Posts Categorized: Online Teaching Resources

When you are about to teach an online course, and you have been told that you need to choose a textbook, feeling pressure is understandable. For students, a textbook is a major purchase, and usually an expensive one, and so your decision has consequence. If your online course is asynchronous, the textbook is going to… Read more »

When faced with literally hundreds of college courses, all of which make a pitch for the student’s attention (and eventually their attendance), how does a student choose which course to take? Course descriptions. Remember course catalogs when you were in college? You’d “shop” through them and see what struck you as interesting, pertinent, or just… Read more »

Think back to when you were enrolled in college. How long were your courses in terms of weeks and hours spent in the classroom? Chances are, if your college education was traditional—which is to say, typical—you likely enrolled in semesters. If that was the case, your classes probably took about 15 weeks to complete, and… Read more »

Collaboration, Interaction, and sharing form the heart of an online course. Interaction leads to student engagement, and student engagement indicates success. If you’ve taught, or even attended, an online class of any sort, you know how strange it can seem. If you’ve even done a large-scale Zoom meeting—and who hasn’t, at this point?—you know that… Read more »

When it comes to online student success, student engagement is going to naturally rank high. This is especially the case in online courses, where student behavior, motivation, and participation are critical. Trying to “stay connected” in an online class—even though the Internet is supposedly about connection—can prove daunting to many students. After all, it is… Read more »

By now, as someone interested in becoming an online adjunct professor, you are aware of the many things that need to go into doing that job well. One of the things you’ll have to do is to lead discussions, and those discussions will be led entirely online, in cyberspace. So how do you do that?… Read more »

Leading class discussions, and encouraging discussion among students, is one of the most important factors of a successful online class. In the asynchronous format, discussion will look a lot different from what we might expect of teaching—a professor behind a lectern at the head of a classroom calling on raised hands. Well, an online class… Read more »

If you’ve been looking at media reports of the life of an adjunct college instructor, you’ve no doubt been made privy to all the, well, controversy. And a lot of people will say that being an adjunct—let alone an online adjunct—just isn’t worth it. But you ought to know up front: there’s a difference with… Read more »

A lot of prospective online instructors write to me with frustration at how long it is taking to land that first job. There are many reasons – not having to do with the one’s ability, motivation, or qualifications – why it is so difficult to “break in”. I review these reasons in our newest 4-week, instructor-led course… Read more »

In 2018 we published a brief blog post titled 5 Creative Icebreaker Assignments for the Online Classroom, and to date it’s our most popular article. Which makes a lot of sense – we know from distance education research that the establishment of a vibrant, engaging, and collaborative classroom community lies at the heart of an… Read more »