Using Teaching Strategies

White and weight (2000) state the important elements of online education are" interaction, feedback, learner control, access to directions, help, consistency and organization, assessment and recordkeeping". (p. 1) The environment that I spend most of my working day in is the Saskatoon Catholic Cyber School. As the administrator my role is to educate the teacher on how to best develop and teach high school courses online.
In my attempt to achieve this goal I have developed a teaching strategy that is referred to as Continuous Improvement Framework. This framework is a series of one month tasks which suggest to the teachers of the cyber school methods of making their courses stronger. During the first year of the framework all tasks were developed and posted by the myself. The second year the teaching staff in teams developed the monthly CIFs. Each of the Cif's attempted to improve on of the important elements that are stated in the first sentence of this discussion.
The method of sharing the CIF steps and information was via a simple website. Each month's task was posted at the beginning of the month and then the expectation was that it would be completed by the end of the month. In the first year it was a difficult task to get the teachers to understand the importance of the CIF and some teachers began to fall behind in the tasks. To resolved this it was decided that a smiley icon would be given for each task that was completed. It was interesting how a adult teachers were so motivated by a simple html chart with icon. As the task master, I started to receive emails like " I finished my CIF two days ago where is my smiley".
Another interesting deduction that was made by the teachers was that for some of them this was the first online "task" they had ever done. Since many of them have never taken an online course. Many of the things that were irritating them about their online student they showed themselves, such as not reading instruction, not getting the task done on time, wondering about the speed of the smiley assessment.
The CIF website can be seen at: Http://www.scs.sk.ca/cyber/cif/cif.htm
The use of the CIF allowed me to emphasize the need to create courses for students which use techniques to make the courses consider the student's individual differences in learning. To clarify, I will approach it from a single course view and the two elements that I have chosen are available in all of our cyber school courses. The two elements in the cyber courses which allow the teachers to successfully use specific teaching strategies are the communication tools and the grade book. The single most important teaching strategy in cyber courses is quick response time to questions and grades. As confirmed by White and Weight (2000) who state the important elements of online education are" interaction, feedback, learner control, access to directions, help, consistency and organization, assessment and recordkeeping". (p. 1)


The four communication tools available in our learning management system are chat, discussion board, whiteboard and course mail. These are the tools that allow an instructor to build a relationship with their students. By responding quickly to any and all questions the student feels that there is someone accompanying them on their educational journey. This relationship will make them more willing to ask questions and hence limit frustration. Online courses can be viewed as too individualistic and students can feel like they are all alone. However, the communication tools will allow the instructor and peer tutors to assist in relieving this feeling. The peer tutor program is made up of past successful students who are available within the communication areas to answer non-course content questions.


The grade book and the computer marked quizzes are both responsible for quick responses to the assessment of the students. These two tools utilize the computer's ability to display and compute results. Although very labor intensive to set up, they are an aspect of a learning management system which is appreciated by both student and teacher. The students enjoy that quizzes can be marked immediately if they are multiple-choice, true and false, matching, or short answer. The grade book allows students to always be aware of their progress in a course and what they need to do. The teachers enjoy both tools because they free them up to teach and communicate with their students. They like the quiz tool because it relieves some of the busy work by doing the marking and the grade book with its formulas can calculate the student's progress for them.


White, K. W., & Weight, B. H. (2000). The Online Teaching Guide: A Handbook of Attitudes, Strategies, and Techniques for Virtual Classroom. Needham Heights: Allyn and Bacon.