Best Practices

The following examples illustrate the five P's—guidelines for successful online instruction. Effectiveness in this teaching environment requires that you be

• Prompt
• Personal
• Positive
• Practical
• Patient

Be Prompt

According to research, prompt evaluation and return of assignments and assessments is the single most significant factor in increasing the completion rate of online courses. Not only does quick turnaround time for submitted work help to encourage the learner's efforts, but it's crucial to enabling them to complete their course in a reasonable amount of time. Returning work within a week of its submission is the UWEO standard.

The following tips on timeliness have been offered by experienced online instructors:

• Grade assignments on a daily basis.
• Set aside one day a week as online learning "work day" to record grades and return assignments.
• Keep files of answers to common problems and issues on your computer; you can then personalize the answers for individual students.
• Receive and respond to student assignments electronically..
  

Be Personal

Because they usually don't see or hear you, online learners need to know they are interacting with a real person. When you respond to them, try to encourage dialogue. By using a conversational style in your comments and incorporating what you know about the learner from the information sheet, you can help dispel a learner's sense that he or she is dealing with an impersonal situation.

Encourage your students to submit the Student Information Form on the class syllabus when they enroll. The form provides helpful background information that can help you individualize your feedback on assignments.

You should also provide information about yourself. Supply both professional and personal information as you feel comfortable. Here are some guidelines and an example from the Distance Learning Design division of University of Washington Extension.

Be Positive

Even constructive feedback can seem harsh when offered without voice, visual cues, or other body language to temper what is stated. A judiciously chosen word can spur the student to greater achievement and dispel "the loneliness of the long distance learner." In addition, humor can provide a refreshing perspective. Charles Frey, an instructor of several Shakespeare courses, says "Students, like other people, are quite insecure, defensive, and relatively energyless. Anyone who can sincerely and accurately find elements in the student's work to praise is likely to find an immediate uprush of interest, work, and increasing quality of performance."

In Psychology 306, Developmental Psychology, Virginia Gunderson always begins by recognizing the strengths in a student's work and then gives specific suggestions for improvement. For example, "Priscilla, Overall, your essay is quite good. It was well-organized, well-written, and you obviously had put a lot of thought into it. Your essay would have been stronger, though, if you'd used specific examples of studies from the text and other course material to support your assertions. In other words, when you mentioned. . . ."

Be Practical

Your evaluation is a primary way to help students learn. Good evaluation lets learners know what they have done well, and gives manageable steps for improvement. It also helps you to assess the effectiveness of your instruction. University of Washington English professor Roger Sale remarks that he prefers not to call the process of evaluation "grading papers." Instead, he calls it "reading, commenting, keeping the conversation going, putting the ball back in the student's court." Identifying the practical benefit of improving will increase student motivation to "keep the conversation going."

If yours is an independent studies (rather than a group start) course, you may want to give students practical suggestions for completing the course on time. Using the student's desired completion date, which he derives from the Student Information Sheet, John Hallaq, the instructor for several marketing and business courses, proposes a schedule of due dates for each assignment.

Be Patient

Distance learners can sometimes take longer than on-campus students to learn your expectations and meet them. To account for this, you might consider using more flexible criteria to evaluate the early lessons of your course. An instructor for several English courses writes, "I try on early assignments to encourage students to break out of their rigid thinking about composition, to be present in their writing. Also, with a bad paper I don't beat a dead horse, after noting its mortality, but I try to find something to praise in writing and to encourage a student to capitalize on it."

Learners have a wide range of technical abilities when they enter an online course, and technical difficulties inevitably arise with the various media used to deliver course materials. Be prepared to support learners as they become familiar with the mechanics of learning in a new environment. Some will become facile quickly, others will require considerable support before they are comfortable with the technical aspects of participation.

In Distance Education: A Systems Approach View—Tutoring, Moore and Kearsley describe the characteristics of good tutors at the British Open University. The best instructors

• have excellent subject matter knowledge
• have good general teaching skills
• have good communication and social skills
• are well-organized, flexible, patient
• are able to motivate/encourage students
• are committed to learners and the program

They added that instructors must also be "knowledgeable and proficient with the media used in the program (i.e., writing, audio, video, computer)."

Teaching Standards

In response to concerns expressed about the quality of teaching and learning in some online courses, several educational organizations have developed teaching standards. Review of these standards can assist you in creating a positive and productive environment for your learners.

1. National Education Association. Division: NEA Affiliate Capacity Building--Higher Education. Quality on the Line: Benchmarks for Success in Internet-based Distance Education.
2. Western Cooperative for Educational Telecommunications. Western Interstate Commission for Higher Education (WICHE). Best Practices for Electronically Offered Degree and Certificate Programs.
3. Indiana Higher Education Telecommunication System (IHETS). Guiding Principles for Faculty in Distance Learning.

Summary

John Daniel, Vice-Chancellor of The Open University in the United Kingdom, recently summarized what makes good distance teaching in his address Distance Learning: The Vision and Distance Learning: The Reality: What Works, What Travels?
"The success of the Open University rests on four pillars. These are the essential functional requirements that you are looking for:

• One: high quality, multiple media learning materials, preferably developed by teams of academics and experts;
• Two: personal support to each student from a living, breathing human being who knows the student's name and aspirations;
• Three: efficient logistics and administration. If you can't get the right material, information and people in the right place at the right time forget it, because the students will.
• Four: as I've already mentioned, teaching rooted in research. It sounds like an optional extra but it's not. It makes the courses intellectually active, which is an important way to be active in a university."