After reading Claire Major’s chapter, the book introduced many tools that helps online learning. One tool Lisa Lane used when teaching “a community college level class that covers Western civilization from 1648 to the present”(Major,2015,page 88) is instant messaging(IM) which is a system similar to Skype that allows her to talk to students in real time when teaching the online course. Because of the use between her and her students are non time scheduled, she uses an other tool called “Plupper” for her students to check her availability quickly by checking on the system. These two tools provides her students with a better communication environment in the learning progress.Her goal of using these systems is to make her students participate more in the learning progress rather than just read the books and do boring assignments. The result of using these tools in teaching the course was successful, students are engaged in the course and these tools created a great communication link between the instructor and students.

Another tool suggested in the book is “Online discussion forum”(Major,2015,page 103). Instructor David Evans in University of Virginia, US used online discussion forum in his online open course of computer science. Because of the nature of the course is totally free and open to everyone on the internet, the number of participants is huge so that it is hard for the instructor to help everyone with their problems. As a result, the online discussion forum is developed for people who have understood the materials to help those in need. According to David, “they provided a very active environment, with over 88,000 discussion questions posted”（Major,2015,page 103). The online discussion forum helped getting people learning the course better and faster. A similar system I have used is the forum post section in this course’s course space. Taking an online course makes it hard to see who my classmates are, but the forum post section provides a platform for students to know and communicate with each other.

 

Reference

Major, C. H. (2015). Teaching online: A guide to theory, research, and practice. Baltimore, Maryland: Johns Hopkins University Press.