Please discuss possible answers to the questions below. This exercise will hopefully generate a lot of thought provoking discussion since there are many right answers to each question. Click the links for examples of activities and answers for each situation/question.

What could you do to “break the ice” or set the tone to provide a comfortable atmosphere in online discussions?

The Bio: Each participant sends a one-screen description of themself to the online classroom. This can be modeled by the instructor so students know what to write. This exercise is nice because it allows the course participants to have a profile of their classmates and it permits them to identify common interests and goals (don’t students do this in their face-to-face courses?). This helps the students find partners to work with during group activities later in the course. The “bio” exercise at the beginning is helpful for students to put a “face” on the usernames that appear next to each participant’s postings.

Since we cannot see each other in the online classroom, it is hard to tell if you are bashful, bored, sarcastic, or just kidding. What would you recommend as an approach to successfully communicate online?

A husband and wife are taking the same course in the same online classroom, and you are the facilitator. Does this present a problem for you? The husband’s messages to the online classroom are becoming heavily influenced with the wife’s thinking, and the husband is expressing anger in the online classroom towards his wife, what are the issues, and how should they be dealt with?

In what way(s) does the facilitator’s level of participation in the online classroom affect a student’s attitude? Can a facilitator participate too much in the online classroom? Why or why not?

• Feedback: The facilitator must give timely, sincere feedback to students’ responses as well as to their class performance. Asking further questions of the learners challenges their thinking and shows them that achieving the learning objectives is important to the facilitator. This helps to develop the desire to learn and to succeed in the course.
• Dialog in the Virtual Classroom: The facilitator should facilitate the dialog and not dominate it. In the Virtual Classroom, most of the learning comes from the interaction among the students. If the facilitator dominates the discussion, then the level of synergy in the Virtual Classroom will decrease. The learners will not not jump in and respond to questions, rather they will wait for the instructor to make the first move. The attitude of self-discovery of knowledge will change to the spoon feed role that is unfortunately typical in many lecture-based on-ground classes. Online instructors should create a tone of respect for the learner, and operate more on a equal basis. The question should be, “You are here to learn, how can I help you?”
• Instructional Design: The facilitator can affect the attitude in the Virtual Classroom through the design of discussion questions pertaining to the course material. The facilitator should create the questions at a knowledge level which is not too high to frustrate the learner and develop the attitude that this is too hard, I will never get this, or at a level too low, creating the attitude, this is too easy, why bother! In either situation there is the chance that the synergy level will decrease in the class and/or the student may not complete the assignments or even the course.

What role does the student play in defining the learning outcomes in the on-ground learning model? How does this change with the online learning model?

The student has a critical role in defining the learning outcomes in an online course. The online student should be willing to contribute to the course by relating their life, work, and educational experiences to the course content. In this way, each student contributes to the group, making the learning experience more personalized for themself, yet at the same time, broadening the scope of the materials for others. Another important point is that due to the accelerated nature of the online learning process, the online student must be highly committed to the course, and “needs to want to be there, and needs to want the experience.” How this relates to defining learning outcomes is through participation and interaction on the part of the student. No longer merely a receiver of information, the student must actively participate in the course process. In a truly successful online course where discussion and collaborative learning provide the basis for content delivery, the students are the main players! The instructor (now called facilitator) does have a major role in the course, but that role has changed dramatically from the on-ground paradigm. The facilitator facilitates, leads, prompts, and organizes, but the students are the ones who, through critical thinking, and effective communication, actually create the most meaningful input for the course.

Identify two tools utilized in the online environment and describe how you would use them in enhancing the learning process.

Identify two means of measuring learning outcomes in the online classroom.

What level of access should a student have with a facilitator? Why?

In online courses where critical thinking skills are emphasized, and the synergy created by student participation is central to the learning experience, the facilitator should be expected to be online five to seven days a week. If developed properly, the facilitator should have the students communicating with each other within the second week of the course and with the entire class on a regular basis so that students will not expect to access the facilitator directly for all of their learning needs. The facilitator’s role would be to pose questions and monitor discussions, providing feedback and additional information or resources as appropriate. This should be done on a daily basis to maintain the synergy within the Virtual Classroom. Finally, facilitators should avoid long lectures and step aside as often as possible to allow the students sufficient room to explore the course material on their own.

What are some strategies a facilitator could use to encourage student participation in the online classroom?

Why is lecturing the least productive method of teaching in the online classroom? Lecturing plays a major role in the traditional classroom, what does this say about the traditional classroom?

Subjecting students to memorization testing in the online classroom should be minimized, if not eliminated as an assessment tool. Why? (hint, think about the context in which the learning process takes place).

If you teach a subject where memorization is necessary to achieve the course objectives (i.e. Chemistry), how can discussion contribute to your course materials? What tools cold you use to facilitate the learning process, and how would you measure the success of the learning process?

Discuss the idea of “value added” in terms of adding video, audio, and real-time activities to a text-based asynchronous online learning program.

In certain subject areas, there could be considerable added value to an online course if video, audio, and real-time activities were included in the program. For example, with language learners, sound and visual components add a tremendous amount to comprehension during communication. This is because tone of voice, facial expressions, gestures, and body language add a lot to comprehension. However, purely text-based activities also have merit, especially during writing practice. The following are examples of how video, audio, and real-time activities could enhance an asynchrous online foreign language course:

• Video: Short video segments of feature films in the target language can be followed by discussion questions in the Virtual Classroom pertaining to character description, plot, story line, idioms, etc. Also, many foreign language textbooks have accompanying videos that supplement the chapters in the book. These could be placed online to be downloaded and viewed at the students’ convenience.
• Audio: Audio files can do wonders for pronunciation exercises…MUCH better than the phonetic alphabet, and when used in conjunction with the phonetic alphabet, can be even better.
• Real time activities: Activities such as video conferencing when used one-on-one is like a telephone call with video. Students can be paired up with partners across the globe and carry on real conversations in the target language. This activity can be followed by discussions in the Virtual Classroom, e-mail correspondence, and other language practice exercises.
• Note: The added use of video, audio, and real time activities can come with a price tag. The use of high tech activities such as these increases the chance of problems with the technology itself. Many things can go wrong, which would spoil the activity and cause frustration detracting from the learning experience. Technology should have a purpose, and not be incorporated into a lesson just because it is possible to do it! In the examples above, the addition of audio, video and real time activities would add value to an online language course, however, they would greatly detract from the course if the activities didn’t run smoothly. Another problem is that with the addition of these add-on technologies, there could be problems with accessibility. Does everyone in the class have the ability to download and view/listen to these files? Does everyone have a webcam on their computer, which would be necessary to participate in the video conferencing activities?  Is it feasible to ask our students to equip themselves with all of this paraphernalia?

In the online classroom, lectures are short and few. With this being the case, where are the students going to get the information they need in obtaining the learning objectives?

Here are several alternative methods for information dissemination.

Your online student calls and says, “My computer has broken down, I have lost all of my notes and will not have another system to use for a week. What should I do? ” Oh, yeah, it is the fourth week of the course, and the student is one of the worst. What action will you recommend? Why?

Your first reaction may be to tell the student to drop the class, but the key here is patience and flexibility. Remember that technical problems can happen even to the best of us. Besides, the drop date has already passed, and this student probably needs your class to graduate. First, direct them to the campus computer labs. If the student can’t come to campus, suggest that they go to a public library where there are computers hooked up to the Internet. If they don’t have time to go to the library (motivation is low), suggest that they find a friend who has a computer. Tell them that if he wants to successfully complete the course, they need to find time to access a computer.

Now, the case of the lost notes (or messages posted to the Virtual Classroom). Have they made a hard copy or saved them to disk as you had recommended in the course syllabus just in case something like this happens? If they haven’t, they should rewrite them and either fax or mail them to you. They could impose on another student in the class to post the responses for them.

Also, (snail)mail them the assignments for weeks five and six, and have them mail (or fax) the completed assignments back to you.

All of this is made possible because of the asynchronous learning environment, which is flexible and convenient. In an on-ground course, if a student misses a lesson, they miss the dynamics of the course, but this is not the case in an asynchronous class. While they may miss the initial discussions, they can read the discussions and make comments at a later date. They can also complete the assignments later once they are back online. A student who is experiencing technical problems should not be penalized. They should be allowed to finish the work even after the class has officially ended. If there is a group project involved, the student should be assigned some other activities to substitute for the group project. However, it should be noted, that the course dynamics for this particular student will shift towards the low synergy end of the learning continuum. Finally, if you are scheduled to teach the same course for the following semester, you can suggest that the student participate in the upcoming class.

Finally, it is quite possible that this student does not meet the necessary requirements for successful online students. If that is the case, they should be counseled to consider taking the on-ground equivalent course and definitely not take another online course in the future.