ESSEA: Best Practices in Online Teaching
Categories:
This document includes a summary of best
practices and results reported from the Earth System Science Education Alliance (ESSEA) project that was conducted
from 2000-2005. Click here to download the PDF file (size: 595KB).
ESSEA has been successfully implemented by more than 40 institutions across the U.S. since its development in 1996. This report attempts to capture the best practices from current and former faculty to support implementation in the future. Data was collected from four sources: questionnaire of faculty; interviews; archived notes of the developers; annual reports from participating faculty. For more information on ESSEA, please click here.
Conclusions
New faculty can benefit from the experience of current and former ESSEA faculty. They emphasize …
- Communication,
communication, communication – be prompt with responses,
communicate frequently, be clear about what will be expected,
interact early and often
- Meet students
face-to-face at least once. A majority of the institutions offered
or required a preliminary face-to-face meeting. However, this can be difficult when the students are regionally diverse
- Technical
issues are important to address immediately including student
aptitude, posting etiquette, software, and available equipment
- Be
clear and direct with participants upfront about the amount of
work this and other online courses entail in hopes of curbing the
dropout rate
- The majority of professors felt ESSEA prepared teachers for offering inquiry based learning in their classrooms
- The most consistently reported issue among the institutions and instructors was low enrollment.
- New
instructors should not be afraid to modify the existing materials
as necessary to best fit their particular student population as a
majority of current and past instructors has successfully done
