¿Do you know online educational strategies?
Although it may seem similar to traditional education, virtual learning requires another kind of strategies to boost the students’ compromise with the learning process.
In a virtual virtual environment, there are 4 elements that take place in the learning process: professor, student, online tools and context. To shape and develop an effective educational strategy the elements mentioned need to be combined. The main agent is the online professor; the online professor does not have to act as a content provider but also take advantage of the digital tools that are within his/her reach in the virtual context in order to improve the learners’ motivation and learning process.
The role of the online professor
- To facilitate synchronous communication.
- Student-centered learning
- To favor the students’ active participation
- To ensure students’ engagement and responsibility.
Online educational strategies
The strategies that we proposed are focused on collaborative work
1.To manage and organize the learning experience
- Collaborative work
- To guide, evaluate and give feedback
- Secuencing tasks: reminders, notifications.
- To monitor students individually
- To provide an eLearning environment
2. To invigorate the learning
- To boost the group via the use of communities and forums where students will be able to communicate among them and solve out their doubts.
- To create an active and comfortable environment, this way, the learning process will be successful and enjoyable.
- To use tools for communication: electronic messaging, WhatsApp, chat, etc.
- To use online activities: collaborative glossaries, discussion groups, brainstorming, etc. This activities will boost critical thinking, collaborative work and idea evaluation.
- To create Wikis or portfolios in order to sort out general doubts.
3. To motivate and boost interaction in an online context
- Forum of debate; a space for collaboration and sharing information with the online course classmates
- Forum of doubts, to provide feedback among compañeros
- To make use of webinars, which will get the professor close to his/her students
- To reward students with extra punctuation when fullfiling tasks or participating in forums.
Online tools for collaboration:
- Google docs
- Google Slides
- Skype
- Dropbox
- Edueca, moodle