May 7, 2012

Good Evening Online Instructors,

This week's "Teaching Tips" offer additional strategies for ways to maximize the benefit of discussion boards for you and your students.

The first tip comes from Nancy Hislop, full-time medical assisting instructor.  Nancy uses the discussion boards as a great way to teach and allow her students to practice proper APA citation formatting.  In Nancy's words:
"I use the discussion boards to help students learn to do APA citations in my classes that have a paper assignment.  I require students to do research for their discussion posts and they have to have citations and source lists in their discussion posts.  I give them the first two weeks to start trying to cite their work and then they do not earn all the points on the discussions if they do not cite their work.  By the time the papers are due, they are pretty good at doing citations."

The second tip comes from Brian Craig, Online Paralegal Coordinator.  Brian likes to bring current events into his unit discussions and often uses Google News to insert key words and locate recent articles pertinent to those key words and topic focal points.

I encourage you to give one or both of these strategies a try in your own discussion boards and let me know how it goes.

Have a great Unit 6 and let me know if you have any questions.

Thanks,
Heather Thomton-Stockman
Online Instructional Specialist