QM: Orienting Your Online Learners

As the Director of Distance Learning for Triton College, one of my responsibilities is to ensure the delivery of high-quality online education that offers innovation and supports faculty and student success aligning with institutional goals. While I bring a wealth of knowledge and experience having been an adjunct in higher education for over 14 years and being fully engulfed in digital learning for the past 16 years, there is always room for improvement. 

This winter I am working toward adding a new credential to my learning. Recently I wrapped up my first workshop in Quality Matter's Teaching Online Certificate. This well-established and highly respected organization has put together a series of workshops that focuses on best practices of online teaching. I plan to reflect on each workshop as I complete them as a way to model metacognition.

Participants can select from a wide range of dates and take the 7 workshops in any order. I chose to begin with the Orienting Your Online Learners course. It seemed like a logical place to begin and as a bonus, we are exploring avenues for how to orient our community college students to online courses.

We had the opportunity to reflect on what we think the biggest differences are between learning online and learning face to face. For me, I focused on the discipline needed to be successful in online courses, how course design is crucial to success, and how students need to exercise agency and responsibility for their own learning online. I also talked about what skills and attributes I think are important in online learning:

Attributes: self-motivation, organization, engagement (with materials and classmates), and open-mindedness.

Skills: digital literacy, communication, and executive functioning. 

The workshop looked at two levels of student orientation: level 1 is orienting students to online learning in general (see an infographic I made to accompany this), and level 2 is orienting students to your specific online course. Here, I shared some specific things I do to orient my graduate students. 

Finally, for our culminating project, I had the opportunity to create an action plan for how I will implement level 1 and level 2 orientation training for our students here at Triton. 

This was all crammed into the first week. I'm looking forward to sharing additional new ideas as I progress through this program.