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Faculty Information

Faculty teaching Chesapeake Online courses are recommended to provide their students with a brief biography, contact information, and instructions on when and how to attend virtual office hours. This information can be uploaded in the course home page or the syllabus. Consider including a photo of yourself to help the students feel more connected to their online environment. Students will also appreciate you posting this information directly under course announcements. As the preference is to keep all communications in Canvas there should not be a reference to your Chesapeake or personal email.

Online Communication

Best practice is to keep ALL Communications with students within Canvas. Chesapeake Online offers many tools to communicate with students. The most frequent tools used are Announcement, Discussion Board/Forum, Inbox, and Conferencing. These tools are effective as all virtual conversations with students remain in the online course and facilitate an online learning community. Should faculty receive any communication from students via email, redirect the student back to the Inbox within Canvas.

• Canvas conversations/inbox messages
  • Conversations/inbox messages are accessible only within the Canvas system by users who have logged in to Canvas.
  • Sending messages:  You can message students and faculty only within your current courses, or reply to messages sent to you within Canvas.          
  • The Canvas conversation/inbox message system will NOT accept any messages from outside Canvas.  Canvas messaging is NOT a full email system.
  • Forwarding:  As a convenience, you can set notifications within your Canvas profile to forward any messages or announcements to an outside email account, such as your Outlook mail.  You can also set up notifications to forward Canvas messages to you via texting.  NOTE:  You cannot answer those forwarded messages by hitting “Reply”.  You must log in to Canvas through the portal, find the message, and answer it there.
  • All communication messages are automatically archived within Canvas.

Discussion Boards

The Discussion Boards are a key component of online courses because as they best replicate traditional classroom conversations. This learning activity consists of open-ended discussion questions that promote faculty-to-student and student-to-student interaction, dialogue, feedback, and understanding of the unit’s learning objectives. Effective use of the discussion boards builds a virtual classroom community. The discussion board is a learning activity led by the faculty member to discuss topics directly related to course unit learning outcomes. Student responses should be monitored frequently by the faculty to ensure that the learning objectives are reinforced and mastered by the students by the end of the unit. Research has shown that students who do not feel engaged in their online class environment will replicate the behavior of an absent faculty member.

Chesapeake Online discussion boards are designed for asynchronous use; therefore, participants do not have to participate at the same time during discussions. However, students are expected to follow discussion forum criteria.

The following is an excellent metaphor for how to facilitate online discussion forums.

Read the Dinner Party Analogy (https://www.facultyfocus.com/articles/online-education/how-many-faculty-discussion-posts-each-week-a-simply-delicious-answer/)

Below are guidelines you can utilize to develop a variety of follow-up discussions to expand upon the dialogue. The original Bloom’s Taxonomy can assist you with reinforcing the course student learning outcomes. These question types can be mapped to Bloom’s taxonomy of learning objectives, which demonstrate increasing levels of cognitive complexity as students move from simple (such as recall of information) to complex tasks (such as synthesis, evaluation, or creation.) Source: Davis, B. G. (1993) Tools for Teaching. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

1. Knowledge: arrange, define, duplicate, label, list, memorize, name, order, relate, recall, repeat, reproduce, and state.
2. Comprehension: classify, describe, discuss, explain, express, identify, indicate, locate, recognize, report, restate, review, select, and translate.
3. Application: apply, choose, demonstrate, dramatize, employ, illustrate, interpret, operate, practice, schedule, sketch, solve, and use.
4. Analysis: analyze, appraise, calculate, categorize, compare, contrast, criticize, differentiate, discriminate, distinguish, examine, experiment, question, and test.
5. Synthesis: arrange, assemble, collect, compose, construct, create, design, develop, formulate, manage, organize, plan, prepare, propose, set up, and write.
6. Evaluation: appraise, argue, assess, attach, choose compare, defend estimate, judge, predict, rate, core, select, support, value, and evaluate.

Online Faculty can also embed video and images in Discussion Forums as well as PDF’s that meet the Teach Act copyright criteria. Video and audio files must include Closed Captioning.

Student Discussion Question Criteria

A successful student is one who takes an active role in the learning process. Therefore, you are expected to monitor and participate in the discussion forums frequently. Through the Discussion Board, you have an opportunity to communicate with your students asynchronously as well as observe them interact with their peers. An active discussion will include threaded conversations that permit students to post and follow-up comments in the group discussion.

The students should be graded for the following:

1. Frequency: Number and regularity of the discussion comments

2. Quality: Contribution to content in the threads

3. Timeliness: Post initial response within two-days after the forum opens  

Full credit should be awarded only when the quality, frequency and timeliness requirements are met.                                                                    

Messages

Chesapeake Online courses utilize the Inbox tool, which is a self-contained email system found within Canvas. Faculty teaching Chesapeake Online courses are expected to use the Inbox tool to communicate with students privately.

Conferencing (ZOOM)

A web conferencing solution that creates asynchronous and synchronous communication with students. This tool can be used for lecture capture, synchronous sessions, and group sessions.