A. Delivering Content & Sharing Expertise, and Giving Feedback

Why do we need to talk about specific aspects of teaching online?

Isn’t teaching teaching?

Yes, of course it is. In this unit we will be applying what we know about what is good teaching to the online environment. There are circumstances that we have to consider, as we discussed in Unit 1, that online learning presents and we use the notion of presences and engagement to meet those challenges.

But ultimately, teaching is teaching. Let’s recap:

We connect our instruction to our learner’s needs

Good instructors think about the needs of the learners, where their learners are coming from and where they want to go. We think about our learners in terms of their developmental, cognitive and social needs. We connect our teaching to what our learners need.

We know from research and experience that once we become adults, as adult learners we generally enjoy learning environments that are respectful, where there is collaboration, where we have a sense of control and we are participating voluntarily. Adult learners come from a wide variety of backgrounds and prior learning experiences, so that as adults, we are always seeking to integrate the new concepts and ideas that we are introduced to with our prior knowledge. Adult learners also generally desire practical applications of the learning to make it meaningful for themselves.

From cognitive science, we can summarize into these six principles of knowledge acquisition the needs of brains that optimize our learning, and these are generally accepted to be the case for most learners.

Six Principle of Knowledge Acquisition

1. Learning requires time, effort and motivation
2. Concentration spans are short
3. Distributed practice is more effective than massed practice or cramming
4. Prior knowledge effects are powerful
5. Our minds respond well to multimedia input
6. To learn, our minds have to be active

_{(Hattie, J. and Yates, G. (2014). Visible Learning and the Science of How We Learn, Routledge: New York)}

Connecting our instruction

We want to make sure that we plan our instruction to fit with how people learn, as described in the previous section. The following is a summary of seven principles of good practice for teaching adults and they are especially relevant for teaching at BCIT. They describe effective practices of instructors who have connected what they do in their teaching to what their learners need for an effective learning experience.

Seven Principles of Good Practice for Teaching Adults

1. Good practice encourages contact between students and instructors.
2. Good practice develops rapport and cooperation among students
3. Good practice uses active learning techniques
4. Good practice gives prompt feedback
5. Good practice emphasizes time on task
6. Good practice communicates high expectations
7. Good practice respects diverse talents and ways of learning

_{(Compiled in a study by Arthur W. Chickering and Zelda F. Gamson)}

Taking the idea of seven principles for effective teaching one step further, some of the developers of the Community of Inquiry have created 7 principles for building a community of inquiry specifically for online and blended learning environments.

Seven principles for Building a Community of Inquiry

1. Plan for the creation of open communication and trust.
2. Plan for critical reflection and discourse.
3. Establish community and cohesion.
4. Establish inquiry dynamics (purposeful inquiry).
5. Sustain respect and responsibility.
6. Sustain inquiry that moves to resolution.
7. Ensure assessment is congruent with intended processes and outcomes.

_{(Vaughn, N., Cleveland-Innes, M., Garrison, R. (2013) Teaching in Blended Learning Environments)}

For this section, we narrow in specifically on instructional strategies that depend upon communication, and the use of communication tools in the online environment.

The affordances of online digital technologies enable us to reduce the transactional distance in traditional correspondence courses when used – specifically, the various communication-oriented technologies such as discussion forums, web-conferencing technologies, News items, and push emails from within the LMS. The planned and sustainable use of these features promote instructional presence, social presence and facilitate learning (enabling cognitive presence). Promoting online interaction, across space and time facilitates learning engagement in the course by tapping into and provoking key motivational elements.

The planned and sustainable use of these communication tools are best matched with instructional strategies that promote discussion and collaboration, where these specific technologies gird the activities and assessment strategies to achieve that outcomes that are best attained via discussion and collaboration.

We merely summarize these instructional strategies and relate them to teaching online (and instructional strategies are the focus of POLY 1010 Instructional Strategies). The main instructional strategies we will briefly review are:

• direct instruction,
• cooperative & collaborative learning,
• learning through discussion, and
• experiential learning.

Our approach is that the above are strategies that are not mutually exclusive of each other – each are strategies that you can combine into one learning event, for example. But for the purposes of concentrating on teaching strategies that adapt well to the affordances of online, we would like to highlight their features.

But before getting started on those, we want to introduce the notion of having a facilitative mind-set and employing tangible facilitation skills to your teaching, no matter how, what or where you teach.