With the support of the CU System President and CU Denver and Anschutz Medical Campus Chancellors, Online Education is vastly improving at our campuses. With this support, the Office of Digital Education (formerly CU Online) now has the ability to provide a robust marketing and student recruitment effort as well as a student success team to support your new, fully online students from the moment they indicate they have an interest in your program.
For our first post, I’d like to share a bit about our team, our work, and our vision for this space that we hope will become a frequently visited bookmark for you and your colleagues.
Many of the face-to-face classroom design considerations hold true for the online classroom. This third post will explore additional design considerations for active learning online. Once again, the design concepts are organized around the questions of who, what, when, where, and why. The goal is to provide key design concepts to consider before choosing the “right” active learning strategy.
Lecture, as an education design strategy, is familiar and perhaps comfortable to us all. So much so that paradigms exist regarding how to give and receive knowledge and skills.
This blog post is the second in a series about active learning course design. The first post provided an evidence-based perspective on how moving from a lecture paradigm design to an active learning design improves student learning. This second post explores how to design active learning for the face-to-face classroom.
As we seek to provide top-notch courses and programs in the online environment, we must remember that the experience of designing and implementing is only half of the equation. On the other side are the students – our partners in education. But we don’t always know much about what online looks like from the student perspective.
When writing discussions, you'll want to ask yourself a few questions which will help define the types of prompts you'll prepare for your students: What level are my students at in this topic/field? (entry level, mid-level, mastery level, etc.) and At this point in the semester, what is the goal for my students? (foundational knowledge, critical thinking, application, etc.)
Are you ready to breathe new life into your online discussions? [Roles in group discussions] You might want to try out integrating roles into small discussion groups, which can provide more variety in the discussion forum and clearly define tasks. Roles can be assigned to students each week, or you can opt for self-selection using a variety of methods.
