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Essential Elements:
Prepare, Design, and Teach Your Online Course
by Bonnie Elbaum, Cynthia McIntyre, and Alese Smith

There’s no doubt that a great classroom lecturer can be an inspiration to students. But almost all lecturers worry that their students are not learning how to discover, how to make connections on their own. If you have never taught an online course you’ll be surprised to learn that teaching online, as described by the authors, has the potential for providing students with a truly comprehensive learning experience. An online course can offer students the chance to learn through exploration, to pursue related areas of interest, to participate in a community of learners, and to take advantage of opportunities to excel.

This book, ESSENTIAL ELEMENTS: Prepare, Design, and Teach Your Online Course offers an easy-to-follow guide that is based on a model developed from experience with hundreds of online courses. The authors are members of The Concord Consortium, a nonprofit educational technology lab dedicated to improving teaching practices through the appropriate integrated use of technology in the classroom.

Based on their experience, the authors offer the Concord Consortium e-Learning Model — which provides a working overview of online teaching — and seventeen essential elements that take you step-by-step through everything you’ll need to know for successful online teaching. The essential elements describe the necessary steps to put the Concord model into practice with these results:

• You will use courseware to display your course assignments and reference materials as text, with graphics, colors, and multimedia to enhance the presentation.

• Your course will have clearly written assignments that engage your students in active learning with each other.

• You, as the instructor, will play an integral roll as a facilitator of that learning.

• Your will use the Internet both as a resource and as a means for connecting yourself and your students based on your mutual interest in the content — regardless of your individual schedules, geographic location, or physical ability to come to class.

• You and your students will communicate and collaborate on a regular basis in a discussion area that allows for student-to-student and student-to-instructor interaction.

• Students will assess their own growth and learning through group discussion and reflection, peer review, instructor feedback, and self-evaluation.

The essential elements are presented in three sections — prepare, design, and teach — that will take you from the starting gate to the finishing line, offering complete assistance for the new online teacher and new techniques and tips for those who have taught online before.

With tips addressing everything from technology to student assessments, from online community building to collaborative teaming, and from scheduling and pacing to facilitating online discussions, the authors have the virtual classroom covered.