Best Practices for Transforming Your Online Courses
Given the priority of moving education online these days, we have the opportunity to reinvent the classroom into a hybrid, interactive, accelerated learning experience. To empower this essential transformation, we collaborated with Praxis AI to build an online experiential workshop for faculty and L&D professionals to learn best practices for designing, building and managing online courses.
This is the first in a series of Video Podcasts where Alex Feltus, Ph.D. and David Clarke explore a dozen topics in transforming traditional classroom training into online, experiential learning journeys. The first topic investigates the “Top 10 Best Practices” for going online. You can access the full Video Podcast below:
Today’s online teacher wears many hats: designing and implementing content, employing various teaching styles, juggling the needs of students, and managing the virtual classroom. It's a delicate balance between classroom facilitator, instructional designer, teacher, and course developer. To help navigate this virtual labyrinth, we came up with 10 best practices that help faculty walk the fine line & make the most of their learning experiences.
Best Practice #1: Deliver Multisensory Content
One of our favorite best practices centers on the power and diversity of multisensory content. You may have heard the brain science around learning styles: kinesthetic, auditory, visual. And a lot of that research has been debunked recently in the academic journals. But we’re here to tell you whether the academic journals solidify it or not, David is a visual learner. Alex is kinesthetic. We both gravitate to hands-on learning.
We know others who prefer to read which gives them more control over the speed of content ingestion. What’s our point? Learning styles vary – that’s the point. As a content developer, you need to provide a buffet of multisensory content – and never forget the most important one … make sure to include a “do” element as much as possible.
Here’s a quick-and-easy way to create two pieces of content from one source – convert your videos into audio podcasts that students can listen to while they're cleaning their garage or driving to the grocery store.
Best Practice #2: Be Yourself & Don’t Be a Perfectionist
A couple other powerful best practices are “Be Yourself” and “Don’t Be a Perfectionist”. This combination helps create speed and progress. This is critical because we believe very strongly, especially as we get more experience as teachers, to lean on our personalities as a strength. Trying to be somebody else just doesn't work. Too much effort.
Being yourself goes along with being a perfectionist. Alex encountered this in trying to make the perfect videos. He realized after a while that he’s not going to be on any red carpets any time soon. Skip the Academy Awards … and to just do it. Spending an extra 4 hours on a video will not make it dramatically better or impact the outcomes. This became more apparent as we viewed other videos online – great content but far from perfect production quality. Remember, you can always continuously improve – so why not just get started?!
Best Practice #3: Break Your Content into Bite Sized Chunks (Microlearning)
Life occurs in micro-moments. So, your learning needs to be delivered in bite sized chunks. No more 1 ? hour lectures, big labs, and giant midterms. You have to break that back down into bite sized pieces. In building his online course, Alex learned that he was trying to squeeze too much content into one block – and it was difficult for his students to consume. Breaking content into smaller pieces makes that process much, much more natural and supports the concept of multisensory diversity. Case in point, shorter videos are much better for consumption and focus.
We always try to walk our talk – so we will keep this section micro. The End.
Best Practice #4: Communicate + Communicate + Communicate = Engagement
As it turns out “communication” is a big problem with lecture-based teaching, especially in large classes. It’s impossible to communicate with everybody effectively. One thing a platform allows you to do is communicate through discussion boards, one-on-one mentoring, office hours, and through the asynchronous content itself.
Communication tools allow you to target specific people – especially shy students and “no-show-ers” – who are typically invisible in a large traditional classroom. A virtual platform gives you so much more visibility into what your students are doing, how well they're doing and how much time they're spending with the content and labs.
Platforms also provide automated ways of nudging learners based on thresholds of certain performance. This is a very powerful capability. You want to emphasize positive reinforcement as much as you can. This ties into engagement.
As we learned through research, if you do not have some sort of interaction with your online students every 30 seconds, you will lose them. You will lose them to email. You'll lose them to distractions of a million different types. To keep your students engaged, ask them to whiteboard; pull up graphics and ask students impromptu questions; call on them; or present online polls. These are just a few of the many strategies you can employ to make your virtual classroom activities as interactive and engaging as possible.
Engagement is important because it motivates learners. It keeps them in the course. Every single piece of research we have ever seen says the more engaged learners are, the more successful they are.
Best Practice #5: Embrace the Hybrid Classroom with Creative Assessments
Alex’s Fall Hybrid Bioinformatics class will meet from 8:00 a.m. to 9:15 a.m. on Tuesdays and Thursdays. In person … maybe. So, with all of the content online, what will he do during class time? His favorite approach is the Socratic method. Alex will walk into the classroom with a hypothesis and have the students test and share their thoughts.
Creative assessments also empower the Hybrid Classroom. Labs are a great, hands-on, option. Labs offer experiential assessment. Of course, there are also traditional options such as midterms and finals. But in a hybrid classroom with microlearning you can now break up assessments as well – consider including micro-assessments. Then, at the end of the course, you can include a video assessment where students record themselves answering questions in real-time. Being able to combine all these types of assessments provides tremendous flexibility and the ability to bring hard skills and soft skills together, to bring qualitative and creative assessment into a quantitative course.
Lastly, the hybrid classroom can allow you to see and interact with every one of your students and see who they are. This could be the best of the best practices, and one many traditional classroom teachers will never get the chance to enjoy.
And don't forget, Have Fun!
WEBINAR: 3 Steps in 3 Days – Transforming Your Online Courses
Join Alex and David for a free Training Industry Product Showcase where they will demonstrate how the faculty enablement journey “Going Online: Teaching in the Virtual Classroom” can help you transform your courses simply and quickly. This is a BYOC — Bring Your Own Course — event!
You will learn actionable insights on:
- Principles and best practices for online teaching and learning.
- Designing an online course using templates.
- Implementing your online design by building a live lesson.
You can register for the free webinar below: