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Teaching effective online and hybrid courses requires advance planning, intentional course design, good communication, organization and a commitment to providing timely activity feedback to students.

Communication

Communication with your students is vital in online courses. Frequently check your course site and seek to maintain strong connections with your students. Encourage students to do the same.

Use Moodle for communication with students
  • In your Moodle preferences set up Moodle notifications to support timely interactions with your students.
  • Ensure students receive your communications promptly by directing them to set up their Moodle notifications.
  • Use the pre-existing Announcement Forum to send course-wide communication. Your posts will be automatically emailed to students.
  • Create a General Discussion Forum in your Moodle course for students to interact with each other, and you, on general topics (i.e. course logistics, topics related to ideas and issues in the course content, personal connections, prayer requests). 
  • Subscribe to the General Discussion Forum so that you see and can respond to student questions promptly.
  • Track unread forum posts to help stay on top of forum communication
  • See Discussion Forums for information about using forums as class activities.
  • Use Moodle Quickmail to email individual students and groups of students.
Use your Bethel email to communicate with students
  • Your Bethel email is an efficient way to communicate with your students.
  • Filters in Gmail can help you manage a large volume of email by setting up parameters to route incoming emails based on sender, subject, content, and/or size of the message.
Use Zoom, Google Meet or Google Chat for Office Hours

Consider using Zoom, Google Meet, phone, or Google Chat to host office hours for your remote students. 

  • Set up a recurring calendar event (this will allow you to use the same meeting link for all recurring events)
  • Communicate with students ahead of time providing them with:
    • Date and time
    • Link to the Zoom meeting, Google Meet, phone number, or Chat
    • Install mobile app (optional)

Synchronous Activities

Use to a video-conference to host a real-time class session

Required Hardware

  • Internal or external web-cam
  • Internal or external microphone
  • Headphones recommended
  • Headphones with a microphone are ideal, if you have access (earbuds work well)
  • Computer or mobile device
  • A wired (ethernet) connection to internet may provide a better quality experience
Additional Synchronous Activities

Asynchronous Activities

Discussion Forums
  • Consider intentionally setting your expectations and the tone for course discussions by providing students with interaction guidelines.
  • Consider being active in the forum discussions. However, balance your interaction. Students need to have space to explore new ideas together, but they also need to hear your voice in discussion.
  • Alternatively, instead of replying to individual discussion threads, record a video or post a written announcement providing feedback on broad themes and/or particularly significant points that came up in the discussion.
  • Remind students to be encouraging to one another, even on challenging or heated topics, while also inviting them to analyze and debate. 
  • Connect personally with students to thank them for their contributions or encourage them to contribute in a different way. Point out interesting contributions and good work by participating in forums or sending an announcement (via the Announcements forum) and encouraging the class to read a particular post.
  • Try to avoid giving points just for showing up in a discussion forum. Consider giving points for discussion forum posts that make meaningful contributions to the conversation and student learning.
  • See Discussion Forums for more information and examples.
  • Grading options for forums
Google Docs and Slides
  • Google Doc and Slides can be used for individual and group assignments.
  • Examples
    • Collaborative documents to record group discussions
    • Collaborative documents or slide presentations to showcase learning
    • Templates to facilitate individual or group assignments
    • Creation of Class Notebooks
  • See Asynchronous Activities with Google Docs and Slides for more information and examples.
Additional Asynchronous Activities

Assignment Grading Tutorials

Reduce the Risk of Cheating

  • Assignments
  • Quizzes
    • Unproctored 
      • Long answer quizzes allow for greater assurance that students are doing their own work
      • If you are concerned about students cheating by looking at their book while completing an online exam, consider rewriting the exam as an open book exam. In addition to minimizing the risk of cheating, open book exams allow you to focus assessment on cognitive levels of learning beyond information recall, like application, analysis, and synthesis.
      • If your exam needs to focus on information recall, consider putting a time limit on the exam. Properly designed timed exams require students to know the information to be recalled because they do not have time to find the information if they do not already know it. 
    • Proctored
      • Proctor exams and quizzes by having students take them during a Zoom or Google Meet session. This is limited proctoring because you can’t see the students’ screens. You can, however:
        • Watch and listen for others in the room.
        • Watch students to see if they appear to be chatting with each other or reading more than would be expected for the quiz or exam.
        • Use it more as a deterrent than an enforcement mechanism.
      • Use Proctorio, a comprehensive learning integrity platform

Gradebook

  • Grade student work promptly and provide specific feedback; this is even more valuable in online and hybrid instruction. 
  • If you are using the gradebook in Moodle, review your gradebook to ensure it accurately reflects the graded assessments in the course.
  • Student feedback indicates that they find the Moodle gradebook to be the most valuable feature of Moodle.

Monitor Student Participation



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