4 Tips for eLearning teachers to make their courses better

/ uniuslearning

education-teaching

Teachers usually provide a prompt and require a certain amount of posts or sentences that a student must write to receive credit before a certain deadline. Often, replying to another student’s post is mandatory. Now we can talk on how to make your eLearning course better.

  1. Keep Questions Specific

If students don’t know what you’re saying in the question, how can they respond in a thoughtful way? Make sure the student knows where to find information the question asks about. For example: don’t ask an ambiguous question about a particular topic in a reading without backup information. Try to provide the page or chapter number the question involves or post links to online articles. By giving students a clue, they can better review what they’ve learned and develop from there.

  1. Let Go of Sentence

Answering a discussion question shouldn’t be about writing the required number of sentences. If students are thinking about word count rather than that topic at hand, doesn’t that defeat the whole point? Try to make the requirement something like: post a thoughtful response with at least three supporting ideas. Sure, it may be harder to grade, but such requirement focuses a student on those supporting thoughts.

  1. You Can’t Force Collaboration

Let’s say you’re the standard: write a post and reply to a post. Typically you’ll just get replies without a true discussion. To avoid this, have more investment. Require a reply to any replies on a discussion post. You have due dates. As a recap, you’ll have students consistently discussing until the end of the assignment.

  1. Two Heads Are Better Than One

You can ask a question to one or several students. What if you had a team of two students for one response? You’d get better and more well rounded responses. Also, such a requirement saves time. Why spend more time grading two responses when a better one does the job?

We hope these tips help you re-think the modern eLearning discussion requirements. And help you to improve your online courses.

Source: http://www.edudemic.com