Integrating the ideas presented in Communicate: Stakeholders quests, create a blog post in which you discuss reasons why effective communication remains an essential part of online instruction. In the blog post, create an example of an ongoing communication that could be sent to all stakeholders. Ensure the product is creative, informative, and adheres to FERPA guidelines.
Effective communication is essential because that is the main way I connect to the students as their educator and mentor. The delivery of online courses is asynchronous (mainly), so there are few guaranteed times students have direct access to me live in their course. Though some assignments (like quizzes) are autograded by the computer, everything else is assessed by me....my standards and my expectations. This means that students have to know I am a person not a computer instructing them in the course. By first establishing a connection with students and parents by call and email, they know I exist but they need to know I exist throughout the entire course. This means communicating with them at least once every week to create a constant reminder of my presence even when not there while students are working. Additionally, this means hearing from the instructor beyond issues like grade average and academic honesty. When I send my course newsletter I do include facilitators because I often include news about due dates and GaVS policies for which they may be unaware of.
Here is a sample of a newsletter I have sent out.
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