Abstract
Faculty teaching both onsite and online courses have unique insights into how each modality can be implemented to be most effective for student learning. In their online classes where students might be more likely to struggle, these faculty are continually looking for methods and strategies to help their students learn the material more effectively. A survey was conducted with 174 faculty that teach both onsite and online to gather ideas on why online courses often have lower success than onsite courses. While overall results of this survey are provided in “Faculty Perspectives on Narrowing the Success Gap Between Online and Onsite Learning” (Cherif et al., 2019), this study leverages the free responses provided in the survey where faculty provided details on their specific strategies to help their online students. These strategies touched on nearly every aspect of online instruction, including course design, resources for students, student characteristics, teaching strategies, student engagement, and assessments. By sharing these strategies, other faculty can consider what might be impactful for their online classes and students, study the impact and continue to improve online education worldwide.
Highlights
The expansion of online course offerings in higher education is undeniable
While many of them didn’t provide clear ideas on how, and what, they assert that the existing forms of online course designs are not helping and new alternatives must be found
Some ideas can be found in a 2015 article where professors Crews, Wilkinson, and Neill proposed principles for good practice in effective online course design to assist students’ success in undergraduate education
Summary
The expansion of online course offerings in higher education is undeniable. The proportion of students who take at least one online course in higher education was (in 2014) at the highest point in history at 33.5%. Several questions on that survey were open ended, allowing responding faculty to elaborate on their insights on why online student might struggle and how online education could be improved (Cherif et al, 2017; Cherif et al, 2019). Based on these open-ended responses, a variety of suggestions were gathered from those on the front line on how online education could be improved. In doing so, ―there are no short cuts for efficient and effective learning which always starts with a proper mindset of both students and teachers (Chew, 2014)
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