The following links to effective practices for blended learning courses are provided by UCF’s Teaching Online Pedagogical Repository (TOPR). Each entry describes a strategy drawn from the pedagogical practice of online teaching faculty, depicts this strategy with artifacts from actual courses, and is aligned with findings from research or professional practice literature. If you are interested in contributing an entry to TOPR, you may use submit your entry using the TOPR Contribution Form. If you are interested in becoming a regular contributor, please send an email message contact to topr@ucf.edu for more information.
Course Content
- Use Advance Organizers to present a course/module framework
- Chunking your course to sizable content
- Include FERPA Statements in course documents
- Use Images with the considerations of accessibility and copyright to illustrate online course content
- Relate course goals into one or more measurable Learning Objectives for each unit/module/week of your course
- Use a Module 0 or Getting Started Module as an orientation to your online course
- Use Screencasts to provide students tutorials or to explain harder to grasp concepts.
Interaction
Blogs
Discussions
- Use Discussion Prompts to facilitate discussions
- Discussion Strategies for Large-size Classes
- Use Group Discussion Strategy to facilitate group work
- Keep students engaged/successful with Intervention messages
- Use Mobile Learning components to increase access to your course and interactivity with your students.
- Facilitate Peer and Professor Feedback using collaborative social media technologies
- Use Social Bookmarking to organize and share online resources
Social Networking
- Use Social Networking tools to share with students brief supplemental content links and status updates related to course work
- Use Social Networking tools to engage students in extended professional networks
- Assessing authentic learning with student-generated Social Videos
Wikis
- Use wikis to facilitate group projects
- and to scaffold learning
Assessment
- Cheating Reduction Strategies
- Collect student feedback using Course Evaluations
- Use Group Evaluation to assess group work
- Use Rubrics to evaluate students’ academic performance
- Use Syllabus Quiz to familiarize students with course policies and expectations