Online Course Peer Review

This past week I attended the International Conference on College Teaching and Learning in Ponte Vedra Beach, FL (http://www.teachlearn.org). A common theme among the many presenters thereseemed to be using creativity in the online classroom.LSC’s peer review process doesn’t look specifically for how instructors might creatively engage their students, but what instructordoesn’t want to shake things up a little and implement newideas in their classroom?

One of the better presentations I attended was titled “Engaging the Millennial Student” by Jason Ford. “Millennials”, according to Ford,are students born between the years 1980 and 2000. They were born into an age of incredible technology and speedy communication. Why not utilize some of the technology they use everyday as part of the learning process in our online classrooms? Some interesting ideas:

• create brief podcasts of stories you often tell while lecturing in an on campus classroom and incorporate them into online lecture notesand discussions
• allow students to use whatever technology they’d like to complete an assigned class activity — the more creative the better (this way you’re learning more about what students are capable of doing with technology, as well!)
• learn more about how you might incorporate games into your course. Interesting links: http://www.marcprensky.com/(Marc Prensky is a leader in this subject), http://www.educationarcade.org/gamesand http://www.seriousgames.org/index2.html

Of course, there are dozens of other ways to capture the attention and interest of students using technology. I’d be interested in learning about what you might do that works well. Post a comment!