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Best Practices for WISE Instructors

The content of this workshop will consist of a series of pages grouped into seven modules:

• Introduction & Overview
• Course Website Basics
• Communicating With Your Students
• Developing Reciprocity and Cooperation Among Students
• Planning the Path to Learning
• Achieving High Expectations
• Wrapping Up

Reading the material on this website is not intended to provide qualification for teaching online, but to inform potential instructors of effective strategies and practices that will improve the quality of their online courses. However, there are opportunities to interact with other learners and develop your skills in online pedagogy if you wish to do so.

Exercising Your Knowledge

Each module will include exercises designed to help you practice the information covered and interact with other learners in our WISE Pedagogy forums. Everyone is encouraged to participate in our ongoing forums at any time, whether you are learning about distance education as a beginner or continuing your development as an experienced instructor.

Throughout the pages of this training website, you will see text boxes with links to the WISE forums and instructions for applying the information into interactive exercises. Follow the instructions in the text boxes that appear throughout this website. These will lead you to participation in the WISE discussion forums and creation of course documents for your own online course. Exercise topics include:

• Signing up as a registered user in the forums (below)
• Icebreakers
• Readings in Online Pedagogy
• Learning Objectives
• Instructor-Student Communication
• Interactive Student Activities
• Teaching Multiple Learning Styles
• Rubrics
• Syllabus Design

Exercising Your Knowledge Follow this link to the WISE Pedagogy discussion forums. You will need to sign up for a free account to participate in the discussions. Once you log in as a registered user, you can explore the various forum threads and post messages. For your first message, go to the page on Icebreakers and follow the prompt for that forum.

Expected Outcomes

By reading the pages on this website and completing the accompanying exercises, you should be able to:

• develop an understanding of key online pedagogical principles
• think critically about online learning from a student's perspective
• demonstrate an understanding of important design principles for developing an online course website
• synthesize course documents
• plan course activities and assignments to appeal to multiple learning styles
• communicate to students what they can expect from the course
• practice excellent communication with students
• promote effective learning of course material and positive student engagement in the subject matter

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