9.1 Motivation

Your students associate their experience at Northeastern with you and their experience in your course. Your efforts not only reflect on you but on everyone in Khoury and on Northeastern as a whole. The student’s perceived value that they receive for their tuition is directly related to your work as an instructor – be respectful of their tuition payments and their time commitment to us. Whether students continue with a major or their degree at Northeastern depends to a large extent on your efforts, the quality of your course and instruction, and the relationship you build with students.

This guide lays out best practices and expectations for teaching an online course. Adapt and adjust them for your course and let us know which practices work and which may not work as well. The practices are based more than ten years of experience in teaching online.

In addition to this guide, there are numerous excellent resources that can help if you are new to online teaching. One such resource is Small Teaching Online by James Lang (Lang 2016).

Effectively teaching online is difficult and requires dedication, attention to detail, and substantial effort. Through surveys and focus groups with students we have found that students find purely online classes (asynchronous learning) without any live lectures, classes, labs, or recitations very difficult and hard to engage in. Staying motivated was reported to be a real issue. Students like live classes or recitations, although those should not be repetitions of already recorded lessons. They like having their courses in one place: all materials and submissions with due dates on Canvas and perhaps an external question-and-answer and live interaction platform like Microsoft Teams. Students also reported that they like when instructors send daily or at least weekly summaries of all work to be done so they can schedule their work in their calendars. Courses need to be well organized. Instructors and teaching assistants need to be accessible. Group work in virtual meeting spaces helps students stay accountable and helps them make or maintain social connections.

References & Bibliography

Lang, James M. 2016. Small Teaching: Everyday Lessons from the Science of Learning. John Wiley & Sons.