Online Course Peer Review

Four or five years ago, LSC faculty attended a duty day held at the DECC. The keynote speaker challenged us to work toward continuously improving our courses throughout the semester by asking students for their anonymousfeedback. I remember thinking “sure, great idea!”, but when it came right down to it, incorporating a “How’s Susan doing?” [...]

Rubric standard III.3 reads: Assessment and measurement strategies provide appropriate feedback to the learner.
Thinking back to my undergraduate years, I honestly don’t remember getting much instructor feedback on my coursework. Of course, I attended a fairly large state school and I oftentimes sat in packed lecture halls with hundreds of classmates. Still, in some of [...]

Rubric standard V.3 states: Clear standards are set for instructor response and availability (turnaround time for email, grades posted, etc.)
Studentswant clear information about how quickly grades will be posted after coursework has been submitted. Before I started taking classes online, I didn’t think much about this standard. I put a statement in my syllabus that [...]

I love online class discussions. When I first started teaching online, I think I might have tried to respond to just about every student post. I wanted studentsto know I was there and reading what they’d written. Of course, I quickly learned to stop being so annoying! Still, as I serve on peer review teams [...]

Many of my students are nowusing Windows Vista, which I understand is pretty impressive to use. The problem I’ve run into is when assignments are saved as word documents in Vista, they become impossible for anyone without Vista to open (.docx). I do inform my students in several areas of my courses that theymust save [...]

The first “Sharing What You Do Online” session spurred so much great discussion thatwe’ve decided to offer six or seven more yet this semester. The next three sessions are as follows:

Thursday, October 11 from 12:00-1:00 Amy Jo Swing will showcase her Comp II class. Amy Jo has been teaching online for ten or eleven years [...]

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 [...]

Over the course of the academic year, I’ll be coordinating adozen or soopportunities for online faculty to see how their peers teach online.The first session will be held next Wednesday, September 26 in the library’s technology center. Watch for details via email, as I’m still in the process of reserving rooms and scheduling meeting dates [...]

A few years back I realized that I needed to address the seemingly growing number of students who werepurchasing the wrong textbook, the wrong edition, or failing to buy one at all (”you mean we need to buy a textbook for an online course?”). Iroutinely provided the correct textbook information on the syllabus and course [...]

Ready or not, here it is! The older I get, the faster summers seem to fly by. Still, this is always an exciting time of the year. A quick peer review update:
Online course peer review is starting its third year at LSC. Since Barry Dahl introduced the peer review concept to LSC online faculty in [...]