Protocols
What Do We Expect of You?
- Participation - What you get out of the course is directly proportional to what you put into it, including attendance, assignments, e-mail, discussions, and group work.
- Interaction - Got an opinion? Express it. Disagree with a proposed course convention? Speak up. Learning online should not be passive. Interaction is the key to success.
- Open Mind - Many of the techniques used in teaching online are new and somewhat unconventional. Also, you are in a class with faculty from different colleges and disciplines. Learn from the differences! Always ask, what characteristics make learners learn, no matter what discipline or context?
- Patience - Don't expect technology to be 100% reliable. When problems arise, stay calm and seek help. This course helps you identify and prevent future problems and solutions to those problems.
- Sense of Humor - Hopefully, when you discover a silly mistake, it won't be a Web page you presented at a national conference or an e-mail message sent to 100 students. Humor covers many mistakes. Typically, students appreciate an instructor who can laugh at their own mistakes and laughing is very good therapy. See McGreal's “Or Even Worse,” a page about online teaching nightmares. Learn to develop your online persona.
- Spirit of Collaboration - Face It! You don't have any extra time to teach online, produce high quality materials, and interact with students. Learn from your peers who have leveraged their strengths with those who have greater knowledge and experience. They did it collaboratively! We are all in this together.
- Learn Our Processes - Learn to develop and deliver your online course utilizing any and all UCF resources (Information Technologies and Resources) at your fingertips
What can you expect from us?
- Answers - Good answers to all questions, even the hard ones.
- Service - We are here to facilitate and teach you proven methods and techniques that will make you successful while teaching online. However, remember we serve a very large campus community and you may have to take a number during peak production periods.
- Quality - We want to meet or exceed your expectations.
- Follow college priorities - We listen to the deans’ priorities for their colleges. Therefore, make sure your ideas are known to those who can help -your department chair, dean and/or associate deans.
Latest trends and technologies – CDWS and the Instructional Design team strive to stay on top of the latest trends and technologies.
- Best practices – By constantly reviewing the literature and studying online best practices, the instructional designers continue to teach the strategies that work across the disciplines.
E-Mail Protocols:
- Be sure to check your e-mail regularly.
- Use the e-mail to send questions about the course to your instructional designer.
- When sending your instructional designer an e-mail, please make the subject pertinent to your message.
- Be courteous and considerate. It is important to be honest and to express yourself freely but being considerate of others online is just as important as in the classroom.
- Be as clear as possible. Online communication lacks the nonverbal cues that fill in much of the meaning during face-to-face communication.
Discussion Protocols:
- Be courteous and considerate. It is important to be honest and to express yourself freely but being considerate of others online is just as important as in the classroom.
- Make every effort to be clear. Online communication lacks the nonverbal cues that fill in much of the meaning in face-to-face communication.
- If you want to send a message to the instructor or to another student, use the mail tool in Webcourses@UCF rather than the discussions.
- Use the appropriate discussion topic; don't post everything on the "Main" discussion topic.
- Use the following conventions when composing a discussion posting:
- Be careful about "Subject" headings; use the subject suggested in your assignment
- Use the "reply" or “quote” button rather than the "compose" button if you are replying to someone's posting.
- Avoid postings such as "I agree," "I don't know either," "who cares," or "ditto." They do not add to the discussion, take up space on the Discussion Topics, and will not be counted for credit.
- Do not use all caps. This makes the message very hard to read and is considered "shouting."
- Check spelling, grammar, and punctuation.
- Try to avoid posting large blocks of text but when you must, break them into paragraphs and use a space between paragraphs.
