Managing Online Forums: Everything You Need to Know to Create and Run Successful Community Discussion Boards. eLearning Courses. Why Online Collaborations Fail. Podcast. Ask online students if there was anything they disliked in their last online course, and you're likely to get a resounding "I hated the group work! " Best practices for online courses tend to place a great deal of importance on collaborative learning, either in the form of discussion boards, or in group projects. But while discussion boards work quite well, depending on the skill of the facilitator and the nature of the questions, group projects are often such miserable failures that they taint the learner's perception of the entire course.
What happened? What went wrong? Too complicated. Solution: Instead of requiring one large group project, ask the group to do four or five small group projects that will require just two or three steps, rather than dozens. Time conflicts. Solution: Give the team at least a week to do each project, no matter how small. Friction between team members. Solution: Define the roles as well as the tasks. Tasks are vague, poorly defined. Contemporary Online Teaching Cases. Welcome Welcome to our Contemporary online teaching case site. It features the work of over 70 Deakin University staff in developing and using new media and online technologies to foster student learning. The site was developed through University strategic teaching and learning innovation funding. It has been designed to help teachers work creatively and productively in their online teaching.
Each of the cases locate new media and online technologies in the context of broader views of what it means to teach and learn effectively in different disciplines and professional fields in tertiary education. You can browse the cases by Discipline, Faculty and Case participant via the top menu. We hope the site provides you with plenty of ideas on how to develop and use new media/new technologies in your teaching. Enjoy the experience! Featured case Click on the image above to view that case or select a case from the menu.