12 Ways to Refresh an Online Course

1) Provide learners with choices related to content, process or product.

• Content choices include different ways of accessing the same content ie. a video or an article to read. Students who struggle may do both.
• Process choices include different ways to interact with information. Ie. for this week, you can choose to either engage in discussion online or create a 3 minute video describing your perspective, or interact in a real online community- post on a blog or in the comments of an article and interact at least twice with the online world related to this topic. Provide screenshots of your interactions.
• Product choices involve presentation or paper or website etc.

2) After you provide learners with choices, ask them to reflect on the choices they made and how that potentially impacted their ability to transfer their learning into different contexts later. Why did they make the choice? Was is the best choice? Why?

3) Engage the whole class in creating the rubric for an assignment together. Then use that rubric as the grading tool.

4) Require partner peer review of papers where learners indicate, in their final submission, what their partners suggested and how they chose to address the suggestions.

5) Project based learning. Create a scenario that mirrors real life (or better yet find a real life opportunity) and situate the learning within that scenario. Be prepared to teach skills that aren’t necessarily in your discipline (communication, PPT slide design, project management, public speaking, etc.).

6) Authentic group work. Just like in real life, different people have different roles on a team. Give each group member a role, and just like in real life, if one of the group members is struggling with his/her role, the rest of the team pitches in to help out. If there is a real problem, the “boss” gets called in which in this case is the instructor. Mirror the group work after a scenario that would occur in your discipline.

7) Use reflection early and often- not just broad “reflect on what we did today” but specific critical reflection. Ex: “Before you read the article related to X, I had you jot down five words you associate with X. After reading the article, how would your list change, if at all?”

8) Teach students to monitor their own understanding and ask them to share. At key points in the course, ask for a minute paper. Students write for 1 minute about what they’re learning and what’s still foggy. The key is to write for one whole minute, everything that comes to mind. Just scanning through these, as the instructor, gives you a great idea of what students are grasping and what they’re not.

9) Observations: Make real-world observations of X, list them or take photos and share with the class. Also, take video of yourself on location in a context that relates to the class topics. Share the connection between that location and the learning outcome.

10) Use quizzes often but keep the stakes really low. Required quizzes that don’t really help or hurt a student’s grade are a great way to reinforce the important content while also showing the student his/her strengths and needs. Have students reflect on quiz results and write or discuss concepts that are areas for growth.

11) Pose a really challenging problem from your discipline (one that has multiple legitimate solutions) and provide clues for solving the problem throughout the whole semester. Near the end of the semester, set up a google doc with an outline and ask students to each contribute equally to the one shared document. Use your judgement based on the size of the class and the complexity of the problem, but you could ask for 3 sentences per student or 1 page per student. Each student could also be required to cite a reliable source for his/her contribution. For easy grading, students should copy their individual contribution into a Word doc and submit the word doc containing just their work for grading. Emphasize that it can be just as valuable to edit/revise the work of others than to submit entirely new ideas.

12) Authentic assessments. In your disciplinary field, how do professionals communicate their ability or knowledge with others? Replicate those authentic methods with your assignments- ex. Proposals, newsletters, letter to the editor, website design, mock conversation (interview), executive summary, white paper, charts/graphs, infographics, video, advertising campaign etc. Ask students to provide a rationale for their decisions so that they’re making connections between the work and the audience.