FIRST CONTACT: USING PRE-CLASS ASSIGNMENTS TO IMPROVE ONLINE STUDENT SUCCESS
Stephanie Delaney
Highline Community College, Des Moines, WA, USA <SDELANEY@highline.edu>
ABSTRACT
Faculty everywhere are frustrated by students arriving in the classroom without the basic skills to succeed in a class. This can be even more frustrating in the online environment where mastery of technical and other skills are essential to simply accessing the course material. The pre-class assignment allows the instructor to more accurately determine whether the student possesses the important skills needed to succeed in the online classroom.
SUMMARY
Online courses demand that students possess certain academic and technical skills. This includes the ability to read carefully, follow directions, plan schedules, work independently, use e-mail and attachments, use the Internet and more. One of the best ways to insure online course success is to clearly set out expectations as early as possible. If you can do this before the class begins or right at the beginning of the class, you give students an opportunity for greater success as an online student.
Despite screening at some colleges, students are not always honest in their skill assessment and thus suffer when they realize that they don’t actually have the needed skills. However, the pre class assignment requires students to actually demonstrate the academic and technical skills necessary to succeed in the class. If the student then discovers that they do not have the skills, they can either work to acquire those skills prior to the start of the class (if possible) or make a decision to take a different class before the term begins.
In my presentation, I will demonstrate a selection of pre class assignments and explain how an instructor might put one together based on the technical and academic requirements for a class. I will also show some supplemental materials used to help students to gain some of the simpler skills.
TCC Online Conferences
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University of Hawai`i
Honolulu, HI