Online Tool Use and Strategies in Face-to-Face Courses: Tomorrow's Professor

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Basic Lessons from Teaching Online that Make Better Face to Face Teachers

Many features of online courses that are deemed to be indispensable are also highly desirable and beneficial in face to face courses.

Organization - Without common sense and consistent organization of both content (such as learning objectives and chapter readings), and administrative components (such as assignment due dates and grade displays), an online course will almost certainly lapse into a confusing, demoralizing state. Every activity, assignment, quiz and forum should tie back to the course big ideas in a more deliberate way online than in a face to face course, primarily because online courses lack the immediacy of classroom questions and answers, and the richer sense of context available in face to face communication. Careful organization in an online class can't help but carry over to the face to face class.

Comprehensive Materials - Much of the popularity of online courses among students derives from their perceived convenience. Convenience arises from the Internet's "anytime/anywhere" accessibility, but also from the aggregation of course materials into an ordered listing, typically with hyperlinks to take the student directly to the materials. Such a listing is mandatory in an online course, but after producing it for the online course, the same materials can also serve the face to face class. A comprehensive listing can serve as a content-rich course outline, and it can remediate content coverage for students who missed class.

Tools - Instructors who teach online may find that essential software, simulations, and administrative tools are also useful in the face to face classroom. Forum discussions, Voicethread, online homework systems, assignment dropboxes (which timestamp and track submitted work), and anti-plagiarism services, all support multiple strategies of assessment,[3] delivery of materials, and methods of coursework submission, which are all necessary in a quality online course. These same tools can be used to good effect in a face to face course. For example, students in an online chemistry course at our institution must visualize three-dimensional molecular shapes in their study of the relationships between structure and properties. However, the students have no access to traditional molecular modeling kits. Instead, they use "Molecular Playground,"a free online tool developed at Ohio State University, [4] to create easily manipulated pseudo three-dimensional "Jmol" structures. Unlike the online students, those in the face to face course have some access to traditional modeling kits. Even so, students use the online tool to create Jmol structures at times and locations for which the traditional kits are not available. Additionally, the instructor uses the tool during class to support discussions, by creating structures much more rapidly than can be done with traditional ball-and-stick kits. Distinct from the structures created from ball-and-stick kits, Jmol images are resizable to be visible in any classroom. The need to implement the Molecular Playground in the online course sensitized the instructor to benefits that the tool could bring to the face to face course.

Student-Student Interaction - Good online teaching encourages the instructor to create a place where students can introduce themselves to the class. As part of the introduction the instructor may ask students to share their favorite website, something for which they are proud, or an obstacle they had to overcome. Such activities improve civility and reduce resistance to collaboration. An instructor in a face to face class uses the same activity because he found that students who knew something personal about the other students in the room treated one another better in classroom discussions and debates.

Formative Assessment - The absence of body language and other subtle cues and clues about student understanding in the online environment puts a premium on quizzes, forum posts, and peer evaluations when looking for signs of student progress. The same examples and tools can also be used in the face to face class. Students may faithfully attend class, but attendance does not indicate understanding. By providing online opportunities to get feedback, the instructor can gain better understanding of student progress prior to exams or other summative assessments.

Conclusion

In general, online courses require greater planning, more extensive resources, more formalized communication, and more detailed organization than do face to face courses. But, the work that goes into creating an online course, and the insights forthcoming from comparison of online and face to face versions of the course, can make the face to face course better in many ways.

CONTACT:Michael L. Rodgers, PhD Director, Advanced Placement Teacher Development and Professor of Chemistry Southeast Missouri State University Cape Girardeau, MO 63701E-mail: mrodgers@semo.edu Telephone: (573) 651-2360 Web: http://cstl-csm.semo.edu/rodgers/ Links to an external site.