Inside Online Learning

The flipped classroom concept is a popular one. It usually involves shifting more passive learning activities, such as listening to lectures, out of the face-to-face classroom to an online format. The second half of the flip moves more active learning tasks, such as collaborative exercises, to a face-to-face setting. When I attended Jackie Gerstein’s featured [...]

Have you experienced Twitter? Since its launch in 2006, Twitter has become one of the most widely used social media tools, with hundreds of millions of active accounts, including an untold number of educators, administrators, and students. It may not be right for everyone, but what will you say when asked to give an opinion [...]

If you engage in social media and networking sites with your students, you are not alone. A study of faculty use of social media in higher education [PDF] published in 2011 by Pearson Learning Solutions and the Babson Survey Research Group found that “nearly two-thirds of all faculty have used social media during a class [...]

Tips for creating to-do lists are everywhere, but could taking items off of your list actually be more helpful? A recent Inc. article from business founder Benjamin Wald provided “An Entrepreneur’s ‘Stop Doing’ List.” So many of us as online instructors are entrepreneurial in action and spirit, often putting together a combination of teaching and [...]

If you search for social media management, the majority of results you’ll find are written for a business audience interested in company branding and community building. When I conducted a similar search for students, in preparation for a recent #IOLchat session, most of the results addressed the job search and importance of a professional digital [...]

What do you do when something inappropriate pops-up in your online class? I’ve dealt with this on a small scale as an instructor, reacting to students’ posts that for various reasons were inappropriate in the context of an online academic course. In many cases, a quick connection with the student reveals that they were unaware [...]

Digital analyst and author Brian Solis shared an interesting observation on a Google+ post, this month: “The only way to understand new culture and behavior is to go native.” The context was related to business operations and the use of technology to connect with consumers, but it struck a chord with me as an online [...]

In a tough economy with high unemployment and competition for jobs, we are all thankful for new opportunities, often making it difficult to say “no” even when our plates are full. I said “no” to a contract offer for the first time this week, and didn’t feel good about it. But the harsh reality is [...]