Learning Online




How To Learn Online - Resources for Students

Your students need to be prepared to learn online. You can provide them self-assessments about their readiness to learn online and easy-to-use tutorials to learn the skills they need to be successful in online learning

  1. Self Assessments on Readiness for Online Learning: Explore a collection of these self-assessment organized within MERLOT and choose ones that are right for your students.
  2. Diagnostic Assessment and Achievement of College Skills includes assessment of self-regulatory learning skills that are essential for online learning.  Learn more about DAACS...
  3. Tutorial for Online Learning: The California Community College's Online Education Initiative created eleven (11) modules and 4 interactive tools to help students learn skills and plan for being a successful online student.
  4. Supporting Students Learning in COVID19 Environments: Emerson Collective has created is comprehensive collection of resources to help you develop ways to support students learning online.  Emerson Collective is a social change organization that uses a broad range of tools including philanthropy, impact investing, and policy solutions to create the greatest good for the greatest number of people.


Competency-Based Tutorial for College Skills including Online Learning

MERLOT, SkillsCommons, and Gooru have created a self-paced, competency-based tutorial that faculty can add to their course as a supplemental learning activity. 

The tutorial is like “Google Maps for Learning”; after a diagnostic to assess the learner’s current knowledge, the Navigated Learning tutorial delivers a pathway of learning resources and assessments to the learner’s destination. The knowledge domains of College Skills includes guidelines for seeking advice, engaging with faculty, time management, and more as well as how to be a successful online learner. The tutorial provides the faculty a dashboard on every learners’ progress in attaining the various competencies.


Let Students Find & Share Online Learning Resources

MERLOT and SkillsCommons are free and open online libraries for everyone to use, including students! 

Students can find and share online learning resources that work for them. Over 50,000 students from around the world are MERLOT members (it’s free to join) and have used it to support their own online learning. Students can create their own personal collections of learning resources and easily share them with you and their fellow students. Providing your students an assignment to explore MERLOT and SkillsCommons and share the online resources they find most valuable helps them learn (and develop ICT literacy skills) and reduces faculty workload in finding the “good stuff” on the web.

When you adopt any of these activities, you would be practicing “Open pedagogy -the practice of engaging with students as creators of information rather than simply consumers of it" (ref). 


Student Leaders Becoming OER Advocates

BCcampus Open Education has published guide for your student leaders to support your campus' OER - Affordable Learning program. The downloadable guide, OER Student Toolkit, is an excellent means to help your student leaders help your students and faculty adopt OER as they move to online learning.


Supporting Mentoring and  Apprenticeships Online

Face-to-face learning is essential for learners in apprenticeship programs and mentors face-to-face teaching is essential for successful learning. There are many ways that online learning and teaching can augment and complement work-based learning. SkillsCommons has organized a wealth of resources that can help you integrate online teaching and learning within work-based teaching and learning.