Myths About Online Teaching

Teaching an online class the first time can take up to 40 percent more time than a F2F class. It's a lot like going through a maze. The first time doing anything new always takes more time. After teaching an online course for the first time, you'll be more comfortable with navigating the learning environment and class activities and it won't take as much time as the first run through.

Admittedly, virtual group projects sound problematic; but like most aspects of the virtual experience, what looks like a problem is actually a tool the instructor can use to improve the learning experience. Precisely because students are scattered, the virtual breakout room takes on extraordinary immediacy.

Most documents in your online course will be HTML based, as opposed to Word or PDF. D2L’s HTML editor is intuitive and looks much like Word when creating a document. Also, draw upon the expertise of the Instructional Design and Online Course Support (iDocs) staff who work with our online programs and the numerous online resources to help you.

This question is a bit tricky, mainly because of the word "lecture." Keep in mind that fifty minutes of watching a talking head in an online video seems like a long time. Additionally, you will need to provide a transcript for that video for the purposes of closed-captioning. Finally, if students want to review a portion, they have to search through a long video. That's not to say that videos shouldn't be used in online courses. They can be very effective when explaining a process or demonstrating a task. Keeping videos to less than 10 minutes and focusing the video portion on meaningful visual content. (e.g., watching a step-by-step problem solving process in Excel, watching a digital story guiding students through a meaningful scenario that illustrates a concept covered in the course, etc.)

Online courses are not F2F class conversions; they require much time, thought, and new approaches to transform an online class into a meaningful learning experience for students.

Technical problems do occur, but they are usually short-term. Help is available for both students and faculty who are experiencing difficulty. It's important to fully test any technology tools being used in a course (new and old) to ensure that they are functioning the way you anticipate to proactively address any issues. Sometimes, however, whole systems run into a glitch. Then, being patient and flexible are important.

There are new resources and programs that allow you to adapt course resources. Each campus also has an office that assists these students to access the courses they want to attend. iDocs also has recommendations for you so that you can make your content available to the widest audience possible.

Research recommends a class size of less than 20 students for an ideal online class. Given the realities of overcrowding at most colleges and universities, this ideal is rarely achieved. However, you can make your online class feel smaller by creating small groups within the class. Our courses are capped at 29 for graduate and courses and 39 for most undergraduate courses.

The research confirms that it's about the same and surveys at CSUSM show that students can learn more in an online course when the online class uses collaborative learning approaches, critical thinking prompts, and discussion boards.