We are the Program for Online Teaching, a group of volunteer faculty helping other faculty teach better online.

Our focus is on pedagogy as the guiding force for using technologies for teaching.

Many of us are from MiraCosta College in Oceanside, California. MiraCostans may access the Teaching/Technology Innovations Center for technical help, resources, news and more.

COOL TOOLS LIST

The POT Network

  • POT Diigo group
    (see tutorial on how to save bookmarks)
  • POT Facebook group
  • POT Vimeo Channel (workshops)
  • POT YouTube Channel
  • Twittter (please use hashtag #potcomm)

Some big issues in online teaching

Jenny Mackness, United Kingdom

Pedagogy is often defined as the method and practice of teaching, but is that all it is? And what do we understand by teaching? What is a teacher’s role? These are questions that have always engaged educators, but with increasing numbers of learners taking online courses in the form of massive […]

The tyranny and comfort of “best practices”

Lisa M. Lane, MiraCosta College According to Wikipedia, a “best practice” is one that “has consistently shown results superior to those achieved with other means, and that is used as a benchmark”. The page also notes that it is considered by some to be a business buzzword “used to describe the process of developing and […]

MOOCs: A Tool for Re-Imagining Our Teaching

Cris Crissman, Phd, Adjunct Assistant Professor, North Carolina State University; Independent Education Consultant

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. . . MOOCs have proven to be simply an additional learning opportunity instead of a direct challenge to higher education itself. — Preparing for the Digital University: A Review of the History and Current State […]

Culture skills – reflections on the online Umwelt

Ross Kendall, Waikato Institute of Technology, New Zealand

In 2013, using WordPress, I put ‘Critical Thinking’ online as a semester-long elective in Wintec’s Bachelor of Media Arts (BMA). This second-year paper, using a blended learning/flipped classroom approach, followed my popular ‘Introduction to Psychology’ and attracted a large number of students, so that it was offered […]

Student Retention in Online Classes: More Questions Than Answers

By Laura Paciorek, MiraCosta College (Child Development)

Introduction: Student Retention

Student retention has always sparked a lot of questions for me and for many faculty with whom I have discussed the issue. Why do some students finish a class and others do not? Why is it that some sections of the same classes, […]