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Tips from the Pros SEPTEMBER 2005 Seven Steps for Providing Constructive Online Discussion Feedback Successfully By Tammy Edwards W In This Issue e frequently discuss the importance of providing timely feedback that is specific and detailed, but we rarely provide strategies to help deliver disappointing news. Unfortunately, in an online environment constructive feedback is often misinterpreted or disregarded because the student feels a response was short, critical, or lacked the specific direction that was needed. As the director of online learning for North Hennepin Community College, I was surprised to discover that 20 percent of online students surveyed last fall felt that their instructor did not adequately communicate expectations or confidence in them. Delivering constructive feedback in writing can be challenging, especially in an online class, where comments are more direct and personal. When this delicate communication is managed casually, it breaks down the trust we work so diligently to build in our online classes. In a recent workshop, Jane Wilson, coordinator of NHCC’s College Learning Place and online music instructor, said, “So often we fire off a fast e-mail in the tone of a quick, informal response; but it is critical for student success that the 2 Teaching from the Road dialogue modeled by the online instructor includes respectful, positive feedback as well as critical analysis of the student’s problems and suggestions for improvement.” As we have worked with online instructors, I’ve realized that it has taken me a long time to become confident in finding my own style for providing constructive online feedback to students. The good news: we’ve found that basic feedback strategies and a simple template work the best! 1. Start with something positive. Start off right away with something the student did well. This helps the student identify something to keep doing and sets a supportive tone so you can continue to build a trusting online relationship. • You did very well in this week’s discussion. • You have a great way of sharing your experience with the class. 2. State the grade and reason right away. The main point of providing feedback is to clearly explain the reason for the grade and set a performance expectation. Stating the Understanding Student Perceptions of Online Learning When preparing to teach an online course, consider the following assumptions that many online students make about online learning: • Online courses are easier than face-to-face courses. • Assignments can be completed anytime, anywhere. • The instructor will be available seven days a week and will respond to e-mail within 24 hours. • All online courses are arranged in essentially the same way. Once I understand how one online course works, I can expect that every other online course will work the same way. • If I get behind in my work, it’s easy enough to catch up later. In trying to convince students that these assumptions are not necessarily true, consider sharing with them the following traits/perceptions of successful online learners: • It takes two to four weeks to adjust to the online Continued on page 6 >> Continued on page 6 >> 3 Save Time without Sacrificing Quality 7 Supplementing a Course with Online Tutoring 4 Online Learner Types COURSE MANAGEMENT President: William Haight ([email protected]) Publisher: David Burns ([email protected]) Editorial Content Director: Bob Bogda ([email protected] Managing Editor: Rob Kelly ([email protected]) Creative Services Director: Debra Lovelien Customer Service Manager: Mark Beyer ADVISORY BOARD Randy Accetta, Ph.D., Eller College of Management, The University of Arizona, a c c e t t a @ e l l e r. a r i z o n a . e d u ; T h o m a s D. Bacig Ph.D., Morse Alumni Distinguished Teaching Professor of Humanities, Department of Sociology/ Anthropology, University of Minnesota-Duluth, [email protected]; Toni Bellon, Ed.D, School of Education, North Georgia College and State University, Dahlonega, GA [email protected]; Sherry McConnell, DVM, Depart-ment of Anatomy and Neurobiology, Colorado State University-Fort Collins, CO, S h e r r y. M c C o n n e l l @ C o l o S t a t e . E D U ; Frank Moretti, Ph.D., Executive Director Columbia Center for New Media Teaching and Learning, Columbia University, New York, NY, [email protected]; Dennis O’Neil, Ph.D., Professor of Anthropology, Palomar College, San Marcos, CA, [email protected]; Lawrence C. Ragan, Ph.D., Director-Instructional Design and Development, Penn State’s World Campus, [email protected]; Henry R. van Zyl, Ph.D., Director of Distance Learning Programs, Thomas Edison State College, Trenton, NJ [email protected]; John Wager, Ph.D., professor of philosophy, Triton Community College, River Grove, Ill. [email protected];Shirley Waterhouse, Ed.D., Director of Education Technology, Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University, shirley@db. erau.edu Online Classroom (ISSN 1546-2625) is published monthly by Magna Publications Inc., 2718 Dryden Drive, Madison, WI 53704. Phone 800-433-0499. Copyright © 2005. One-year (12 issues) subscription: $167. Send change of address to: Online Classroom, 2718 Dryden Drive, Madison, WI 53704. E-mail: [email protected]; Website: www.magnapubs.com To order back issues, call Customer Service at 800-433-0499. Back issues cost $20 each plus shipping and handling in the U.S. You can pay with MasterCard, VISA, Discover, or American Express. This publication is designed to provide accurate and authoritative information in regard to the subject matter covered. It is sold with the understanding that the publisher is not engaged in rendering legal, accounting, or other professional service. If legal advice or other expert assistance is required, the services of a competent professional should be sought. Authorization to photocopy for internal or personal use, or the internal or personal use of specific clients, is granted by Online Classroom for users registered with the Copyright Clearance Center (CCC) Transactional Reporting Service, provided that 50 cents per page is paid directly to CCC, 222 Rosewood Drive, Danvers, MA 01923; Phone: 978-750-8400, www.copyright.com. For those organizations that have been granted a photocopy license by CCC, a separate system of payment has been arranged. 2 Teaching from the Road T his summer, R. Nicholas Gerlich, associate professor of marketing at West Texas A&M University, took to the road to teach an online marketing course, stopping at WiFi hot spots during his 5,000-mile, five-week trip and providing real-world examples of course concepts. “It was the best experience I ever had teaching a class. The students loved it. They were living vicariously through my travels, and it caused them to engage in the class in ways that students hadn’t been able to in the past,” Gerlich says. The course was one that he had taught many times before, and the syllabus remained unchanged. The big difference was that he included a daily blog that featured his observations about marketing throughout the country. “Every day I wrote a one-page essay about whatever I saw, which let students know I wasn’t just out vacationing. I wanted them to be assured that, yes, I was on the road, but I was working every day, because this thing could have backfired if I was not careful. They could have just thought, ‘He’s out driving around, going to the beach, eating pizza in Chicago, and just stopping by once a week for e-mail.’ I made sure that they knew I was plugged in, and it didn’t matter whether I was in Janesville, Wisconsin, or Canyon, Texas,” Gerlich says. The first half of the course featured the “nuts and bolts” of marketing. The second half looked at issues in marketing. Incorporating his daily observations became a “great storytelling adventure.” “The learning was embedded, and students almost didn’t realize how much they were learning along the way. It worked well. I was able to talk about things that may not seem, on the surface, to have any marketing value and somehow find that value and let students see it. I didn’t have to preach to them. They were able to figure it out by reading the story,” Gerlich says. Gerlich was able to bring to his students descriptions, commentary, and, sometimes, digital photos of new products that he found being test-marketed in limited areas. During the trip, Gerlich visited his parents in a gated retirement community in suburban Tampa and wrote an essay titled “I’m Living in a Minimum-Security Prison,” which he used to open a discussion about marketing to senior citizens. He asked, “What’s for sale here? Why would anyone want to live in one of these highly regimented, gated communities where you can’t do anything?” “My students figured out that it’s all about safety, security, and predictability, which are things that people who are 80 years old want. I think they got a lot more out of reading the story than they would have if I had typed up a lecture on this topic.” The level of engagement in the course was higher than Gerlich had experienced before in his online courses. In 51 days the students posted more than 2,000 messages, or 40 a day for a class of 41. “You can’t get that in a classroom, and I never dreamed it was possible in an online environment, based on my 26 prior experiences teaching online. I’d done well but never quite to this level.” Feedback on the course was overwhelmingly positive. Here’s a typical comment: “At the end of my workday, I would come and check your blog and read the students’ remarks. It was my time each day Continued on page 8 >> Online Cl@ssroom COURSE DESIGN Improve Efficiency without Sacrificing Quality A key consideration when designing online courses is whether a given course activity will yield enough benefit to the students to warrant the amount of time and effort expended by the instructor, course designer, and students. This was the main message from Kathryn Ley, associate professor of instructional technology at the University of Houston-Clear Lake, in her presentation at the 21st Annual Conference on Distance Teaching & Learning. In her presentation and in a follow-up interview with Online Classroom, Ley offered the following advice to maximize learning and minimize extraneous cognitive load through sufficient design, strategic embedded learning support, and efficient online communications. Sufficient design When designing an online course, estimate the instructor’s and students’ return on time and effort by asking the following questions: • How much time will it take for the instructor to prepare the activity? • How much time will the instructor need to spend on logistics? • What instructor skills and technology are required? • How much time will the students need to spend on logistics? • What student skills and technology are required? • What will the activity add to the learners’ knowledge or skills? • Will it be worth the cost? • How can the activity be modified to reduce extraneous cognitive load (logistics) on the learner and to save the instructor maintenance and processing time while still providing adequate feedback to the student? Online Cl@ssroom Learning online will always have some extraneous cognitive load associated with it. The goal is to minimize it. “I would estimate that if the logistics for 90 percent of the learners is less than 10 percent of the total time on the assignment, the assignment is worthwhile,” Ley says. One way to minimize the extraneous cognitive load is to provide students the information they need in a straightforward manner rather than having them expend time and effort on tasks that are not related to the assignment’s learning objectives. For example, rather than having students search the Web for articles you want them to read, you might want to pick the articles for them, if the search for those articles is unrelated to the assignment’s learning objectives. “If [searching for an article] is logistics, don’t make them go get the article. Give it to them,” Ley says. Embedded strategic support Learner support is essential to online learners’ success, but providing adequate support can make teaching an online course overly burdensome. However, there are ways to embed some of that support in the course design. For Ley, the syllabus is an integral part of this support. Her syllabus provides a description of her vision of the learning community (something she directs students to when they are not living up to these standards), an assignment table, and assignment instructions. Ley does not use the course calendar to remind students of assignment due dates, because she has determined it is not worth the effort. Instead, she keeps an assign- ment table on the syllabus, which provides students a single place to look for the information they need.“My syllabus, all assignment instructions, and any additional addenda are on my instructor message board. Students don’t need to hunt around for this type of information in e-mail, because it will never be there,” Ley says. In addition, the last four characters of each assignment’s name convey the month and day that the Continued on page 8 >> Turning the Tables in Threaded Discussions Rather than facilitating threaded discussions by asking students open-ended questions, why not have students ask the questions? This is a strategy that Kathryn Ley, associate professor of education at the University of Houston-Clear Lake, tried recently with great success. In a recent online course, Ley had each student formulate a question about an upcoming assignment. To get credit, the student had to ask a substantive question—one that could not be answered directly by quoting the course materials Ley provided. “It was an eye-opener for them and me,” Ley says. “They got to ask questions, and I answered them. I found out what they didn’t know in a way that I would never been able to before, and they found out what they didn’t know that they would not have normally asked if I hadn’t required them to post a question to get points.” 3 STUDENTS Online Learner Types: Implications for Course Design S tudent behavior in an online course can vary greatly depending on motivation, maturity, learning styles, technical proficiency, and experience as an online learner. Knowing what to expect from students can have important implications for course design and management. Phil Darg, adjunct online instructor at Lake Superior College, identifies the four types of students: Achievers, Taskers, Ball-droppers, and Ghosts. • Achievers generally make up between 10 percent and 20 percent of students in an online course. They have excellent reading and academic skills, often have taken several online courses before, are highly motivated and self-disciplined, and have good computer skills. “Online education is an absolute godsend for Achievers. They can apply themselves to the utmost, do a great job, and work at their own pace— often ahead. They are not slowed down by a live classroom environment,” Darg says. • Taskers make up 40 percent to 50 percent of students in an online course. They have moderate to high academic skills, may or may not have taken online courses before, and are motivated by due dates and grades. “Taskers are those students who want to know when something is due. They take it one step at a time. They’re looking for structure. They want to know the bottom line,” Darg says. • Ball-droppers make up 20 percent to 25 percent of the enrollment in most courses. They are academically challenged or have moderate academic skills. Many have not taken an online course before and often make 4 incorrect assumptions about the course schedule and criteria. They are motivated after the fact (by missing due dates) and have poor to moderate computer skills. “Ball-droppers often aspire to be Taskers but are distracted by something in their lives or just aren’t making the commitment to learning online. They’re not checking in as often as they should,” Darg says. • Ghosts make up 5 percent to 10 percent of students in an online course. They generally have poor academic and computer skills. Many have not taken an online course before and are unmotivated and disconnected. “They’re registered for the course, but they’re not communicating with the instructor and they’re not really doing their work. They’ll only come in once in a while, and when they do come in, they’ll ask a question that indicates that they’ve been absent from the process for a significant period of time,” Darg says. Student types and course design Reaching these different types of students in a single online course can be difficult. For Achievers, it’s a matter of giving them the freedom to work at their own pace and intensity level. For the other types of students, it’s a matter of engaging them and keeping them on schedule (to one degree or another). “I’ve concluded that I really can create only one class, even though there may be four different categories of students within that class,” Darg says. “I’ve tried to create an environment where if you’re an Achiever and you want to go, go, go, the barriers against doing that are removed. If you want to work ahead a little bit, that’s no problem. “The Taskers need the structure. The same is true for the Balldroppers, but they also need that communication and reminders about what is going on in any given week. For Ghosts, you can send them as many e-mails as you want, but you have absolutely no assurance that they are opening and reading that e-mail.” Because of these differences among his students, Darg allows students to work ahead if they want to. What this means for course design is that he needs to have the entire course planned out by the first week of the term. “This can be challenging for instructors who want more flexibility in their scheduling. It gives Achievers the certainty they need so they can proceed at their own pace and plan appropriately. Another thing I’ve noticed is that students need every piece of information on how to succeed online, how the course is organized, and the best way to approach reading the textbook and online materials. I also provide work samples from past students. I found that has a huge effect on the quality of papers coming in.” Based on his five years of online teaching experience and the fact that students work at different paces, Darg does not have students collaborate on group projects in his courses. “I concluded that the majority of the students taking online courses are looking for the individual flexibility that they need in order to take a course. Many times I’ve had students say, ‘I’m really glad this course is online, because if it wasn’t and I couldn’t work at 3 a.m. on Sundays, I wouldn’t be able to get through it.’ For that reason, I have shied away a little from group work. The advantage of that [for Achievers] is that they can’t be held back by poor Online Cl@ssroom performers in the group. However, if you’re not a person who is selfmotivated and self-disciplined, you’re going to face greater challenges because you’re not going to have that student encouragement to get with the program.” Despite this absence of group work, students interact in threaded discussions. “The discussion area is the online community portion of the course where student and teacher are going to communicate with each other, and everyone can see it. Everyone is part of the community. We can learn from more than one person and explore different points of view. We’ll have a number of discussion questions throughout the term, and students are required to participate and be part of that online community.” Those students who would like to work ahead can post comments in any unit and come back later to check for responses as others catch up. However, once the week for a particular discussion passes, Darg locks the thread and moves on to the next topic. Monitoring student progress Darg makes it a point to monitor students’ activity in his courses to determine which category each fits into and how he can support them. Darg will look at students’ amount and frequency of communication, as well as which course pages they’ve accessed. “After a couple of weeks, you have an indication of who’s spending time in the class, who’s not spending time in class, and who’s communicating. As the assignments start to come due, you can use that as a marker to see who’s keeping up and who’s falling behind,” Darg says. Based on this monitoring of students’ progress, Darg intervenes when appropriate. “If I notice that a Online Cl@ssroom student is gone for five days or hasn’t read the current week’s items, I’ll send him or her messages asking how they’re doing. That says, ‘I’m watching your progress, and I believe in your abilities to succeed, but you have to buckle down a little bit.” Darg usually responds to Ghosts first. To help deal with Ghosts, Lake Superior has a policy that enables instructors to drop unresponsive students from the course. Instructors are required to check student attendance, and once a “I’ve concluded that I really can create only one class, even though there may be four different categories of students within that class.” student has been gone from a class for a significant period of time or has not turned in an assignment for a significant period of time (usually two weeks), the instructor enters a last day of attendance (LDA) for the student. “Basically what we’re saying is, ‘From our perspective this student isn’t performing.’ Something like that can happen as early as the third or fourth week of the term. If there was a situation where the student was motivated to get back in the class, this would send a strong message that he or she needs to pay attention to things. The LDA officially sends the message that he or she has been dropped from the class for nonattendance. Some will appeal and promise to be involved, and sometimes they will get back in the course.” online, Darg has found that grades within online courses typically span a wider range than they would in a face-to-face course. Freed from the constraints of the face-to-face classroom, Achievers’ grades will typically be higher online than in face-to-face classes. Conversely, students at the other end of the spectrum, who might otherwise be able to get by in face-to-face classes, often are overwhelmed online. “If a student is undisciplined, he or she will probably do better in a live class because of the pacing and face-to-face interaction. If students are self-disciplined and highly motivated, in some ways moving into the online environment can be ideal because they can spend as much time with it as they want. They can work at their own pace, and basically they’re not letting the pace of a live class weigh them down,” Darg says. Online learners can change the type of students they are. A student’s technical level of expertise can affect how successful he or she will be in an online course. “I’ve found that when students are taking an online class for the first time, they’re not going to be in that Achiever category; however, once they learn the online course environment, and if they have the proper motivation and self-discipline, they can easily move up into that category because the only thing that was holding them back was a technical issue. For those students who are academically challenged, it’s a matter of motivation and discipline,” Darg says. For more information, visit http://phildarg.efoliomn2.com/. @ A wider range of grades From his experience teaching 5 << From Page 1 result right away provides a reference point for the supporting information you provide next. • This week you earned 20/25 discussion points for posting four responses to student case studies. • You answered three of the four sections correctly and earned 85/100 points. 3. State the correction as a reminder or recommendation. Phrase the correction as a suggestion, reminder, or recommendation, but be clear and specific. Most important, focus on the task or requirement needed to be successful, rather than on the student personally. • Remember, full participation points are awarded for submitting more than five posts a week. • Don’t forget to use the APA format when citing sources. • It is important to include all the required sections. 4. Provide an example or tip to reach the goal. After stating what was missed, point students in the right direction with helpful advice. Provide a road map with simple tips. This models proactive problem solving and helps students brainstorm their own solutions. • Here’s an example of a solution that earned full points and shows how the answer was derived. • Some students find it helpful to take notes while watching the presentations. • Before clicking send, I often read my posts out loud to make sure they are complete. 6 5. State your expectation. Be clear about what you want from students, so they understand the goal. This reinforces the suggested correction you stated earlier and refocuses the student back on the expectation and not on what he or she missed. • In upcoming weeks, I will be looking for… • To maintain a perfect score in future assignments,… • To raise your grade,… 6. Remind them of available help. Students need to hear a message multiple times, so remind them where help is available. Not only does this encourage students who are hesitant to reach out for help, it cuts down on their claims of not knowing it was available. • We have a busy week, so make sure to contact me or to post general questions to the class. • Your success is important to me, so don’t hesitate to call/email me (or our class tutor) when you have questions. 7. End with something motivational. Remember the old adage about sandwiching a negative between two positives? It is so important to close, especially corrective feedback, with something positive or motivational. It helps build the students’ confidence, and they respond better to the advice. • You are doing a great job so far, and I appreciate your commitment and effort! • You are halfway there—keep up the excellent work! • This has been a tough week with challenging assignments, and you did very well! planned for this fall, pilot class surveys are showing positive results. In addition, the instructors implementing this model are becoming comfortable providing constructive feedback, and new online instructors are feeling more confident about teaching online this fall. Contact Tammy Edwards at [email protected]. @ << Tips from Page 1 classroom, even when students have taken online courses before. • Students who succeed in online courses generally work during consistent times each week. • Because every online course is different, even students who have taken online courses before will generally need two to four weeks to adjust to the course design and course management strategies. • Contrary to what students might think before taking an online course, it is very difficult to catch up if they fall behind. Reference Springfield, Emily. “How to Create an Online Course.” University of Michigan School of Nursing. Accessed August 23, 2005, at wwwpersonal.umich.edu/~espring/ edTechText.doc. We are currently working with instructors to implement the seven steps. While another survey is Online Cl@ssroom STUDENT SUPPORT Tutoring System Provides Various Levels of Help to Meet Individual Learners’ Needs D ifferent learners come to the online classroom with different levels of knowledge of the subject and different needs. It is up to the course designer and instructor to devise ways to meet the needs of individual learners without impeding the progress of the group. To address individual learners’ needs, George Meghabghab, associate professor of computer science at Roane State Community College in Tennessee, has developed a tutoring system for his online Java programming courses that provides a degree of individualized help without his having to spend all his time in one-on-one sessions with his students. Meghabghab has two prepared tutorials in PowerPoint for each of the major concepts in the course (a total of 32 tutorials). Since the content of the course builds on previous units, it is essential to provide tutoring as early as possible. The design and content of these tutorials are based on Meghabghab’s estimates of the upper and lower levels of the students’ knowledge. The key to providing students with the appropriate level of tutoring is determining what the students understand, what they roughly understand, and what they don’t understand at all. “There are different levels of understanding, and so we have to have different levels of tutoring,” Meghabghab says. To provide the appropriate level of tutoring for each student who needs it (typically seven or eight out of a class of 25 for any given concept), Meghabghab has students answer a series of questions related to the concept and divides his students who need tutoring into two Online Cl@ssroom groups—those who don’t know anything about the concept and those who have some vague knowledge of the concept. The level of tutoring corresponds to how well each student does on the concept questions. Students automatically receive the appropriate tutorial for each concept. (Those who answer the concept questions correctly do not receive a tutorial.) This automatic delivery method is an advantage over other forms of tutoring. It means that more students who need help get it, whereas in other cases students usually have to seek out help if they determine they need it. This delivery method also provides the appropriate level of instruction when it is needed, something that can be very difficult in the face-to-face classroom, Meghabghab says. Meghabghab is careful to point out to the students that merely receiving a tutorial does not indicate that one is an inferior student. And although the tutorials are sent automatically, they are optional. However, as an incentive Meghabghab adds two or three points to an individual’s final grade for taking the tutorial and corresponding self-tests. After taking a tutorial and selftest, students will often e-mail Meghabghab that this extra instruction has helped, and Meghabghab estimates that 90 percent of the students who take a tutorial and self-test say that it has helped them on the subsequent quiz. Students who begin the course in need of tutoring often get to the point in the course where the regular course content is enough for them to fully meet the course’s learning objectives. Meghabghab estimates that 30 percent of the students who need tutoring move from one level of tutoring to another. Creating these online tutorials is time-consuming, but Meghabghab believes that this is a more efficient way of providing individualized help than through one-on-one student–instructor interaction. Based on 125 students who have participated in the course since the inception of this tutoring system, the failure/drop rate in Meghabghab’s courses decreased from 20 percent to 10 percent, which he feels is reasonable given the complexity of the subject matter. Although this tutoring system has helped him deliver tutoring in an effective manner, Meghabghab is not sure if this approach would work in other disciplines, and it does take quite a bit of time to create the tutorials. “Certainly more research needs to be done in online tutoring and in finding more intelligent ways of looking at online tutoring. How do we decide what kind of material a student needs, to help with his or her lack of knowledge?” Contact George Meghabghab at [email protected]. @ @ Share Your Ideas If you have developed an innovative online course or have some online teaching tips you would like to share with the readers of Online Classroom, contact Rob Kelly at <[email protected]>. 7 << From Page 3 assignment is due. This reduces the number of inquiries about due dates. Efficient online communication A common complaint among online instructors is the amount of time they spend responding to students’ e-mail messages, particularly as institutions try to accommodate more students in each online course. The key is finding ways to communicate more efficiently with students. Ley recommends setting a communication policy that makes the majority of the communication in the course open to everybody, providing greater equity and efficiency. To achieve this, Ley communicates through the instructor message board—a daily message that gives the status of the course, reminds students about what is coming up, and clarifies assignment instructions. This daily message helps create a learning community by keeping students updated and logging on to the course site, Ley << From Page 2 to get away from all the hustle and bustle and be a part of this class.” “I realized there is something more going on here than just reading a lecture and asking, ‘What do you think about blah, blah, blah?’” Gerlich says. None of this would have been possible without the growing prevalence of WiFi hot spots. Before his trip, Gerlich opened an account with Flying J, a truck stop chain that offers WiFi at many of its locations. In some locations, Gerlich was able to access the course at 8 says. “When I communicate with students, they will log on to see what I’m saying. I know this because I pay attention to when they log on.” Threaded discussions are the main forum for student communication with the instructor and each other. “E-mail inherently generates very complex communication among multiple people. It’s much simpler to manage those communications if you use the discussion board,” Ley says. Ley recommends using threaded discussions for every type of communication except messages that discuss grades. This adds to the sense of community and also reduces the number of messages she has to respond to. Getting students to communicate via discussion board rather than by e-mail is relatively straightforward. Ley makes it clear in the syllabus that she wants communication to be conducted in a public venue and will politely remind students who do not follow this rule. When a student sends an e-mail message that should have been posted in the discussion board, Ley posts and answers the question in the discussion board (with the student’s name removed from the message) and sends an email to the student asking him or her to look on the discussion board for the answer. After about two weeks the students catch on to this policy and rarely send inappropriate e-mail messages. To further improve the efficiency of communication, Ley recommends that, whenever possible, students submit assignments in the body of an e-mail message rather than as an attachment. This eliminates the need for the instructor to download each student’s assignment, which can take a substantial amount of time, particularly in high-enrollment courses. Another thing Ley recommends is that students put the name of an assignment in the subject line of messages they send relating to that assignment. free WiFi hot spots—at a campground, Panera Bread, Barnes & Noble. “[WiFi] is so pervasive right now. I had no idea it was so developed. It allowed me to do exactly what my students are doing, which is to have education on demand, so I was teaching wherever I could. It gave me much more freedom, not to run and play, but to develop professionally and to be able to teach the class as I saw fit.” Gerlich had full access to the course’s control panel. He took several precautions to ensure that he could reach his students and perform course administrative tasks regardless of location. He carried a directory of Flying J truck stops; he had two dial-up accounts; he brought along an Ethernet cable; and he gave his students his cell phone number. Contact Kathryn Ley at [email protected]. @ Contact R. Nicholas Gerlich at [email protected]. For a directory of WiFi hot spots, visit www.wifi411.com. @ Online Cl@ssroom