BEST PRACTICES IN TEACHING ONLINE: FACULTY-SOURCED GUIDANCE FROM INTEGRATE

Teaching online is growing in acceptance and its accessibility creates an opportunity to reach students from diverse socioeconomic backgrounds. There is a need to develop best practices for teaching about Earth online, as new technological topics, pedagogical approaches, and teaching materials that incorporate active learning and data emerge. In response to this need, the InTeGrate project convened a workshop of faculty who teach online in a variety of contexts to develop consensus best-practices, collect online resources, and develop teaching materials to share with the rest of the community.

Workshop participants generated five broad categories of guidance for faculty teaching online: develop communication and a sense of community among class participants, stimulate student engagement, develop activity frameworks that scale with class size, include information literacy in the curriculum explicitly, and employ effective management and assessment techniques. Many of the best practices highlighted by the group are not unique to teaching online, but teaching online rather than face-to-face affects how they are or can be implemented. The suite of webpages developed from this work showcase specific strategies in each area, underpinned by examples drawn from the experiences of the participants. This resource can provide a wealth of advice for faculty seeking help for teaching online. Faculty can also provide feedback on the strategies and add their own experiences to the collection.

Participants also worked together in teams to develop new or revise existing teaching resources to make available via the InTeGrate website. In addition, they shared insights about online resources they use in their teaching and class management and developed plans for an online repository for next-generation, interactive educational materials and tools for creating them.

All of the best practices guidance, teaching materials, and online resources from the workshop can be found via the InTeGrate website - http://serc.carleton.edu/integrate/workshops/online_learning/index.html.