Studying for final assessments; Completing final assessments; Understanding final assessment questions; Sample final assessment questions; Preparing a study timetable; Research & writing for assignments. Boettcher and Conrad suggest that an effective ‘strategy for developing a supportive online course community is to design a course with a balanced set of dialogues’, by which they mean that ‘the three dialogues of faculty to learner, learner to learner, and learner to resource are about equal’ (2010, 39). On Facebook, search for your topic. Students have different learning styles. And when you package your ideas in the perfect blog post template, you’ll have the formula for a winning blog post every time you write. Students are more likely, therefore, to ‘use content, resources, and applications that are online, digital, and readily available’. When teaching a large class online, Boettcher and Conrad recommend dividing the class into small study groups of four to six students, in which students can go to one another ‘for supportive networking or mentoring, including help in identifying resources or clarifying key points of a class assignment’ (2010, 39-40). And start reading the comments. Thinking aloud among peers can help students learn alternative approaches to tasks and activities from one another, some of which can support the completion of tasks or engagement in skills to a greater degree of proficiency.

Creating awesome content is a perpetual challenge. Second, of the first ten practices, the eight chosen offer particularly fruitful insights for online teaching in secondary education. It also takes longer to write by hand, which gives the brain time to process any new information it may be receiving. These are not groups within online classes, but rather sub-groups in place throughout a course, in which students can support one another. To stay on top of things, I find it’s helpful to set up weekly alerts and make time to go through your search results. Test every headline before you publish. Head back to AlsoAsked, and enter those search terms to generate more questions. There ‘is the danger’, they write, ‘that too much faculty presence will stunt the discussions as well as delay the development of learner self-direction’ (2010, 38).

This process can serve as a useful form of modelling. If your professor has not established research requirements for your assignment, it’s a good idea to ask. The most common way in which we learn and are taught is within a social context, as members of a class. Develop and use a content frame for the course. Plan a good closing and wrap activity for the course. And these reviews can give you a level of insight into your audience that you’d normally expect from a face to face conversation: Word to the wise: fraudulent feedback is a major concern on Amazon and other online retail sites.