As I was finishing my DPhil thesis in the spring of 2015, Tim Sensing contacted me to discuss my move to ACU in August and my fall teaching load. I learned that I would be teaching a couple of residential classes as well as a seven-week, online History of Christianity I course. Online learning was a brand new thing for me. I had never taken an online class much less taught one. I had an idea of what worked in the classroom, but what is effective teaching in an asynchronous online class?

In some ways, I’m still trying to find out what makes for good online teaching. I attended Berlin Fang’s Adams Center workshops on how to make the most of Canvas, and I learned useful things about how to organize modules and chunk material in a user-friendly way. It’s helped me simplify the appearance of my courses, which is less confusing for my students. Students often express appreciation for the clear expectations and layout of my online courses.

But as valuable as having help with instructional design has been, I’m still learning how to foster an online learning environment in which assignments are challenging, formational relationships can develop, and meaningful theological exchange regularly takes place. I want my students to feel that I am present and attentive to them as people even if the course is asynchronous. Whenever there’s a workshop or class on best practices in online teaching, I go. While I haven’t found perfect solutions to my questions about how to design a great online class, I have been experimenting. I’ve discussed some of my adaptations to online courses in response to student feedback elsewhere. On this page, I want to trace the development of the two courses I teach most often online: Greek I and Greek II. Because MDiv students are required to take these classes in sequence, I have the same students in Greek I and II for a whole academic year. That gives me a lot of time to build relationships with the students and to receive feedback about what’s working and what’s not.

In my first couple of years, I noticed that my students who had a knack for languages and chose to apply themselves usually did well. I noticed that other students, who perhaps found language learning more challenging, withdrew, resorted to cheating, or barely managed to scrape by. I spent many hours writing detailed feedback on these students’ assignments, but their continued struggle with the same errors made it clear that they were not reading the corrections and comments that had consumed so much of my time. My first online course site was well-organized with all the things that my students needed (largely because I inherited the skeleton of it from a more experienced colleague). The “bones” of the course were excellent, but I started wondering if there were some small adjustments I could make to encourage and reward more participation from my students who were disconnected and to save myself some time too.

I decided to make some minor changes to their weekly assignments. First, I noted that my 15-student online Greek class really felt like 15 simultaneous independent studies in Koine Greek. Some students flourish in that kind of self-guided work, and others flounder. Nearly all of them wondered whether other students were finding things as difficult as they were. This made me reflect on how much of my own learning in a classroom environment had depended on my peers. When I learned NT Greek as an undergraduate, some of the most valuable lessons I learned were because of questions other students raised in class. As we translated during class, my classmates came up with elegant solutions to passages that I couldn’t figure out, and they made mistakes that I might have made otherwise. We helped each other come up with mnemonic devices for vocabulary and paradigms, and we quizzed each other. How could I replicate that kind of learning community in an asynchronous, online class?

The truth is, I can’t replicate it, but I have been able to improve some things. I added a discussion board for translation revision. After my students submit their assignments, they check their translations against an answer key, and they explain revisions they made, identify subjects to review, and ask any questions they have. This builds spaced practice into the course so that they have to review the previous week’s work and lessons. (My diligent students always did this, but other students need a structure to force them to do it.) I keep an eye on the discussion board so that students get timely replies to their corrections and questions. They are not required to comment on each other’s posts, but I do encourage them to read the whole discussion because they might pick up valuable information along the way. I’ve noticed that they often respond to each other with encouragement (“It’s hard, but we can do this! Hang in there!”) and solidarity (“I had trouble with the same thing!”). Adding this discussion board has been helpful for me too: it’s a space where I can give more feedback and address common problems to the whole class, and that makes me feel like I’m teaching rather than just proctoring. Since I know they’ve already had to check their work in detail, I feel less pressure to comment on every single thing when I give feedback on their homework, and this saves me time (and sometimes hand-wringing).

It is not a perfect solution; I always have a few students who are insecure about their work and don’t want to talk openly or in detail about their mistakes in this forum. I do think it is appropriate to encourage them to get out of their comfort zones in this way. Overall, this has been a small intervention that I think has improved learning, made my work more efficient, and added community and connectedness.

I consider enhancing the connectedness of my online learning communities the top priority for improvement in all of my online classes. I’ve been gleaning techniques from my colleagues that help them to foster a sense of connectedness and care despite physical distance and separate time zones. For several years, I held an optional Zoom webinar with my Greek students every week. Now that I’m teaching the residential class too, I’ve invited my online students to join the residential class via Zoom if they are able. I post a recording of the meeting later so that people who couldn’t join in real-time can still hear the discussion.

With my undergraduate classes and History of Christianity class, I post short “reflection lectures” early in the week in which I pick up themes from the previous week’s readings and their submitted assignments and add new perspectives or provide necessary clarifications. It does take more time to do this than just to grade essays and respond here or there on the discussion board, but it makes teaching online more enjoyable and rewarding for me. I think it also makes my students feel that I’m more engaged than they would think otherwise.

Next page: Advising and Mentoring Students