Tips from the AEJMC Teaching Committee

Helping your students beyond the classroom

One of our freshman majors came into my office recently with a distressed look on her face. She came to us with a strong high school grade point average but was struggling in her classes here.

When I looked at her spring 2009 schedule, it wasn’t hard to figure out what was going on. Four of her five classes were taught almost entirely online. She felt overwhelmed, isolated, and incapable of meeting deadlines, especially in the self-paced classes.

Her situation is increasingly common as colleges and universities turn to online classes to serve more students in an era of shrinking education budgets. The 2008 Sloan Survey of Online Learning tracked a 12 percent annual increase in online enrollment. Nationwide, about 3.94 million college students were enrolled in at least one online course in fall 2007.

At many institutions, instruction in large introductory courses has been shifted from lecture hall to laptop. Freshmen, straight from fairly structured learning environments, are the ones most affected.

This trend affects all college educators, whether or not we teach online. As online enrollment grows, so have the number of resources designed to help us teach in this environment. While many university Web pages are devoted to this topic, a few good sites for teaching tips are:

• http://www.onlineteachingtips.org
From Dallas Baptist University.

• http://www.ion.illinois.edu/resources/
From the Illinois Online Network.

• http://www.ctdlc.org/faculty/TeachingTips/index.html
From the Connecticut Distance Learning Consortium.

• http://tlc.eku.edu/tips/online_teaching/
From Eastern Kentucky University.

Even for those of us not teaching online, we must keep in mind that we may be the only faculty member many freshmen see every other day. Our students are keeping track of multiple deadlines that don’t correspond to standard course scheduling blocks. They often turn to us for help with other classes because we are a familiar face.

Last year for the first time, my department offered three small, topic-driven freshman learning community courses with the hidden agenda of giving freshmen an hour a week to interact with a faculty member in a small group. While my community explored media and politics, I spent much of the time talking about time management, selecting courses, managing stress, learning in large lectures and how to succeed in online courses.

This is the inaugural Teaching Corner column. Members of the AEJMC Teaching Committee will explore a teaching topic in each issue of interest to journalism educators. We’d love to have you share your tips related to our column topics. We hope to gather your thoughts and ideas and put together a page on each topic on the Teaching Committee section on the AEJMC Web site.

If you have strategies or resources you’d like to share for teaching in an online environment, please send them to . I’d also love to hear from those who work with students on time management, academic success strategies and the like as related to online survival skills.

Finally, we’d love to hear your ideas for future column topics. One of the things AEJMC members said they’d like to see more of in the newsletter is teaching tips. We on the Teaching Committee want to make this space useful to those passionate about teaching. Send ideas to Diana Rios, committee chair, at , or to Jennifer Greer at the address above.

By Jennifer Greer,
University of Alabama,
AEJMC Teaching Committee