What the best online teachers should do

Abstract

As a core project, a university eLearning Pedagogy Faculty Learning Community (FLC) chose to apply recommendations for the art of good teaching to the online realm. There is relatively little discussion of this issue in the literature. In this paper, we use Bain's (2004) book What the Best College Teachers Do to discuss some of the major ways that the practices of effective teaching in general can be applied to online teaching in particular. Specifically, we explore methods of fostering student engagement, stimulating intellectual development, and building rapport with students when teaching online. This analysis provides a much-needed art of teaching set of recommendations that complements the science of teaching best practices approach to online pedagogy.