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Project Name: Beyond Sit and Click: Designing Engaging Online Courses
Teacher: Kristin Kipp
Grade Level: Adult, Instructors of Online Course Content
Subject/Course: Professional Development
Other Subject areas to be included, if any: Technology
Duration: One school year with monthly meetings lasting two hours each
Project Idea/Description
Project Idea/Description
In this professional development project, teachers of online content are challenged to update their courses to meet the needs of 21st Century learners, who demand collaboration, interactivity, and critical thinking in their learning. This project utilizes focus groups with monthly goals as well as learning labs and monthly discussions to help teacher imagine what truly interactive, engaging online course content can look like. The final product will be a wiki that can be shared with other teachers to help them create more engaging courses.
Driving Question
Driving Question
How can we make online learning more engaging for students?
How can we make online learning more engaging for students?
Sub-questions
Sub-questions
- What qualities create an engaging online session?
- What aspects of the iNACOL Course Quality standards are most critical in creating engaging course content?
- What role does collaboration play in learning?
- How can we deepen student to student interactions in our courses and what impact would that have?
- How can we better utilize discussion boards to help students connect to each other?
- How can we implement group projects to help students deepen their understanding of a topic?
- How can differentiation in product, process, or topic help engage students?
- What is active learning?
- What does active learning look like in an online environment?
- What depth of knowledge are our current courses using most of the time and how do we take that deeper?
- How can online tests or quizzes be updated to access a deeper level of understanding?
- How can we use digital media such as video, audio, and images to make online learning more engaging?
- How can we make our courses more relevant to the real-world?
- How can we incorporate real-world problems into our courses?
- How can we help our students connect with an authentic audience to make their learning more meaningful?
Content Standards
Content Standards
iNACOL National Standards for Quality Online Teaching
C1: The online teacher knows and understands the techniques and applications of online instructional strategies, based on current research and practice (e.g., discussion, student-directed learning, collaborative learning, lecture, project-based learning, forum, small group work).
C2: The online teacher knows and understands the process for facilitating, monitoring, and establishing expectations for appropriate interaction among students.
C4: The online teacher knows and understands the process for facilitating and monitoring online instruction groups that are goal oriented, focused, project-based, and inquiry-oriented to promote learning through group interaction
C6: The online teacher knows and understands differentiated instruction based on students’ learning styles.
iNACOL National Standards for Quality Online Courses
B3: The course instruction includes activities that engage students in active learning
B4: The course and course instructor provide students with multiple learning paths, based on student needs that engage students in a variety of ways.
B5: The course provides opportunities for students to engage in higher-order thinking, critical reasoning activities and thinking in increasingly complex ways.
B10: The course provides opportunities for appropriate instructor-student and student-student interaction to foster mastery and application of the material.
ISTE Standards for Teachers
1b: . Engage students in exploring real-world issues and solving authentic problems using digital tools and resources
2c: Customize and personalize learning activities to address students’ diverse learning styles, working strategies, and abilities using digital tools and resources
21st Century Skills from P21
Think Creatively
- Use a wide range of idea creation techniques (such as brainstorming)
- Create new and worthwhile ideas (both incremental and radical concepts)
- Elaborate, refine, analyze and evaluate their own ideas in order to improve and maximize creative efforts
Work Creatively with Others
- Develop, implement and communicate new ideas to others effectively
- Be open and responsive to new and diverse perspectives; incorporate group input and feedback into the work
- Demonstrate originality and inventiveness in work and understand the real world limits to adopting new ideas
- View failure as an opportunity to learn; understand that creativity and innovation is a long-term, cyclical process of small successes and frequent mistakes
Implement Innovations
- Act on creative ideas to make a tangible and useful contribution to the field in which the innovation will occur
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