Every Friday at 1600 UTC (Noon Eastern), the Instructional Design Live team meet to discuss effective online teaching and learning practices with professionals in the field. You can listen to the live audio by visiting http://bit.ly/djnDpq or you can participate in the discussion by following the link below:

Instructional Design Live: Online Survival Guide - Nancy White (Friday, September 24)

This week, Nancy White will join us to discuss how to dvelop an effective learning community in an online course. Nancy's expertise lies in developing Communiies of Practice in both olnine and offline domains and providing traing and consulting in leadership and change management. She is co-author of Digital Habitats: Stewarding Technology for Communities with Etienne Wenger and has been working and teaching online for over a decade: http://onlinefacilitation.wikispaces.com/
 
Nancy will be discussing the following questions: 
 

Time to put a little fun into online learning--with good reason: 'Emotional arousal helps the brain learn'. Medina, Brain Rules (2008). Joni Dunlap leads the IDLive team in considering how to incorporate fun into the fabric of a course to provide a more stimulating learning experience.

 

 
Zuochen Zhang, Assistant Professor in the School of Education at Windsor University, and Richard F. Kenny, Associate Professor at the Center for Distance Education, Athabasca University, joined us this week to discuss the perspectives of International students in online courses.
It is becoming common practice in higher education for online distance education programs to enroll international students, but what are the implications for online course designers and instructors when faced with learners from diverse backgrounds that may not be familiar with cultural references, discourse conventions or a constructivist pedagogical approach.  Tune in to find out more.
 
Discussion is based around Learning in an Online Distance Eductaion Course: Experiences of Three International Students