“Since most professors have spent their lives holding forth from the front of a lecture hall, many have not had to engineer their lesson plans with the sort of rigor required of a well-designed online course… When teaching online, you have to pay more attention to the navigation of the course, the clarity of the course, the objectives of the course, the reason why you’re assigning activities and assessments, [and make] certain everything is perfectly clear to the students. In a face-to-face situation, you can get by with just coming in and not having prepared and winging a class session. You can’t do that online. Or rather, you can’t do that online if you expect students to learn well. You can develop a really bad online course, without necessarily knowing it….”

I’m working on additional methods of providing students with information concerning grades and how they are to be evaluated. I’ve begun to incorporate “competencies” into my clinical course (immigration), and am working on a grading rubric and explanations that parallel ones used by legal writing faculty. Such rubric describe what the various grades (A A-, B+, B, B-, etc.) represent, on assignments and competencies as well as final grades. These descriptions should help students understand why they get the various grades they’ve earned, and should help them focus specifically on competencies they need to develop to enhance their grades. As I put this together, I’ll share it on our Blog.