Description
by Bonnie Elbaum, Cynthia McIntyre and Alese Smith
Atwood Publishing, 2002
112 pages. Paperback.
There’s no doubt that a skilled classroom lecturer can inspire students, but almost all lecturers worry that their students are not learning how to think critically, how to make connections on their own. If you have never taught an online course, you’ll be surprised to learn that teaching online, as described by the authors, has the potential for providing students with a truly comprehensive learning experience. An online course can offer students the chance to learn through exploration, to pursue related areas of interest, to participate in a community of learners and to take advantage of opportunities to excel.
This book, ESSENTIAL ELEMENTS: Prepare, Design, and Teach Your Online Course, offers an easy-to-follow guide that is based on a model based on hundreds of successful online courses. The authors are members of The Concord Consortium, a nonprofit educational technology lab dedicated to improving teaching practices through the appropriate integrated use of technology in the classroom.
The authors provide a working overview of online teaching and seventeen essential elements that take you step-by-step through everything you’ll need to know for successful online teaching. The essential elements describe the necessary steps to put the Concord model into practice with these results:
- You will use courseware to display your course assignments and reference materials as text, with graphics, colors, and multimedia to enhance the presentation.
- Your course will have clearly written assignments that engage your students in active learning with each other. You, as the instructor, will play an integral roll as a facilitator of that learning.
- You will use the Internet both as a resource and as a means for connecting yourself and your students based on your mutual interest in the content regardless of your individual schedules, geographic location, or physical ability to come to class.You and your students will communicate and collaborate on a regular basis in a discussion area that allows for student-to-student and student-to-instructor interaction.
- Students will assess their own growth and learning through group discussion and reflection, peer review, instructor feedback, and self-evaluation.
The essential elements are presented in three sections prepare, design, and teach that will take you from the starting gate to the finishing line, offering complete assistance for the new online teacher and new techniques and tips for those who have taught online before. With tips addressing everything from technology to student assessments, from online community building to collaborative teaming, and from scheduling and pacing to facilitating online discussions, the authors have the virtual classroom covered.
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A. Customer –
Very good at helping an instructor prepare, design, and teach an online course.
Sarah Slachter –
Four stars just about says it all. A good reference book.
Richard G. Derouen –
A must-have for anyone developing online courses.
I added this to my library covering teaching techniques as our college of education uses it as a recommended reference for online instructors. Simple sound advice to consider with solid techniques for building an effective online course. By using information from this guide my student-course participation and success rate was significantly increased.
Paul Signorelli –
Bonnie Elbaum, Cynthia McIntyre, and Alese Smith, all affiliated with the Concord Consortium in Massachusetts at the time their book was published, offer what they consider to be the seventeen essential steps of preparing online learning sessions which will keep instructors and learners equally engaged. The book opens with a section on preparing an online course and includes tips on how to build a course outline, set clear deadlines to encourage effective learning, and planning for quality. The middle section of the book moves into elements of designing a course which helps students maintain their focus, develop effective collaborations which foster learning, and literally stay on course. The concluding section on how to teach online is followed by an extensive checklist which summarizes the contents of the entire book for anyone involved in developing and delivering online learning opportunities.
A. Customer –
I was very glad to discover this little book and adopted it as the text for a faculty training course I teach at a community college. It is technology independent, making it ideal for teaching the principles of online course development. I’ve been using this book for several years now, and although it’s a few years old, good information design and online teaching practices don’t really change, so it hasn’t become outdated.
A. Mead –
Great training for online instructors. We use this as a text when training instructors to be designers in online courses. It is a great reference.
Shauna –
Perhaps I was a little hard on this book because I am an experienced online instructor, but I was a bit disappointed in the content. The copyright is 2002, and that may be some of it as well with the ever changing technological world. I found the basic things were included but was hoping to gain additional insight in setting up courses and teaching online. The “essential elements” are there but pretty much bare bones. The entire book is less than 100 pages if you don’t count the appendices. This book is probably good for the beginner with no idea where to start with an online course, but I would not recommend it for someone like me who was looking for additional insight after having some experience teaching online.