Effective Communication & Instructional Design

Imaging that you entered a room and the instructor looks you the eye and sternly states:

“Beachtung! Sie müssen Nummer zwei Bleistift und setzen Sie sich hin"

If you did not understand German, you may be baffled. Meanwhile the instructor is frustrated that you are not following instructions and holding up the class. Did the instructor give you directions? Yes, but the instructor did not communicate them to you.

Now, image you are a new freshman student unfamiliar with online learning and you are taking a fully online course with directions referring to “threads” and “dropboxes” while burying needed information deep within nested folders that are difficult to find. The new environment may as well be a different language and this can impede student success.

It is clear that increased communication with students while the class is in session should promote student success.

 

When teaching there are several tools and heuristics to promote success by offering prompt feedback (Chickering & Gamson, 1987), such as:

• Logging on three or more times a week to make a presence,
• Using an Announcement tool to send communications to students (at least once a week) that can be pushed to their phones.
• Taking advantage of the course messaging and email features to keep regular contact and to check up on delinquent students.

However, did you know that there are features of course design that can either aid or inhibit communication?

Sometimes the design of course can systemically affect communications. Simply, adopting certain best practices in course design can aid communication with students and contribute to their success.

This resource will review several aspects of how employing best practices can help reduce communicative mishaps and streamline the process of students understanding their learning objectives and how to meet them with minimal technological or course design issues to impede there success. In particular, it will focus on better instructional design that can be applied before the class even begins. This resource will review:

• Communicating expectations effectively
• Faculty Introductions that develop an effective learning environment
• Explicit feedback policies
• At-a-Glance pages
• Communicating Learning Objectives, and
• Grading Rubrics

With the intent to communicate expectations better and improve student success.

Below is a e-book, that can be downloaded as a PDF, with each section a corresponding video accompanies each section.  Be sure to click on the interactive object below to be able to see it in full screen and have other features, such as text searches and navigation tools.