In the Jesuit IPP, context can mean: know the learner. A professor seeks to understand the perspectives and something of the life experience of her students. Learn what you prudently can about their life, family, interests, aspirations, and relationship to, for example, social, economic, political, or racial issues.
At the same time, provide students with some context. Explain to them your field's core, unifying beliefs (or debates), contributions to society, and ways of working. Many of your students have no experience with undergraduate or graduate studies, so why your course is important is not obvious to them. Show a little passion for your subject, and explain to them how you came to be who you are. This can be inspiring to otherwise indifferent students.
A professor encourages his students to connect what they experience in his class (learning) with other aspects of their lived experience. Up front this means learning facts, debates, concepts, theories and so on - the work popularly associated with school. But the next step is relating it other things students believe, think they know, or might have at least come across before. Does the learning in this course reinforce or build upon prior education? Does it seem counter-intuitive, or produce contradictions in what students think or understand?
Ignatius of Loyola was famously reflective, but far from navel-gazing, he worked toward discernment, or developing a practical understanding or course of action. A professor encourages her students to consider a new concept or story in light of the bigger picture surrounding it (context - society, culture, history, and so on) and their own prior knowledge, beliefs, or life circumstances (experience.) Can students identify as-yet unspoken implications, or pose further questions, based on these comparisons? Are there other perspectives on a topic that might tell a different story or express a different moral position? How might further possible experimentation or research yield a bigger, and different picture?
Students should also reflect on their learning within the class, at the present, as an experience. Are there concepts they easily grasp, or struggle to grasp? Do they find that some concepts, theories, or even just facts arouse in them one emotion or another? ("I don't like this!" is a valid start. Now ask "why?") What role do I, or the way I live, play in what's under discussion here?
Here, professors strike a balance between potent reflection-provoking activities, and suggesting or even imposing a dominant way of thinking, or indoctrination. (Students can tempt professors to this: just tell us the answer, please!) Instead, the professor coaches students to achieve discernment using their own brain power, individually or collaboratively.
Ideally, the reflection stage should have students sharing with each other. This is a chance to acquire different perspectives from other students, have their own ideas challenged, and help one another arrive at a broader, more comprehensive insight. The basic, but by no means only way this happens in online courses is asynchronous discussion.
A professor provides opportunities for students to employ the fruits of their reflections - insights, conclusions, newly acquired (if still imprecise) skills, and so on - in creating or doing. "...[W]hile it may not immediately transform the world into a global community of justice, peace and love," action as part of coursework "should at least be an educational step in that direction and toward that goal even if it merely leads to new experiences, further reflections, and consequent actions within the subject area under consideration." (Ignatian Pedagogy, 1993 , 8). Ideally, "Action" in a class should be more than quizzes and exams that ask students to recall and report what they memorized.
Evaluation is a basic part of school education. Within the Ignatian education model assessment or evaluation serves the specific purpose of showing students how they have learned, and where they still struggle within learning. This contributes to magis, or the continual pursuit of our better selves.
Course assessments, then, must be more than points-gathering or box-checking. Rather, they are opportunities to offer students specific suggestions for improvement, as well as affirmation of where they succeed.
Moreover, professors should encourage students to think about how they learn, or metacognition. This involves the risk and effort of systematically trying new things and observing the results. As a student, why do I struggle in (and maybe dislike) geometry? How might I change my ways of learning so that I find geometry easier and more rewarding?