify participants. Create profiles of members that can be found on individual Web pages.
• Consider uploading pictures of students to help put faces and names together.
• Set rules to create a friendly environment. If you notice any harsh language, immediately send a private E-mail to the student who sent the inappropriate message.
• Invite experts to participate in chats and bulletin board discussions. Announce to students when the expert will be arriving online.
• Use a calendar to post start and end dates for specific discussion topics. If you have a scheduled chat event, post that as an announcement and on the calendar.
• Make online discussions a part of the student's grade. This can substitute for the usual class participation portion of the grade. You may even consider that a certain number of postings each week are required per student.
• Encourage reflective thinking and ongoing discussions by avoiding questions that lead to right and wrong answers.
• Reply to student postings and prompt your students to go deeper than mere opinions or surface answers. Have students support their arguments with facts and supportive data when available.
• Bring the physical world into the virtual one. Use graphics, sound bytes and digital video to create a sense of "place" and to appeal to the diverse learning styles of your students. If possible, use QuickTime VR to create three-dimensional spaces that reflect real phenomena.

If you'd like to explore online facilitating further, have your department chair approve your course for the online/hybrid modality. Then contact Karen Lundstrem and register for the online/hybrid professional development course.