Online Teaching

• Establish learning outcomes for your course that are clear and measurable.
• Use a course blueprint to ensure your assessments, activities, and materials align with your learning outcomes.
• Consider how to calculate instructional time for online and hybrid courses
• Use a course checklist to help you stay on track with building and facilitating your course in D2L:
  • New Course Checklist
  • Previously Taught Course Checklist

• Read the D2L Essentials guide, which covers basic features such as:
  • creating modules
  • adding your syllabus and other content
  • updating news items
  • activating your course
  • emailing your students
  • grades, and more
• Watch a recorded webinar on getting started with D2L
• Read the Tools documentation for specific tools in D2L.

It’s all too easy for students to feel disconnected from one another and their instructors in online environments. This can be particularly true in asynchronous classes where students and instructors do not see and hear from one another at the same time. 

Watch a 40-minute webinar on Staying Connected with Your Asynchronous Students

Research has shown that higher degrees of social presence are positively correlated with higher degrees of perceived learning and satisfaction. We also know from our own students that social presence is particularly important in their online learning experiences. In a survey completed by 1,586 DePaul undergraduate students in spring 2020, many students mentioned that their online learning experiences lacked the sense of connection, routine, and structure that they often rely on in face-to-face learning. The following list provides practical strategies to address these concerns:

• Help students get to know you and each other. Introduce yourself and also ask students to introduce themselves in the beginning of the course. Share your professional background and experience, and if you feel comfortable, some personal information, in order to establish yourself not only as an expert but also as an authentic, approachable person.
• Provide timely updates and check-ins. You can do this using a combination of email and news items in D2L. Many instructors record short videos for this purpose.
• Assign low-stakes assignments early in the term. This allows you to verify student progress and provide students with feedback while there’s plenty of time for them to take action and improve.
• Set clear expectations for response time. Let students know how quickly you respond to email and grade assignments.
• Provide opportunities for real-time interaction. Offer optional synchronous sessions for students in fully asynchronous courses and hold virtual office hours over Zoom.
• Use small-group discussion to increase student engagement. When leading synchronous sessions, consider using breakout rooms to give students opportunities to talk to each other about course content and build connections. In asynchronous courses, assign students to small groups to help keep Discussion forums manageable.
• Consider establishing alternative communication spaces for students. Provide ways for students to connect with you and one another using a collaboration platform like Microsoft Teams or Slack.
• Consider using multimedia-rich presentation and discussion tools. Tools such as VoiceThread or Flipgrid encourage audio/video-based asynchronous conversation as an alternative to text-heavy discussions in D2L.
• Give feedback using video or audio. In D2L, you can record audio feedback using the Submissions tool or video-based feedback using Panopto.