Improve it.
Improving online courses has advantages that are unique to this platform. Each semester, I purposefully select a few improvement goals. I share these goals with my students and collect evidence from past courses and current courses to create an even better course.
Use peer observations
Each semester, I recruit a peer to support me in improving my course. In spring 2021, a colleague in Secondary Education observed, collaborated, and supplied feedback so that I could improve student discourse.
Learn what to keep
An important question for constant improvement is, “What should NOT be changed about the course?” These responses remind me of the important components and delivery that should not be changed as I improve my course.
Use student feedback
I use student feedback on course evaluations regularly. New evaluation tools are being used across my college, and COVID disrupted the traditional course ratings. These results were pre-spring 2020. Since 2020, I have use non-traditional evaluations to get a better sense of areas of improvement.
Use peer collaboration
Collaboration is paramount to good instruction. I collaborate with other instructors who teach the same course, or instructors who teach similar populations to learn and share ideas about creating rich and robust assignments. From 2016 - 2020, I worked weekly with this colleague, as she supported me to think about accessibility, accountability, and depth of student ideas.
Learn what makes online courses great
In my quest to improve my online course delivery, it is important for me to know how my students describe my instructional moves and the way I do this in an online course. The summative evaluations do not give me enough information, so I create my own evaluations. This gives me the qualitative feedback that helps me to know what to keep and what to improve.
Check in often
Formative assessments are important for instructors too. To ensure that I’m meeting the needs of my students, I collect evaluations at 5 weeks and 10 weeks, in addition to the summative end-of-course evaluations. From this evaluation, I improved my course by prompting discussions such as, “Why might this assignment help you to understand the many ways students approach a problem.” These discussions helped students to understand the purpose of the assignment and what they would gain as a learner and future teacher.