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[neutralname]

I've browsed through this board and I don't see this question; apologies if it has already been discussed.

I'm teaching an online intro level elective course next semester, and it is my first time teaching online, so I'm full of trepidation.  I've got to choose the books soon.  Should I just select the textbooks that I would use if it were a classroom course, or does the fact that it is online make a difference to book choice? 

My thoughts are that I should probably find the most reader-friendly books I can, because it will be much more difficult for me to identify particular passages or pages students have difficulty with.  I won't be able to see their faces or hear the uncertainty in their voices when going over parts of the text.  Most of them won't be much practiced at taking online courses either, so there will be a communication problem.  Since the onus is going to be on them to do the reading and come up with questions, I need to give them a text that they can understand fairly well without much initial help.

Does that fit with the experience of those who have already done this?

[magistra]

Sounds about right.  You need to like the book and would use it in any setting, but opt for easier rather than harder.  And if you've taught with a book enough times to know where the trouble spots are, you might want to use it so you can preempt problems.

You need to consider the rest of the course, though.  For example, how will you use the discussion boards, assuming you're using them?  It's good to have guided responses, but perhaps you could also start threads for the students to ask questions.  You can ask a couple prompts too, such as "in the past students have asked about X.  What did you think?"  Maybe offer extra credit points for people who post in that section.

Give lots of assessments and feedback to the students early so they'll know whether they're on the right track in terms of reading comprehension, fulfilling assignments, etc. 

[larryc]

Good online resources paired with the book can make all the difference. I used to use a history text that had little online practice quizzes and a simple analysis tool ("Looks like you missed a lot of questions from section 3! Go back and restudy that section.") that students really liked.

[neutralname]

Thanks for the suggestions.  I'm still trying to get my head round how to teach a class course where there are no classes.  I chose this course to teach online because it is a topic which lends itself well to weekly tests, and I'm thinking that although I won't be doing any lecturing, I'll be spending a great deal of time giving students feedback about their work.  I'll be encouraging/requiring them to submit their work on the discussion board, so that they can learn from each other's mistakes and successes.

So I'll be choosing a textbook that is not only well written, but also comes with a good instructor's package.  Coming up with good weekly test questions is very time consuming, so I plan to get as much help as possible with that.

[kedves]

I don't teach fully online courses, so I can't give advice about the special challenges,  but I wanted to add some comments about the general features of books that make them more useful to instructors and students.

Agreeing with the above, the simpler, more clearly written, and more focused the book, the more likely it is to be read and the easier it is for students to understand without a lot of additional explanation from the instructor.   A testbank is helpful, especially one that works with your operating system (not all are Mac-friendly), and a good study site for students is very helpful.  It is great to be able to send them to the site when they ask, "What else can I do to improve my grade?" is great.  One note about the study site:  many are still password-protected by the publisher.  I've had some problems with those.  Students buy a book used that is missing its password card, can't access the site, feel ripped off, and get angry with me.  I always look for open-access study sites.

I use one really good textbook for an upper-level course that has a fantastic internet resource site--not a study site but a huge online library of data, advocacy group, etc. links related to the material.  Each chapter of the book contains assignments making use of this library.  I like spreading their learning over the week and directing them to online information sources that are more reliable and thorough than the ones they would find by Googling.  I have not found many books like this, but I think the more you can get students away from the "tell me, now let me tell it back to you" model of learning and toward the "the world is full of ways to use this knowledge" model, the better.  Zuzu's "Rich Content thread has some good links and might make you think of others.

I now use a mixture of in-class and online guided assignments that could be fully online:  how-to-use-the book; academic honesty; paraphrasing/reading comprehension.  I agree with the advice to give early and frequent assignments that help students know how they are doing and help you know to what extent things are getting through.

On tests -- Start with a practice quiz so they can get the hang of the test-taking system without any risk.  This can be book-and-syllabus quiz or similar.  If you are using Blackboard to write multiple-choice tests, do yourself a favor and create test pools from which you take questions for quizzes and exams rather than creating them as tests to begin with.  It took me a while to catch on to the difference.  Blackboard has an answer-feedback feature that allows you to write out lengthy explanations of why the wrong answers are wrong and why the right answer is right.  My students love those and print them out to study from.  Use those odd moments here and there (before class, in meetings) to jot down a m.c. question note; you can fill in the answers later but the thought passes without the note.  I have found that written-answer online tests (short essays) are bad, so I prefer a combination of multiple-choice tests and short papers.

I seem to have a lot of advice for someone who doesn't teach online courses--sorry if it's too much.

[melba_frilkins]

If you are also teaching the class f2f, use the SAME textbook for both f2f and online. Otherwise, you'll go bonkers.

I find in my online courses, the text is much more important as a key source of information to my students. Yes, I have some online text-based "lectures" but that's still just more reading.

If you're concerned with tapping into what the students find difficult or confusing, just have a discussion forum for each chapter that asks that very question,  something like "What did you find most difficult or confusing about the reading? Or what was most difficult to see why it was important?".  In order to get a lot of responses, you do have to require it for a grade (could be equivalent to attendance/participation), and then you do get a lot of comments from the students.