Teaching Best Practices

Teaching Strategies and Techniques

• Consider how you will adapt your teaching strategies to interactive video
  • At many sites, students have Internet connected computers. This allows the instructors to use online course management systems like Blackboard while teaching CIV courses.
• Pre-class strategies
  • Give students experience with the equipment
  • Encourage interaction between sites
  • Use warm-up activities
• Beginning of class strategies
  • Informal roll-call
  • Ask questions/solicit answers from all sites
• The Lesson
  • Preview/state objectives
  • Keep instructional segments short (chunking)
  • Provide various learning activities, just as you would in the regular classrooms
  • Plan with interaction in mind. Be aware that when you are teaching a CIV class broadcast to multiple campuses, you can see only one campus at a time. Therefore, plan various activities that will encourage and allow all sites to have a chance to participate.
• End of class strategies
  • Remember to incorporate CIV elements into your evaluation and revision process.
• Other issues
  • Visit remote sites two or three times, if possible (for personal contact with other sites)
  • Manage schedule conflicts with other sites
  • Develop a policy for weather cancellations
  • Have a plan for what to do if equipment fails

Support Issues

• Administrative
  • Work with facilitators at other sites. Solicit their observations.
  • Plan for transfer of physical materials
  • Keep a list of addresses for mailing/e-mailing materials
  • Understand the role of support technologies – FAX, e-mail, Internet, class homepages (BLS)
• Instructional
  • Be available to students by providing phone numbers and e-mail addresses.
  • Provide office hours to all students (online, phone, and in-person)
  • Provide students a list of support resources, such as tutoring, examples, multimedia, and other materials. When possible, make the same resources available at all sites.
  • Utilize support technologies (tutoring software, Skype, publisher Web sites)
• Technical
  • Understand troubleshooting procedures (who to call on-campus and off, common problems)
  • Keep a list of key technical contact phone numbers
  • Have a backup plan for when the technology fails