Students are not fond of teamwork, especially when it’s online. That is one of the findings of my dissertation, which explores the relationship between online students’ interpersonal needs and interaction preference. Nine years have passed since I received my Ph.D., and this unfavorable feeling toward teamwork still seems to be present to a large extent for online students.

As an instructional designer, I find that two of the things that faculty struggle with are developing sound outcome statements and developing interesting online activities that effectively assess those outcomes. I don’t mean to imply that faculty don’t know how to do these things but instead that often, especially with objectives, they are implied instead of explicitly stated. In the face-to-face classroom environment, an instructor can easily adjust objectives and assignments based on class reaction—unfortunately much of this flexibility disappears when teaching online. Online students need to know up front what the objects are (at both the course and week/modular level) and see a clear connection between those objectives and the assignments/assessments.

It is particularly gratifying to read a headline like this one, which appeared in last week’s Chronicle of Higher Education: “Online-Education Study Reaffirms Value of Good Teaching, Experts Say.”

Gotta love it! "Good teaching" finally makes it into the online tool kit!

The ’study’ is Evaluation of Evidence-Based Practices in Online Learning: a Meta-Analysis and Review of Online Learning Studies–recently released by the U.S. Department of Education. The full report is available online.

I quickly downloaded, printed out, read, and marked up my own copy!