Learner Centered Online Class Design
When you design a learner centered classroom, you want to give learners plenty of opportunities to interact with each other and you want to design an interactive classroom where students not only interact with each other, but they interact with the class material.
This model of teaching and learning requires students to be active participants in the learning process. Students are no longer just empty vessels to be filled with information like in a teacher-centered classroom.
Students become active in the online classroom through engaging forum discussions where students are free to express their opinions on a topic, free to debate with each other the pros and cons of a topic, free to research further on an aspect of the topic that interests them, free to answer teacher questions that further the conversation on the topic and makes students want to learn more about the topic. As students interact with each other in the forum, they bond and learn to trust each other, thus forming a community of learners working together to master the core concepts in the class.
Teachers maintain three kinds of presence in the classroom. Social presence where teachers project a friendly persona inviting students to want to learn and ask questions. Teachers can achieve social presence during the first week of class when she introduces herself to the students and presents herself in a warm approachable manner.
Cognitive Presence is established when the teacher gets to know the students through constant email, constant interaction in the forums, constant feedback on assignments, and constantly asking students what their goals are for taking the class.
Teaching Presence happens when teachers design a learner-centered classroom and asks as a guide to student learning as the students interact with the material through projects, conversations, debates, problem solving scenarios, role play and case studies.
The teacher brings real world knowledge to the classroom and provides authentic resources that reflect real world scenarios and current events so students can relate what they learn in the classroom to their lives. Authenticity is important. Work is made more meaningful when it mirrors authentic activities students do in the real world.
To create a learner-centered classroom, the teacher needs to provide class lessons that include video, audio, text-based materials, e-books, graphics, charts, images, to appeal to students of all modalities. Teacher lectures are kept to a minimum no more than 5 minutes per video. Easy self assessment based on the 5 minute video boost student confidence in learning and encourages students to want to tackle the next mini-skill in the next 3 to 5 minute video.
The traditional 1 hour face to face teacher lecture does not work in an online environment as students tire of being in front of a computer screen, so that is why it is important to keep the lecture to 3 to 5 minutes.
As long as the teacher designs activities that are interactive, assessments that are authentic and project based, online interactive quizzes, have a variety of different kinds of resources, that gets students to be active participants of learning, then you have a learner-centered classroom online class design.
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