Online Teaching at Its Best: Merging Instructional Design with Teaching and Learning Research

by Linda B. Nilson and Ludwika A. Goodson (Jossey-Bass, 2017)

Good Teaching in Any Modality

Online Teaching at Its Best begins by reminding us that teaching can be good or bad in any modality. Effective practices include "opportunities for student collaboration, as well as self-reflection and self-monitoring." Although ideal learning activities share traits across modalities, the online environment poses different challenges. The authors recommend a backward design process that starts from bigger-picture outcomes such as student agency or confidence, then graphically maps the units of a course to appropriate activities and assessments.

Principles from Cognitive Science

Chapter 4 offers "25 principles of learning from cognitive science." Item 11 supports connecting lessons to simple stories or example cases, and item 12 supports connecting concepts to examples that differ in abstraction and context. (Number 25 is especially ponderous: students learn better from printed materials than from e-books.) The authors sort these findings into recommendations such as spaced practice, invoking emotions, and creating a safe environment. A later chapter addresses misconceptions: ask students to reveal them, prompt them to test their model against counterexamples or anomalies, then offer the correct model and "relate new knowledge to it as much as possible."

Managing Feedback

Principles 23 and 24, "Error Correction" and "Prompt Feedback on Errors," speak most directly to my courses. Online Canvas quizzes with prepared feedback and multiple attempts are well-suited, but formative assessment with retakes in the live classroom creates a grading load that must be managed thoughtfully. This quarter I have tried grading in-class formative assessments quickly rather than point by point, giving everyone half credit for trying (unless the work is 100% correct), then offering a matched, computer-graded Canvas assessment where students submit corrections for up to full credit.

🏠Blog home