Engaged Online Teaching & Learning
Engaged Online Teaching and Learning at CSI treats the whole learner, focusing on disciplinary content and three areas of practice: connections, feedback, and course design. You’ll see these four “buckets” presented in different ways throughout this text because the relationships between them are non-linear and each concept can be addressed in any order and in any way that is helpful to your objectives.
To measure one’s efforts, we offer the following standards as benchmarks. Instructors wishing to review and improve their courses may report the ways in which their courses meet, exceed, or fail to meet these standards.
Connections
This course provides mechanisms, tools, and opportunities for learners and instructors to connect with one another as curious, engaged learners who collaborate to build course norms, to ask good questions, and to discover the connections between course content, each other, and the larger world.
Content
Content provided in this course allows learners to meet or exceed course and program outcomes, and is accepted by the department, college, and other discipline and/or accrediting bodies as meeting disciplinary standards.
Feedback
The instructor of the course provides multiple, regular, and iterative opportunities to give feedback on learner performance, and gives learners the opportunity to revise, revisit, and reconceive knowledge as it builds through and relates to the course as a whole.
Course Design
The design of the course interface, content, activities, feedback mechanisms, and means for community building allow learners with various needs to access all elements of the course easily. Universal Design for Learning (UDL) and clear wayfinding are foundational aspects of such accessibility.
Content is the "what" of the course, and often the "how." Sometimes content is also the "why." Course content is often discipline-specific, but should always be considered in light of how it (the content) interacts with, influences, and is influenced by content from other disciplines including (perhaps especially) lived experience.
Online courses with effective, meaningful connections between learners, instructors, and peers provide opportunities for learners, instructors, visitors, observers, and others to interact in human ways. Learning is thereby always situated in the lived experience. By way of these connections, learners grapple with the implications of the knowledge, skills, actions, and practices of the course and the discipline where the course resides.
Arguably, no learning happens without meaningful feedback which provides information about the consequences of actions, ideas, and practices. Feedback comes from instructors, disciplinary content and standards, peers, and lived experience. Feedback must be actionable to be meaningful for learning.
The medium is always (at least part of) the message. Course design elements acknowledge that learners take information from the way content is presented, performance measured, and skills assessed. Useful course design allows learners to spend cognitive load on course materials much more than on deciphering the organization, layout, and progression of an online course.
