MDC | Virtual College | Faculty Resources | Student Retention Keys to Success

Virtual College - Learning @ Your Time @ Your Place

The four (4) keys to a successful online course are all available from you. These include:

A clear and concise syllabus
Facilitation of effective and ongoing communication
A wide variety of activities that you use to keep students motivated to learn
Spending enough time-in-the-course yourself facilitating student learning and managing the course.

A well-developed syllabus is essential for successful online teaching and learning. It serves as the outline for what is to be learned, what activities will be required, how much the activities are worth, and provides other critical course information such as course policies, required materials, and information about the instructor. Syllabi templates with required and suggested information fields will be available in the Faculty Lounge under Resources. A syllabus is considered to be your course contract with your students. This is why it must be kept along with student grades for (4) years.

Stated in the SACS criteria book:

"Students must be provided written information about the goals and requirements of each course, the nature of the course content, and the methods of evaluation to be employed." Also stated: grading policy must be published (this means that it also needs to be in the course syllabus).

There is no set structure or format that is suggested or required. Syllabi just need to cover the above at minimum . The course syllabus is also described in the Faculty Union contract:

Article 21. Section 1. Work Expectations

O. " Course Syllabus . Prepare and provide to students on the first day of class a course syllabus that describes the course goals, objectives and requirements, the nature of the course content, the methods of evaluation to be employed, and the basis upon which grades will be assigned. The course syllabus shall be submitted in advance to and approved by the supervisor of the department offering the course and shall comply with all departmental standards. Faculty members will make the necessary corrections."

Students do not have you in front of them explaining every detail and fielding any and all questions. This is why timely and ongoing communication is absolutely critical to student success in online courses. Without this interaction, students feel isolated, disconnected, and hopeless.

There are many instructional strategies that you can apply to maintain effective communication with the students and among the students. You will learn how to create a learning community that will also help you manage all the communications in the course.

The amount of time a student spends on meaningful learning tasks the better for mastering the learning objects. To increase this time you must come up with activities that will motivate students to spend more time than is required. You have an amazing variety of teaching and learning strategies available to you online. Many are ready-made, some are adaptable, and, of course, you have your own wealth of experiences to create your own unique activities. We will work on these later when you start to customize your course for teaching.

At least, the same amount of hours that you spend in the classroom and in office hours for a face-to-face course should be spent teaching, communicating, and managing an online course. If it is possible, it is much better to spend smaller amounts of time more often or everyday than to chunk it into a couple of sessions per week.

For one thing, if you wait too much time in between checking up on your course, students will have twice the number of questions for you to answer and they may have come up with solutions that you did not want them to pursue. It is very interesting to see what happens when students are left on their own. We have had to come in to rescue a course or stop a full-fledged revolt! If you wait a long time in between, you may also dread what you will see, so you wait even longer and the communication is piling up and the students are frustrated and they are all communicating together without a teacher to guide them.

The Virtual College is like a regular class in an online environment. It is not Independent Studies or Open College. Online teaching is much more interactive than a regular course if the instructor is an effective facilitator.