Be the Best Web Conferencer You Can Be! Tips for Best Practices

If you've been using Web conferencing software for a while, you probably already have a sense of
what is good practice with the tools. "Best practice" is more difficult to define and depends on context: your mileage may vary from mine. As instructors, we rely on intuition rather than dogma to develop best practice and what we know is more implicit than explicit. I've done a bit of research (so, hopefully, you won't have to) to try to locate sources where best practices in Web conferencing for instruction have been communicated and explained. There is also a significant amount of knowledge chronicled in other posts on this blog, so this will definitely NOT be the last word. Use it as a starting point.

Ms. Giovanna Badia and Mrs. April Colosimo presented at the 2013 ASEE (American Society for Engineering Education) Conference on "Best Practices for Engaging Users in a Web Conferencing Environment". They emphasize the need to 1) Introduce and Orient; 2) Inform; 3) Reinforce Active Learning and Feedback; 4) Humanize the Environment; 5) Close and Follow-Up. Among their tips: "There are advantages and disadvantages to maximizing the screen while displaying the content. For instance, the chat box will no longer be visible to the presenter. However, it will also mean that the names of registrants will not be seen in the resulting video. It can be a challenge to devote attention to both presenting and scanning for questions or comments, so it is advisable to have a second person, whenever possible, to monitor and respond to chats...." "Just as with face-to-face sessions, you can present case studies or prompt students for topic suggestions if illustrating search tools. It can be distracting for participants to move back and forth from applications to the web conferencing software so it may require more planning in advance. Try to slow down when demonstrating, since there may be a delay between what the instructor shows and what participants see on their screens...." "Use questioning as an active learning technique to involve everyone via audio, chat, or with the use of a whiteboard. Be patient and wait for responses. Decide how to manage discussions beforehand, with participants raising their hands or waiting for their turn to type or speak. Take time to reflect on comments and ask participants to elaborate. If you feel relaxed enough, you can prompt specific individuals by name to contribute to a discussion but it has to be done sensitively since there are no visual cues to indicate whether or not someone is comfortable responding. The whiteboard can be
a tool for engaging participants in the design of a concept map, brainstorming ideas, and producing a list of key terms...."

Learning Solutions Magazine  posted an article recently by Darlene Christopher entitled, "Best Practices for Polling in Web Conferences". Her suggestions for designing poll questions: 1) Keep it short; 2) Avoid double-barreled questions; 3) Eliminate acronyms or unclear language; 4) Avoid leading or biased questions. When formulating responses, she recommends: 1) Use plain language; 2) Limit answer choices; 3) Use mutually exclusive responses; 4) Use number increments in equal amounts; 5) Include options for outliers; Include a "don't know" option if  appropriate. The article includes many practical suggestions for rehearsing, anonymous polling, and broadcasting poll results.

Jozianne Mestas at the University of Colorado, Denver, has published "Best Practices for Web Conferencing With Adobe Connect Pro." The article provides advice for PowerPoint Preparation: "be
conscientious of the font sizes you select to ensure that your web participants will be able to read your slides. The same principle applies for using intricate pictures, graphics and non-standard fonts. Since Adobe Connect Pro uses its own reader to view the presentation, in order to make sure all participates can view the content, it is best to use simple fonts, graphics, and animations." On Screen Share: "If you choose to utilize the screen share option, it is recommended that you use the screen
resolution of 1024x768 to ensure that your participants can see your screen without demanding too much computer network bandwidth." For audio: " I recommend limiting the number of open microphones at one time to minimize the possible confusion caused by multiple individuals trying to
talk all at once."


Saint Leo University makes available its one-page "Web Conferencing Best Practices for Moderators" divided into 3 sections: 1) Before Session (test connectivity, check lighting and background objects, etc.); 2) During Session (use an ice breaker, speak clearly and at an even pace, etc.); and 3) After Session (follow up with meeting notes and next steps).

The Sloan Consortium has a presentation by Linda Macauley of Elizabethtown College entitled, "Best Practices in Using Interactive Web Conferencing for Online and Hybrid Courses". Linda's work has also appeared in Faculty Focus. Her tips can be divided into these categories: Getting Started; Classroom Management; and Troubleshooting and Technical Support. Getting Started: practice in Classroom Management: explain the icons; establish a protocol for speaking and asking questions; appoint students to be presenters; use yes/no buttons periodically. Troubleshooting and Technical Support: add the help number to every invitation; remind students about background noise; do periodic sound checks;schedule at least one test session with students; provide "how to join"

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instructions to students; post invitations where students will find them.

Sloan-C also archived a presentation by three Eastern Kentucky University professors - Paula Jones, Maryann Kolloff, and Fred Kolloff - entitled "Best Practices to Promote Learning Through Web Conferencing: Resources, Tools and Teaching Methods".  These three emphasize these best practices: 1) Prepare Content Beforehand; 2) Plan a Practice Session; 3) Have an Assistant on Hand. They also list several "Before the first meeting" tips, e.g., plan for accessibility needs, share a whiteboard with the number for technical support early in the session, log in 15-20 minutes early. There is a another list of tips to follow during the session: make sure that student interactions are required every few minutes;
plan for breaks; close items when finished with them.

Be There Now (or Later): How to Be Present When Your Students are Somewhere (or Somewhen) Else

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In 1971, Ram Dass published Be Here Now, a life-changing book for many of the Boomer generation. The book emphasized spiritual truths and the admonition to be present at the only time that matters - now - and in the only place that matters - here. With quotes like "the next message you need is always right where you are," it brought many readers to an awakening based on the present moment.

Teachers in the virtual classroom often have a difficult time with the concept of "presence" and "here and now." They miss the eye contact with students that the traditional classroom provides, making it difficult to hold the audiences' attention or even to know when they are holding it. Non-verbal signals (facial expressions, body language, hand gestures) are also missing online. Students who wish to can get up and walk around, turn their backs on the instructor, switch screens, feed babies, etc.: there is little physical control granted to the instructor over the virtual classroom. Distractions - barking dogs, incoming text messages, e-mail, Facebook prompts, etc. - are difficult to control and have the potential to destroy instructor presence. We've all got horror (or humor) stories about that: one that recently appeared in The Chronicle's Wired Campus spoke of "barking dogs, wailing babies, and a naked spouse" as intruders in the virtual classroom.

The potential for disconnectedness or distraction is so great that virtual classroom instructors have to be proactive, just as the readers of Ram Dass's book were urged to "wake up" and "be here now." They must pay attention to what they're saying, how often they pause to ask questions and wait for answers, and how they recognize opportunities to solicit feedback and participation. They regularly check the class roster and call on students to contribute thoughts or materials. They know that injecting humor or surprise is an effective method for breaking the ice and getting everyone's attention. They find ways to personalize their presentation, often by using the Web cam judiciously to show themselves and/or their environment or by inserting personal pictures (of themselves, their garden, a pet) onto slides or whiteboards.

Where synchronous collaboration is possible (i.e., where you have an online audience now), it should be encouraged and planned for. I like to make my students believe that they can be called on anytime to do something - and then prove it by calling on them randomly and often. If more than three minutes go by without my pausing to engage my online audience, I'm in danger of losing both them and myself in the lecture, not the present moment. I like to insert a PAUSE slide about every 10 slides in my presentation to ensure that I use it and "wake up" to my audience. The chat back-channel is a great way to reinforce presence and engagement, as long as you pay attention to it and encourage student participation.

Vicki Davis cites 12 healthy habits to grow your online presence in her Cool Cat Teacher Blog:

1. Share.
2. Respond.
3. Comment.
4. Link Generously.
5. Read (or Listen) Prolifically.
6. Distribute Yourself.
7. Beware of Flattery.
8. Live Life Online and Off-line.
9. Latch Key Your Legacy.
10. Laugh (a lot).
11. Take Every Presentation Seriously.
12. Expect Criticism.

Be there!

Frequent Contact with Online Students: Priority One

Chickering-Gamson contend: "Frequent student-faculty contact in and out of classes is the most important factor in student motivation and involvement. Faculty concern helps students get through rough times and keep on working. Knowing a few faculty members well enhances students' intellectual commitment and encourages them to think about their own values and future plans. "

So we need to keep and maintain contact with our students. In the Confer environment, one of the key reinforcers of this contact comes from the audio tool, which allows real-time conversation. Jennifer Hoffman says that “The trainer’s voice is perhaps the most important content delivery method available in a synchronous classroom.” Similarly, Clark and Kwinn assert that "audio participation increases social presence and is the best option" for synchronous online communication. We seem to have built-in responders to audio cues, and students who can hear the instructor's voice - to say nothing of being heard by the instructor - are reassured that there is a human being teaching and guiding them in their learning.

Confer also provides a chat tool that gives an ongoing log or transcript of typed conversation during the session. Messages can be sent to a selected audience or a private individual. The text can be resized, and the chat can be saved (copied and pasted) to a text file. This tool provides another interaction option, and its proper use will empower students in the online classroom. Joe Tansey observes that the fact that all students can see the responses in the chat window instantly is a valuable way for participants to share a wealth of ideas and information... Text chat makes it easy for all involved to match responses with contributors, and no responses are overwritten or erased – which can be a risk with some white board tools.” Joe also feels that "a useful feature of text chat is that it can provide learners with a non-threatening way to pose questions or communicate other needs with the instructor. Questions on the mind of one learner are often on the minds of others. If instructors aren’t able to answer all questions during the allotted class time, they can usually save the text chat and respond to questions after class.” Jennifer Hoffman adds that “participants who are more reserved are often more likely to interact when text chat options are available.” In a study called "The Social Arena of the Online Synchronous Environment," Zeina Nehme writes that “a learner might be comfortable chatting only rather than talking on the microphone.” There are limitations to this tool, however: as Schwier and Balbar discovered, one is "the lack of nonverbal cues, and the difficulty interpreting the intentions of each other. Chatting is spontaneous by nature, and this spontaneity doesn't allow participants to craft clear prose, so subtleties were sometimes lost or misinterpreted."

The polling tools are also aimed at interaction, albeit in a more structured way than either voice or chat. Jonathan Finkelstein notes that "polling is a low-threshold way of involving even the more reticent participants, as it allows for a simple means to take part in and affect the flow of a live online session. Integrated polling tools not only help a facilitator quickly gauge interest, comprehension, and opinions of the subject matter at hand, but they can also be used to appraise more subtle measures of student engagement and understanding: those more akin to the hesitant raising of a hand in a physical classroom.” Diana Perney at the Pennsylvania Virtual Charter School says, "I use this tool throughout a session. I create on the white board a multiple-choice question to start the session and ask the learners to respond, choosing A, B, or C. The polling results give me a sense of the class and activates prior knowledge for the learner. I will repeat this process throughout the session to engage the learners and to keep my finger on the pulse of the class. It often catches the participants off guard – they don’t know when I will ask the next question. The polling tool also meets the needs of visual, auditory, and kinesthetic learners. I ask the question, they see the question, and a button needs to be clicked to indicate a response.”

What DOESN'T Work in the Virtual Classroom?

I've written a lot about the benefits of the virtual classroom and included many examples of what works well in this environment. In the 10+ years of CCC Confer, we've seen exponential growth in popularity among faculty and students, and we've watched Web conferencing technology become more and more reliable and stable for our thousands of users.

But it wouldn't be accurate or fair to pretend that Web conferencing is always  the best option or that it is always the best way to reach students and deliver online instruction. In fact, there's evidence to suggest that Web conferencing provides some barriers for students and instructors, which must be recognized and overcome for a successful experience and for effective instruction to take place. For example, I just previewed an article in the June 2013 Journal of Computing Sciences in College entitled, "Under What Conditions Does Web Conferencing Inhibit Learning in a Computer Science Classroom?" The authors - Jami Cotler of Siena College and Dima Kassab and Xiaojun Yuan of SUNY-Albany - drew conclusions from two lectures (one delivered face-to-face and one delivered online via Web conferencing) and students' reactions to the experience of these lectures. I'll reserve comment on the methodology or validity of this study, but I'm interested in the students' perceptions.

Distractions. In the Cotler study, 31% of the students reported problems with distractions during the virtual lecture. The nature of these distractions were not disclosed, but we can guess that they may have involved the typical distractions online students encounter: e-mail messages, tweets, Facebook posts, instant messages, and other Web excursions. It may also be that these students found the Web conferencing interface itself distracting, with its chat window, video, whiteboard, etc. The face-to-face classroom also has distractions, of course, but eye contact with the instructor is often inhibition enough for students to block them off and pay attention to the lecturer.

To help students overcome these distractions, the experienced Confer instructor gives guidelines to students before their first online class session and even at the beginning of the session. Disable notifications from your online applications (noises, signals, pop-ups): they will interfere with your concentration. Some instructors even provide specific instructions for turning off, say, Facebook notifications. And, while the class is meeting online, it's good practice to keep the students alert by mixing up the delivery.

Engagement. Cotler's students reported that they were 38% less engaged in the virtual classroom than in the face-to-face environment. Oddly, though, 88% "felt they were able to participate during the [Web conferencing] lecture" and 56% "felt highly engaged in the course materials and the course activities" in the online classroom. So the perception of less engagement may have been related to distractions or some other subjective factor. Many (69%) of the students reported "less connection to the instructor" when using the virtual classroom. However, they reported using the whiteboard and chat features, and most of the students claimed to have reached out to either another student or the instructor during the online session.

We know from long experience that keeping students engaged in the virtual classroom is more challenging than in the traditional environment. You can't see all of your students, and you're not going to be able to validate all of their behavior all of the time. Your sense of control online is compromised because of the distance between you and the "desks" in front of you. But you can keep students engaged by doing some extra work: preparing breaks in which students provide examples, express opinions, or vote on issues. Work in assessments or chat activities, and use breakout rooms to divide a large class into manageable small groups where it's harder for students to hide or let others do all the work. Several of my blog posts provide examples of these strategies.

Unfamiliarity with Technology. I was surprised to read in Cotler's study that unfamiliarity with technology accounted for only 13% of the reported problems with the virtual classroom. Half of all the students "stated that it was convenient and that they like that they could remain in the comfort of their home," and an amazing 81% reported "feeling less stressed about tasks accomplished during the [Web conferencing] session in comparison to the face-to-face session." So technophobia (or at least fear of synchronous online interaction), while not dead, is on the wane with today's students.

It's a good idea to orient students to the virtual classroom before you make them do something in it. This can happen during a "practice" session, in a "sandbox" (we offer several on the CCC Confer Web site), or via training materials (videos, slides, documents) you provide for them. Given these results and the increasing popularity of synchronous online rooms (Skype, Google Hangouts, etc.), it may be just as important that you orient yourself to the virtual classroom and feel comfortable showing its features to your students.

What doesn't work in the virtual classroom? Mainly, not having a plan to use it!

How to Encourage Active Learning Online

According to the research findings summarized by Chickering and Gamson (1987), good practice in undergraduate education encourages active learning. R.R. Hake studied the role of active learning in 1997 by comparing traditional courses to courses using active learning techniques and concluded: "the mean gain was more than twice as large for active learning classes, so you could say that courses implementing active learning are more than twice as effective as traditional courses in building basic concepts." Allison Carr-Chellman and Phillip Duchastel (2002) observed that synchronous online activities "yield a more direct sense of interaction, increased collegiality, immediate resolution of problems, and better team building." Duncan, Kenworthy, and McNamara (2012) noted that synchronous online activities had a positive effect for students on both final exam performance and overall class achievement. Oztok, Zingaro, Brett, and Hewitt (2013) recently concluded that students who interact with their instructors in synchronous online sessions also read the discussion forums more closely, respond more thoughtfully to forum prompts, and spend more time reading course materials.

 Even with evidence of its effectiveness, it's sometimes difficult to incorporate active learning into online courses because the temptation to isolate as in instructor is strong.  You feel alone and it's awkward not to lecture, to wait on the "invisible" class to respond and learn for themselves. Here are some tips from active learning advocates.

Breakout Room Collaboration. Heidi Beezley, instructional technologist at Georgia Perimeter College, advocates having students talk to each other as they collaborate in breakout rooms. "I think the trick is to try to pull them back to the main room before they get to the point where the discussion has died down... [You] need to establish a culture of accountability, making sure that they use the time wisely, or they will run out of time and won't be able to complete the task." She assigns each student to a base group of students who work together in groups of five throughout the course.

Ready, Set, Go (or One, Two, Three): Put it in the Chat Box! Peyri Herrera and Larry Green arrived at this method independently, as far as I know. They both use a spot check with a countdown to have students answer a question in chat, simultaneously. The important point is to have everyone answer at once, so that the instructor can guage how well they're understanding the concept, but also to encourage students to think in real time, to pay attention, and to be present.

Communicative Activities. Planning to involve students in the Confer session has the greatest potential for creating an active learning environment. Chat is effective, especially if you seed it,  but so is using the whiteboard for brainstorming. Allowing students to role play or debate can be effective, and a spot poll makes sure everyone is paying attention.

Think, Pair, Share. This method from North Carolina State University has gather ideas about a topic (Think), choose partners with similar interests (Pair) and work together on a presentation they will deliver to the class (Share). 

Be Quiet. Waiting for students to respond is hard, perhaps especially so online. But if you don't wait on them, you may not get them to respond. Learn the value of silence online.

Greet Your Students. Believe it or not, simply calling your students by name and acknowledging their presence has an effect on their participation. It's too easy to hide online: greeting them makes them feel less invisible and encourages them to get involved.

Give Them Control. My favorite technique is to reverse roles with a student. I like to explain a technique, demonstrate it, and then invite a student to try it out by giving desktop control to that student or inviting them to use the whiteboard to illustrate the concept. The student chosen is, of course, an active learner, but the rest of the class tends to become engaged because there is always the possibility (probability in my case) that one of them will be asked to reverse roles next.

Have a Voice, Make a Choice: Vote!

It's an election year, and the campaigns are in full swing, urging the electorate to exercise their power by voting to ensure the future. Voting is, according to Thomas Jefferson, "The rational and peacable instrument of reform, the suffrage of the people." Lyndon Johnson added, "The vote is the most powerful instrument ever devised by man for breaking down injustice and destroying the terrible walls which imprison men because they are different from other men.” And Henry Louis Mencken provided this reason for the importance of this option: "Voting is simply a way of determining which side is the stronger without putting it to the test of fighting.”

In the Confer classroom, voting (or polling) can be a powerful instructional tool. It encourages active student participation, gives learners an opportunity to apply or test their learning, and lets the instructor discover quickly how well students are following or understanding the materials or concepts being taught. A quick spot poll spices up a class session, providing a break in your content presentation and there is ample research evidence that student response systems ("clickers") in face-to-face educational settings are effective and can improve student learning.

The "clicker" in the Confer classroom is the Polling tool. This video shows how easily it can be set up and how you can decide to show results to students.



How might you use this? Typically, according to Caldwell's research on instructors' use of student response systems, instructors prepare PowerPoint slides in advance with between two and five questions per class session. The questions are used to:

• begin or focus discussion
• require interaction with peers
• collect votes following a debate
• assess student preparation
• survey students's opinions, attitudes, reactions
• practice problems
• guide thinking (e.g., "Which step comes next?")
• conduct experiments or illustrate human responses (especially in the social sciences)
• have fun

It should be noted that students in the Confer classrooms have other response/feedback options. They can use emoticons, for example, to indicate confusion or even signal when the instructor is going too fast or needs to speed things up. Private or public chat can be used, and (as in the physical classroom), hands can be raised.

But voting with one's peers is powerful. The student who makes a choice on-screen has become an "investor" in the answer and will generally pay attention to the poll results. These results can be reassuring whether they reflect agreement or confusion: the student has peers who agree and are either right or similarly confused. Using the polling tool is an effective way to keep students in your class accountable: if they know they'll be required to answer questions, they're more likely to come to your class prepared. And, as Rebecca Gomez of Cypress College describes below, polling can be used to give (or remove) students class participation credit.



Like a general election, getting out the vote takes some prep work. Prepare your questions in advance, and use this tool frequently in your early lectures so that students  become familiar and comfortable with it. You may have to work on your timing as you collect student responses so that you don't jump to results before they're fully collected. It's also a good idea to poll your students about the polling process itself: are they comfortable with it? Once you've grown comfortable with the polling tools, you'll want to build a collection of polls you can insert into any lecture: if you do, consider sharing this with colleagues who are getting started with Confer.

Getting out the vote in your classroom can improve your students' success. It can help to add stimulation, engagement, understanding, and active learning to your online lectures. And, once you've got the knack of it, it's fun!

Do you agree?

Learning to Interact Online: It's a Progression

"It is assumed by academic institutions that if online courses and programs are offered, teachers will know how to teach in that environment, and more importantly, students will know how to learn or engage with that material. Our experience is that the opposite is true. Faculty need training and assistance in making the transition to the online environment, but students also need to be taught how to learn online. Learning through the use of technology takes more than mastery of a software program or comfort with the hardware being used. It takes an awareness of the impact that this form of learning has on the learning process itself. As more and more institutions and their instructors enter the cyberspace classroom and encounter both successes and difficulties in the process, they are coming face-to-face with the realities of online teaching and asking more, not fewer, questions about how to make the transition successfully." - Rena Paloff and Keith Pratt, Lessons from the Cyberspace Classroom.

I've had occasion to notice the progressions that instructors make as they master the tools of educational technology and apply them to pedagogical tasks. For example, a teacher who comes to Confer for the first time has an interactive whiteboard, which is the most obvious tool for presenting content to students. This instructor will begin by using the whiteboard only as a visual support, presenting static slides and accompanying them by narration. The whiteboard becomes, in essence, the online equivalent of a projector, and there is little or no effort to use it for conceptual development, interaction with students, or as a discussion stimulus.

After time, some instructors become comfortable enough with the Confer environment to use the whiteboard to solicit student responses. He/she may use the pointing tool to highlight some of the content, or allow students to draw or annotate the online slides. More and more, this instructor will use the whiteboard to challenge students to think by means of visual stimuli and verbal coaching.

Eventually, these instructors develop a new way of thinking about the whiteboard and its usefulness. They see ways to use it as an integral part of any online session with students, and they try to integrate its inherent interactivity into their lesson plans. They have developed an awareness both of the available techniques for annotation, drawing, and manipulating screen content and objects, and have become fluent in using these techniques. Now, they make sure that students - individually or collectively - react to and interact with the whiteboard content. They drag and drop students' annotations to match concepts, hide or reveal certain objects to engage questions, match objects or terms on the screen, or use freehand drawings to illustrate improvements or new approaches. The whiteboard becomes less and less a screen for displaying static content and increasingly a tool for prompting discussion, eliciting responses, developing ideas, and testing hypotheses. These instructors often develop their own content specifically for the whiteboard rather than displaying ready-made PowerPoints.

Gilly Salmon calls this latter kind of teaching "e-moderating" and maintains that it is the key to teaching and learning online. Salmon's five-stage model describes the ways both instructors (e-moderators) and learners progress in the online classroom: 1. Access and Motivation, in which the first challenges are to successfully login and make the visit worth the trouble; 2. Socialization, in which the challenges are to adapt to individual learner needs, provide bridges between old skills and new ones, and allow for individualized expression; 3. Information Exchange, which invites challenges and participation, encourages group tasks and roles, and is characterized by often "messy" communications; 4. Knowledge Construction, with much questioning, discussion, challenging, motivating, and interaction in order to build understanding; and 5. Development, in which the learners become independent critical thinkers, able to inject humor into the process, and able to reflect on what and how they have learned online.

Thankfully, I've been able to watch some of this progression among our Confer users, and to benefit from their experiences and insights. As these e-moderators emerge in our learning community, they'll help all of us to understand the developing online conferencing environment and how it can best enable learning and growth.

Ask Questions

"The important thing is to never stop questioning."- Albert Einstein. Eric Vogt adds that questions are a prerequisite to learning, a window into creativity and insight. They motivate fresh thinking, challenge outdated assumptions, and lead us to the future. In the virtual classroom, students need to be given the chance to answer provocative questions and to ask them of one another and the instructor. 

In your online classroom, begin with a simple exercise on the whiteboard. Using the text tool, write any topic related to your course or workshop: "syntax," "percent," "graduation requirements," "neurosis," "troubleshooting," or "beauty." Invite students to use the audio tool or the chat area to pose open-ended questions about the topic: "What is beauty?" "Are there different kinds of beauty?" You can call on students randomly or in order (e.g., by name from the roster), and explain that this will continue until someone cannot posit a new question. You should be able to generate a very long list with even just a few students, if they're interested and paying attention.

Now focus the learners on what role questions have in their learning process. Why is it important for them to ask questions? Did any of the questions asked during this exercise make you pause and reconsider your concept of the topic? Do you feel comfortable asking questions in this class and venue?

To ensure active learning, select one of the questions and have each student speak (or chat) for one minute (using the timer) on the subject. You can do this at any time during your online lectures or workshops to make sure that your students are involved in their own learning by asking questions and looking for answers.

At the Centre for Leadership in Learning at McMaster University, a good question has these properties:

1. Most importantly...something you are interested in.
   
   
2. The question is open to research.

3. You don't already know the answer, or have not already decided on the answer before doing the research.

4. The question may have multiple possible answers when initially asked.

5. It has a clear focus.

6. The question should be reasonable.

7. Try to avoid or rephrase questions which have a premise.

8. Make sure you have defined all the terms in your question so you know exactly what you are asking.

9. A new question can be asked once all your information is gathered.

10. Having the right answer matters to you.

 Follow the above link to discover Paul Bidwell's ingenius "Quescussions" activity, which forces students to ask questions as a means of discovery. You may also want to look here for more suggestions for asking good questions in class.

Active Learning

"Learning is not a spectator sport. Students do not learn much just by sitting in classes listening to teachers, memorizing pre-packaged assignments, and spitting out answers. They must talk about what they are learning, write about it, relate it to past experiences and apply it to their daily lives. They must make what they learn part of themselves. " (- Chickering and Gamson)

In our study of Web conferencing for instruction, Shufang Shi and I found that instructors associated application sharing with the pedagogical principle of active learning more than they did any other tool in the Confer toolset. But if you use application sharing only to demonstrate to students, you're cheating them out of rich online learning opportunities. Make your session interactive by allowing students to complete pre-designed exercises, giving them cursor and desktop control. If you pass control from student to student, allowing them to complete steps in a problem or series of problems, your entire class will pay attention. The process itself - not just segments of the process or individual parts - will be absorbed. One caveat: students aren't always able to understand what they're seeing in application sharing sessions. You may want to explain who's got control of the screen, where they should be looking to find the cursor, or how to navigate at a pace that refreshes the screen on all students' screens without being disorienting.

I've mentioned the value of breakout rooms in a previous note. At least one other strategic advantage is that you can facilitate more active learning in small groups than in large ones. Groups of three-to-five participants will demonstrate greater individual participation than will large online classrooms.

The Chat tool can also be used to ensure active learning. Students find it difficult to listen actively: so do instructors. Move them to the chat area for discussion of a topic in order to re-engage them and to break up the content delivery. Polling students - forcing them to make decisions about the learning content - also encourages active learning.

The Whiteboard's drawing and annotation tools are a wonderful resource for reinforcing active learning. Don't just present your visuals: engage students in them. Instead of simply describing a chart or graphic to the class, ask students to type their reactions - either in the chat area or (if space allows) directly on the whiteboard itself. You can even design visuals with "cartoon balloons" or other cues to encourage and support class annotations.


I'm sure there are hundreds of other ways you use to encourage active learning. Tell us about them!