Assessing your Strengths and Focusing on Them What do you do well? - If you are about to start teaching online, one of the best questions to ask is “what do you do really well in the face-to-face classroom?”  Identifying your strengths is important because you want to ensure that you find a way to focus on those  in the online environment.  For example, does your course feature interactive discussions, do you deliver memorable and exciting lectures or do you organize challenging small group projects? Regardless of your strengths, we can help you identify how to replicate/apply that to your online course. Initially, finding a way to adapt yur course to the online environment can seem like a daunting task, especially if you are not familiar with the available tools and delivery methods.  While this document outlines some of the tools that are available, it is a good idea to think about how you currently approach your courses? Do you have clearly identifiable learning objectives for each class? – When teaching online it is especially important for students to know exactly what information they are responsible for.  Identifying course objectives can also help faculty determine what type of electronic material will need to be included/created. How are lectures delivered? – Just like face-to-face courses, most online classes at NJIT include some sort of lecture or multimedia component.  Are your lectures normally supplemented by PowerPoint?  Are your lectures based on case studies?  Do you normally work with equations on a chalk board?  Regardless of what approach you take, we can help you create a similar lecture in a digital format.  One benefit to digital lectures is that once they are created, they can be reused in subsequent semesters.  Faculty have also found that they can also incorporate those lectures into face-to-face courses.  For example, some face-to-face students are required to listen to/view a lecture before class so that there can be more time spent discussing the lecture. How are discussions handled? – Discussion is an extremely important component of the online environment.  Normally referred to as asynchronous discussion, students can post questions to the online discussion board and then when you log-in you can answer those question.  With this method, not only do individual students get their questions answered, the whole class can benefit because they can read the responses.  Proper use of asynchronous discussion can also help instructors save time.  Many times novice online instructors rely too heavily on email and find that they are sending the same emails to multiple students or answering the same questions again and again.  A discussion board also has the added benefit of giving students the ability to answer each others questions—further enhancing your class’s discussion.   Finally, at the end of the semester the discussion board can be a good starting point for creating a course FAQ document. How are assessment handled? – Student assessment is just as important online as it is face-to-face.  It is important to determine if you will be collecting assignments, offering online quizzes, assigning group projects or requiring students to take proctored exams.  Course assessment will be explored in greater depth but it is important to start thinking early on about how you will be measuring what your students are learning. The suggested path for beginning this process involves meeting with representatives from Instructional Technology and Media Services instruction@njit.edu who will create an individual plan for creating a high-quality distance learning course. Next Step: Available Tools and Resources