Teaching online, even in a blended format, can be a daunting task. Not only must you prepare course material, but you must learn how to use your course’s learning management software as you account for the peculiarities of digital instruction.

We’ve written this guide to help. Each of us know from years spent as students, teachers, and instructional designers, that digital instruction can be difficult to master. Yet, it can also prove richly rewarding.  You have an opportunity to innovate, build new types of learn experiences, and extend meaningful instruction beyond the classroom. You just need a place to start the journey!

This guide has three objectives. First, provide you the tool-based training needed to teach a course using Desire to Learn (D2L).  Second, offer you the essential teaching strategies to maximize student learning outcomes while using D2L. Three, present you with a list of additional resources exploring digital instruction and pedagogical best-practices.

How to use this book.

This book is not a mystery novel. You can jump ahead, read the end first, or start in the middle. It is meant to work as a guide that is helpful to you.

That said, there is an organizational structure we felt useful.  This guide is broken into six parts, each building on the last. Each part is broken into modules that explore a specific topic. These modules then provide practical advice in how to use a certain a function of D2L as well as pedagogical best-practices in so doing. We suggest first thinking about what you most need to understand in preparation for your course and then glance through the table of contents to ferret out the topics and modules most pertinent to your needs.

Finally, this is an open access book that we hope to update continuously, but we need your help in so doing.  At the end of each module you will find a link to a very short Qualtrics survey.  We would love your feedback in how we can improve this text, what new topics we should include, and strategies you believe will make the book more impactful.

Thanks!

Lane, Margene, and James

A Disclaimer concerning “technology”

Technology can be an effective tool to improve teaching quality, and innumerable technology-based teaching tools have proved revolutionary: chalk, the #2 pencil, protractors. Other tech-based teaching tools have turned out to be something much less: Second Life. 

Using technology that is unsuited to your teaching style, or unnecessarily encumbers your pedagogy with extra steps, is wasteful and impedes your effectiveness as an instructor. If you find that the tools discussed in this guide are not helping you as an educator, go back to older methods of instruction. Or, better yet, keep experimenting.

It’s OK to share!

This e-book has been published on Press Books and is freely available for download.  Simply click on the desired download format (available on the book’s homepage) and read the book at your leisure on your phone, tablet, or computer. Feel free to share it with your friends, or provide a link on your own social media page.  Open access means, well, open access.

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