Perfecting the Art of Teaching

Over the weekend, Annette Jurczak sent me the link to this article:

American School Board Journal - September 2006
Special Reports - Technology in a Flat World

Teaching Your Students: Building connections -- through online learning and
a rigorous curriculum -- is a must for today's students by Victor Rivero

http://www.asbj.com/specialreports/0906SpecialReports/S4.html

This is interesting, because it was only two weeks ago that I wrote an entry on Teaching Online, and now these guys publish this article.

In looking through my Bloglines account, this is also a common theme of things that I ahve left there to eventually comment on. Some of these entries include:

• Stave Off These Seven Pitfalls of Distance Learning from Most Recent Peer Reviewed Materials In MERLOT Teaching And Technology
• Taking time to teach how to learn online - Christel Broady, Embanet from Online Learning Update
• Transitioning to Online Course Offerings: Tactical and Strategic Consideration - Lisa A. Burke, JIOL from Online Learning Update
• A Review of Research on Teaching Courses Online from Teaching and Developing Online
• Course Evaluation Methods from Teaching and Developing Online
• Online Teaching from Teaching and Developing Online

Each of these entries either raise another issue dealing with teaching online (such as teaching in a virtual school) or offer an opinion on how to do it.

In the last entry, one of the concerns that I raised with virtual schooling was the issue of performance of virtual school students only equally that of classroom students, even though as a population virtual school students have traditionally been the more academically inclined students. Online Learning Update includes an entry that outlines a research study which gives a possible explanation for this difference (see Student Success in Face-To-Face and Distance Teleclass Environments: A matter of contact? - Teddi S. Deka and Patrick McMurry, IRRODL). I mention this because it is yet another piece of infomration that could be incorporated into the list of good virtual instructional strategies.

So, what are theses? If we could generate a list of good online or virtual instructional strategies, what would you include?

Tags: virtual school, cyber school, high school, education