Online Course Peer Review

Students who are new to online learning are often, quite understandably, nervous about how the online classroom works. I’d hazard to guess thatmost of us have at least a few students each semester who are overly concerned about how to use important features of the classroom — the dropbox and quizzes, in particular. A fairly easy way to help ease these concerns is to provide students with the opportunity to practice out these features, without the worry of being graded.

Create a folder in the dropbox called “Practice Submitting an Assignment — optional” (or something along those lines) for students who have never used the dropbox and want to try it out. This can be especially helpful if students have never saved a document in rich text format (which I require) and want to give it a shot before submitting their first “real” assignment.

Quizzes seem to be especially stressful for students. Why have them stress out about the quizzing feature when they’re already nervous enoughabout being quizzed on the course material?Consider setting up an optionalpractice quiz for students who want to experience the feature before that first nerve-racking quiz. This can also be a good opportunity to slip in questions about the course that students should be familiar with. Include questions that they’ll need to refer to the syllabus to answer–such as college and course policies. It can’t hurt!

Regardless, letting students try out some of the features of your course without the concern of a grade, can help to decrease the stress level of some who are new to online learning. Low stress is good in my book!