Rules for Online Teaching

I like this Jonathan Rees post about rules for online teaching. At Dominican, we've had many conversations about how to teach online while preserving our relationship-centered mentality. Rees is, similarly, thinking about how to make online teaching more than just a different delivery system.

Here are some best practices he's extracted:

1) They do not try to duplicate the face-to-face experience. Instead, these courses try to emphasize the kinds of online experiences that can only be done online.
2) They make sparing (if any) use of learning management systems. Instead, these instructors have tried to find tools on the open web that will help them teach the kinds of skills that they want them to learn.
3) These courses are very labor-intensive. Rather than use the online experience as a way to automate tasks that face-to-face instructors must do themselves already, the best online instructors actually make work for themselves.
4) These classes are relatively small. Why? See 3) above.

A fine place to start.