Teach Your Online Course

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 the Prepare Your Online Course 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 emails by setting up parameters to route incoming emails based on sender, subject, content, and/or size of the message.

Use Google Hangouts (Meet) or Google Chat for Office Hours

Consider using Google Hangouts (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 Google Hangout (Meet), phone number, or Chat
  • Install mobile app if they choose

For information about using Google Hangout (Meet) to host a real-time class session see Web-Conferencing in Prepare Your Online Course

Hardware

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

Grade Book

Grade work promptly and provide specific feedback; this is even more valuable in online instruction.

• If you are using the gradebook in Moodle, review your gradebook to ensure the changes you’ve made are reflected there.
• If you did not start the class using the gradebook feature in Moodle, we recommend you use your current method of tracking grades.

Assignment Grading Tutorials

• Grading Assignments
• Feedback Files, Comments and Grades
• Rubrics and Grading Guides

Forum Interaction, Feedback and Grading

• Get involved in discussions, but don’t overdo it. Students need to have space to explore new ideas together, but they also need to hear your voice in discussion.
• Alternatively, instead of participating in 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 threads.
• Remind students to be encouraging to one another, even on challenging or heated topics, while also inviting them to analyze and debate. In online education, you need to be more intentional in setting your expectations for the tone and quality of discussions.
• 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 only giving points for discussion forum posts that make meaningful contributions to the conversation.
• Grading options for forums

Reduce the Risk of Cheating

• Assignments
  • Use TurnitIn to check for plagiarism
• Quizzes
  • 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. 
  • Proctor exams and quizzes by having students take them during a Google Hangouts (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.

Monitor Moodle activity reports and TurnItIn and reach out to students who appear to be struggling.