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Providing student feedback is a key component of an instructor’s role and an important part of effective instruction. Research shows that ongoing feedback keeps students engaged and improves their morale, motivation, and learning (Best, et al, 2014). Yet, providing high quality feedback can be a time-consuming commitment, especially in courses with large class sizes or numerous written assessments. Instructors should keep in mind the tools, structure, and best practices that can help them provide feedback.

Faculty often express concern over how to maintain personal relationships with their students in an online course space; incorporating optional synchronous elements to an online course can help “put a face” to a name. Zoom, the video conferencing tool that allows you to create synchronous experiences for their students, has become ubiquitous in educational and businesses in the past two years.

Hosting a guest speaker is not only a great pedagogical tool; it’s also a vivid example of the ways one mode of interaction can enrich the other in a multimodal course. Guest speakers can participate in a class synchronously (e.g., by participating in a synchronous session via online conferencing tools or in person) and/or asynchronously (e.g., by recording video or participating in asynchronous discussion boards). Students find asynchronous guest speakers easier to access, while synchronous speakers offer more opportunities for back-and-forth interaction between students and the guest (Alebaikan, 2016).