In this session, we will reveal the building blocks of a Model of Quality Online Instruction, optimized for positive student experiences. Come test your knowledge and assess your own methods in this interactive session! Leave with a diagnostic tool to evaluate quality online learning.
In online education, it can be difficult to know where to invest your time and energy to make the biggest impact on student satisfaction, success, and experience. In this presentation, we will reveal a new Model of Quality Online Instruction informed by the current state of the literature and expert consensus. This model highlights five levels to building quality in online courses. We will provide evidence to support the relationship between teaching presence, student satisfaction, engagement, and academic success.
The presentation will kick off with an affinity mapping exercise to activate attendees’ prior knowledge about what components of the online teaching and learning process have the biggest impact on student experience. Then, we’ll leverage the outcomes of the affinity map into a Family Feud-style game and we’ll close with a presentation of our model and the accompanying research. The takeaway for our attendees will be a simple diagnostic tool they can use to complete their own self-assessment on how they are applying key characteristics of instructor quality in their online teaching that will result in a positive student experience.
During the initial affinity mapping exercise, individuals will jot down characteristics of instructors and their teaching strategies that are most likely to positively impact the student experience. Then, small groups of 4-8 attendees will work together to review each other’s ideas, consolidate similar thinking, and rank the characteristics from highest to lowest impact. This ranked list will be what each team submits to the Family Feud round. Based on our research and the model of instructor quality we’ve developed, we have a list of the characteristics that have an impact on the student experience, and we’ll compare each group’s list to our master list in the style of Family Feud (e.g. teams get “points” for each item on their list that matches the master list).
After we have concluded our Family Feud comparison, we’ll spend a few minutes detailing the visual of our model and describing techniques that instructors can implement on each step of the model to “level up” their teaching practice. To help attendees internalize these techniques, we’ll ask for active participation. For example, we’ll provide one technique for social presence that reveals the instructor & their expertise like “providing just-in-time information about the course design and organization” and then ask attendees to do a quick brainstorm of 2-3 other things they can do in their own courses.
Finally, we’ll finish the presentation by handing out a diagnostic self-assessment tool we’ve developed to help instructors identify where they are on our pyramid model and where they can get the greatest impact from investing their time. The diagnostic tool will focus on continuous improvement with the idea that each term you can gradually add new techniques to your teaching practice to improve student satisfaction & engagement and academic success.