All too often, learners and faculty members see online courses as the ‘second best’ option compared to campus-based courses. This shouldn’t be the case! Here are 3 ways to ensure online course quality at your institution:
- Enable learners to interact with their instructors. Online learners see the capacity to interact with their instructor as crucial to a good learning experience. Interaction can take many forms, including detailed feedback over email, using a voice feedback tool, and video chat sessions. Interaction should be open in the online classroom. This can be enabled by integrating an online forum for learners to use on your online learning platform.
- Utilizing the same materials for online courses as for campus-based courses. Utilize the same reading materials and other materials in your campus-based courses as you do with your online courses. Mixing things up and enabling campus-based degree learners to take online courses is also a good way to strengthen the relationship between these two parts of the student body.
- Leverage the advantages of online learning to the fullest. Online courses have advantages that campus-based courses don’t like time flexibility, the capacity to support synchronous online discussions on an online forum about many topics related to the course at once, and a greater capacity to incorporate multimedia content. Utilize these advantages to the fullest Upgrade your LMS to a shiny new model so that learners get the benefit of the latest tech.
High-quality training should be provided to educators to ensure that they can deliver online courses to the highest standard.
