Customer Reviews

Online Teaching Guide, The: A Handbook of Attitudes, Strategies, and Techniques for the Virtual Classroom

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To date most books about online learning have focused on academic research or institutional policy. White and Weight have now added a solid practitioner's guide to the literature. The Online Teaching Guide, published in October 1999, consists of a collection of 14 individually authored essays and articles on the art of being an online instructor. Each of the authors borrows on his or her own experience teaching for the University of Phoenix's online campus to shed light on different aspects of how to facilitate a classroom environment in cyberspace. Ken White begins the collection by writing on the importance of understanding that the virtual classroom is first and foremost not a lonely place created by technology but a crucible for human communication. "As in any social venture, people are imprecise, unclear and unpredictable," writes White. This theme, that the virtual classroom is an experiment in human communication, is repeated throughout the individual essays. The job of the online instructor, argues each of the authors, is to understand and direct non-verbal communication so that students experience a learning environment that captures a high level of student interest and enjoys high levels of student retention. The book is rich with real life examples and practitioner's tips for executing them. In the essay "The Elements of Effective Online Teaching," Anita Bischoff, Director of Academic Affairs at the University of Phoenix, outlines a communication matrix that requires the online instructor to communicate presence by providing regular feedback, maintaining public course visibility, selecting and directing students to high quality learning materials, and removing obstacles to student retention. Bischoff provides helpful, practical examples of how an instructor can achieve each of these elements. This book contributes a great deal to our practical understanding of how real-life instructors are successfully creating and maintaining e-classrooms using asynchronous platforms. The only disappointment of the book is that contributions were limited to instructors who have practiced at a single college, The University of Phoenix Online. A diversity of institutional voices would have resulted in a richer, more eclectic reader for use in educating the next generation of virtual professors. Summary evaluation: This is a top-notch, e- instructor's survival guide. Don't go virtual without it.

This book is a compendium of white papers, by academics, of academics and for academics. It discusses "what" is Online Teaching, and the authors throw in a few common sense suggestions (although these may seem like revelations to those who don't know Internet Technology well).

It is appropriate for secondary and college teachers who are not sophisticated I-Net users. It is not that helpful outside of an academic setting.

The Online Teaching Guide I am sorry to say does not live up to its cover. It unfortunately does not cover in any depth the conceptual and practical issues as they relate to the online classroom and as for helping you overcome the challenges that confront all online instructors, sorry the book misses the mark totally. Most of the chapters are weak and tenuous to say the least and will offer little help to any on-line tutors or facilitators. The book has a rather macabre fixation with 'flaming' and the Wizard of Oz and the attempts at humour are to say the least somewhat strained. There are also a number of elementary mistakes in the actual text, for instance ' Human begins are "sense making" creatures', Chapter 2 page 14 and they get worse throughout the book. Maybe the authors were so emotive about the subject that he couldn't be bothered to read what they had written. Unfortunately I did and I wish I had not bothered. Don't be a mug like me and buy this book I am sure that there have to be some better texts on this interesting subject around.

This is one of the texts I was assigned for a course in teaching online (which I haven't done yet but hope to). I found it insightful and will probably find it more so after I have a class or two under my belt. It is somewhat repetitive, but that was the editors' stated intent. No complaints at all.