We’re excited to announce our first coffee course of the year:

Engaging Students Online

Wednesday, 8 February to Wednesday, 15 February 2017

More and more material is being put online for students to use, but are they engaging with it? It’s a common scenario for discussion forums to remain empty, and for teachers to be unsure if students are using the material they are putting online. How can you foster student activity, conversation, and engagement in your online courses?

This coffee course will discuss strategies for encouraging and facilitating student engagement in your course sites. It will investigate the differences between online and face-to-face learning, and explore how to involve students more in their online learning. Participants will learn: techniques for adapting classroom activities for online, how to develop successful online activities, how to communicate effectively online, and to effectively build sustained engagement in online courses.

Course Dates

This course will be run from Wednesday, 8 February to Wednesday, 15 February 2017 through this blog. There will be one blog post on each of these days, which will take 10-15 minutes to work through. Feel free to leave comments or respond to other participants on the posts.

Modules

• Day 1:  What is engagement, and how does it work online?
• Day 2: Creating social presence in your course
• Day 3: Communicating effectively with students
• Day 4: Critical perspectives on engagement and participation
• Day 5: Creating engaging online activities
• Day 6: Reflection and final thoughts

All are welcome

We welcome all staff, including tutors, demonstrators, professional staff, and academics at the Australian National University to join us, as well as colleagues at other institutions. Professional development recognition is available for all ANU staf through HORUS. Log in to HORUS, and find the course called “Engaging Students Online”, AOC003 under the Training Catalogue. To receive recognition, you will be required to post a comment on every blog post.

How does the course work?

All you need to do is Subscribe for Updates in the block on the right-hand side of the blog. For information on how to participate in this coffee course, please see this post for more information.

Questions?

Please feel free to contact us at wattle.support@anu.edu.au  or leave a comment on this post with any questions.