High-Impact Practices in Online Education: Research and Best Practices

Edited by Kathryn E. Linder and Chrysanthemum Mattison Hayes (Routledge, 2023)

Beyond the Single Course

High-Impact Practices in Online Education collects chapters from a dozen authors. A high-impact practice looks beyond individual course design to ask which college experiences move the needle for students, especially those traditionally underserved. Highlighted practices include undergraduate research; travel, service, and internships; cohort programs such as first-year seminars, a shared summer reading list, or learning communities; and two classroom experiences, writing-intensive classes and collaborative projects.

Designing for Collaboration

Collaborative projects let students practice working together while engaging the content, and learning is enhanced by more time on task, multiple perspectives, extra feedback, and practice using terminology so others understand. The chapter authors acknowledge that "providing collaborative learning opportunities online is challenging," but encourage thoughtful design, including "negotiation, argumentation, and… making implicit knowledge explicit." Team-building, structured expectations, and scripts around teamwork build trust; conflict should be expected, anticipated, and planned for; and an explicit grading process, through "rubrics, peer evaluation forms, written check-ins… and decision logs," alleviates pressure.

Starting from What's Realistic

I have not taken on collaborative projects, because my students already face enough challenge learning the material and managing the course. I do hold live Zoom discussion sessions, partly to learn what it is like for asynchronous students to meet briefly throughout the week. So far, about two-thirds can join a 15-minute meeting and speak in front of each other and me, while about one-third face a barrier. Next, I would like to survey students about the primary sources of difficulty. Project-based learning would be especially valuable in Business Calculus, and grounding any projects in a real understanding of what is realistic for my students will be important.

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