A good starting point for thinking about building community in your online course is to begin by reflecting on the activities in your face-to-face course. The table above was developed in July 2020 by Dr. Rachel Barnard as a way to help illustrate how an online course might look different from a face-to-face course.
|
Face-to-face |
Online |
|
1st day of class: intro you and the course |
D2L pages (“files”) describing policies, norms for how often to log in to D2L, etc. with text and short “tour” videos |
|
Student turns to neighbor to ask question |
Student use the chat (if synchronous sessions), discussion board, email, and/or text a friend |
|
Office hours: in your office |
In a Zoom meeting room possibly with a “waiting room” |
|
1:1 meetings about projects |
1:1 Zoom meetings about a projects |
|
Group workheet |
Collaborative e-tools (Office365, Google Suite, etc.) |
|
Class meeting: pre-reading –> small group discussion –> share out –> post-reflection |
Social reading in perusall.com –> Small group discussion notes on google doc –> individual, written reflection submitted to D2L |
|
Class meeting: iClickers for classroom polling |
iClicker REEF (if sync sessions); or videos + short D2L quizzes (if async session) |
|
Taking attendance by roll call |
Taking attendance by zoom usage reports, iClicker Reef, zoom polling question, responding to a discussion board post. |
Another similar resource to explore is a similar table from our colleagues at LSU: https://docs.google.com/document/d/15ZtTu2pmQRU_eC3gMccVhVwDR57PDs4uxlMB7Bs1os8/mobilebasic?pli=1
Please note some of the resources in this table are not supported at MSU. This table is available in a Google Doc, where it is being updated and you can contribute to it as well. This table takes the process a step further by identifying the synchronous and asynchronous ways to achieve your goal. For more on synchronous vs asynchronous learning experiences, go to the next article in this playlist.