The Online Teaching Guide: A Handbook of Attitudes, Strategies, and Techniques for the Virtual Classroom

by Ken W. White

Book Overview

The New Online Teaching Guide is a valuable resource for teaching successful online courses. The Guide focuses on an interpersonal approach, offering a wealth of practical techniques to sharpen online... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0205295312
• ISBN13: 9780205295319
• Release Date: October 1999
• Publisher: Allyn & Bacon
• Length: 192 Pages
• Weight: 0.90 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 7.1" x 9.2"

Customer Reviews

Don't Go Virtual Without It!

To date most books about online learning have focused on academic research or institutional policy. White and Weight have now added a solid practitioner's guide to the literature. The Online Teaching Guide, published in October 1999, consists of a collection of 14 individually authored essays and articles on the art of being an online instructor. Each of the authors borrows on his or her own experience teaching for the University of Phoenix's online campus to shed light on different aspects of how to facilitate a classroom environment in cyberspace. Ken White begins the collection by writing on the importance of understanding that the virtual classroom is first and foremost not a lonely place created by technology but a crucible for human communication. "As in any social venture, people are imprecise, unclear and unpredictable," writes White. This theme, that the virtual classroom is an experiment in human communication, is repeated throughout the individual essays. The job of the online instructor, argues each of the authors, is to understand and direct non-verbal communication so that students experience a learning environment that captures a high level of student interest and enjoys high levels of student retention. The book is rich with real life examples and practitioner's tips for executing them. In the essay "The Elements of Effective Online Teaching," Anita Bischoff, Director of Academic Affairs at the University of Phoenix, outlines a communication matrix that requires the online instructor to communicate presence by providing regular feedback, maintaining public course visibility, selecting and directing students to high quality learning materials, and removing obstacles to student retention. Bischoff provides helpful, practical examples of how an instructor can achieve each of these elements. This book contributes a great deal to our practical understanding of how real-life instructors are successfully creating and maintaining e-classrooms using asynchronous platforms. The only disappointment of the book is that contributions were limited to instructors who have practiced at a single college, The University of Phoenix Online. A diversity of institutional voices would have resulted in a richer, more eclectic reader for use in educating the next generation of virtual professors. Summary evaluation: This is a top-notch, e- instructor's survival guide. Don't go virtual without it.