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Channel: Faculty Focus» Errol Craig Sull
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11 Tips for Setting the Tone in Your Online Course

The cliché that you only get one chance to make a first impression is especially true when you teach online. Each item you post—email, discussion message, announcement, etc.—must be created with much...

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Taking a Learner-Centered Approach in Online Courses

One of the biggest changes in recent years has been the adoption of student-centered instruction. Here are a few tips for taking this approach to teaching in your online courses: Be a constant presence...

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Keep Your Classes on Track During the Holidays

This time of year is always one of the most difficult times for students to focus on their studies. In the online classroom it can be an especially challenging to keep students engaged, serious, and...

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Seven Tips for Creating a Positive Online Learning Experience

Here are a few tips to ensure your students have a positive online learning experience. Personal introductions. By using the personal introductions of students, an instructor can get to know his/her...

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Instructor or Professor, It’s Not Your Title but What You Do That’s Important

In a recent conversation, an online teaching colleague complained that her school had wrongly listed her as “adjunct instructor,” rather than “adjunct professor,” in its faculty roster. “That term...

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Online Teaching Tips: Sweat the Small Stuff

When we teach online courses there are many fundamental issues that concern us: knowledge of our subjects, teaching strategies, engagement of students, school policies, deadlines, grading and returning...

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Online Teaching Tips for Leveraging Students’ Insights and Experiences

Teaching any online class is time-consuming and can be a juggling act. The instructor must keep students engaged and motivated, adhere to a variety of deadlines, quickly answer all student emails and...

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Preparing Your Online Students for the Tough Weeks Ahead

Our courses are rolled out to online students with assignments scheduled for each week. Some of these assignments are relatively easy, meaning there will be weeks that are “light” in terms of scheduled...

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How to Create Effective Activities for Online Teaching

We’ve all used them, first as students and now as online instructors: activities in a class meant to highlight, spotlight, underline, enhance, or explain some aspect of the subject we are teaching. Too...

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Creating Effective Responses to Student Discussion Postings

An integral part of nearly all online classes is the threaded discussion—it is where students interact on a nearly daily basis, posting their thoughts and information on main discussion topics, your...

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The Underbelly of Online Teaching

No matter how much we embrace and enjoy online teaching, the human frailties of mistakes, disappointment, anger, frustration, and oversights will come calling each time we teach a class. And when any...

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Teach Like It’s 1990: Online Teaching Fundamentals Are Always in Style

The list of technological add-ons to enhance our teaching efforts seems to be endless and growing. Yet as these add-ons continue to grow in use, a problem has also begun to surface: the online...

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Personality Matters When Teaching Online

Online instructors are hired because they are judged as having the right combination of education, teaching experience, content expertise, and professional accomplishments. But once an instructor is in...

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The Online Educator’s Complete Guide to Grading Assignments, Part 1

Students know that in any online course assignments will be required, and students expect the online educator to read the assignments and give feedback that can help them improve their understanding of...

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The Online Educator’s Complete Guide to Grading Assignments, Part 2

On Tuesday, I provided general suggestions on course-based grading expectations practices. Here I share some ideas for grading specific assignments. Use a bank of comments that are precise, detailed,...

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The How, Why, and When of Posting Resources in the Online Classroom

Resources—that amalgam of nearly anything and everything related to the subjects we teach and offered to our students as “extras”—give students a broader, deeper, and enhanced understanding of what...

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Tips for Overcoming Online Discussion Board Challenges

Discussion boards are often viewed as the heart of online courses, and for good reason: the students can interact with one another 24/7, sharing, debating, and offering ideas, insights, suggestions,...

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The Most Overlooked Items That Can Help Keep Online Students Engaged

Student engagement is a popular topic and the overwhelming majority of the information on this topic is concentrated on the big issues of keeping students engaged, such as the importance of faculty...

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Creating the Perfect PowerPoint for Online Teaching

While other forms of visual presentations have cropped up—such as Prezi and Empressr—PowerPoint remains the presentation software of choice. Yet many folks develop PowerPoint presentations without...

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Overcoming Eight Common Obstacles of Teaching Online

Anyone who teaches online has run into problems within their courses. Some of these problems can be complicated and if not correctly resolved can do major damage to the online instructor’s reputation...

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